Crenshaw’s Intersectionality

21 Aug

Katie and the Grabbing Back team

TW: this article contains examples of racially aggravated sexual assault and domestic abuse.

Introduction

The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a prominent civil rights activist, academic, and general incredible genius. She first popularised the term in her 1989 paper, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.

Since the essay was published, the concept of intersectionality has had a huge impact on the theory and activism surrounding social justice. However, it’s also a term which gets thrown around a lot. So, following on from last month, this article is an attempt to explain the original idea outlined in Crenshaw’s famous paper. Fingers crossed we’re not just throwing it around too.

**Before we start, it’s important to note that in this article we focus on race and gender, and Black women in particular. This is because Crenshaw does so in her paper. However, the same concept applies to all identities.**

What is ‘intersectionality’ anyway?

At its core, Cresnhaw’s account of intersectionality is a way of understanding what’s actually going on when people are oppressed. However, for Crenshaw, it’s also a crucial tool for properly theorising and fighting oppression.

Very basically, intersectionality is the idea that oppressions interact in complicated ways. For example, sexism and racism work together to create experiences of oppression that vary between contexts. So, if we want to fight the oppression of everyone, we can’t treat, for example, racism and sexism as if they happen separately or one at a time. Rather, Crenshaw thinks that we need to account for this interaction.

This might seem obvious to a lot of people now, but at the time of writing Crenshaw was reacting against a common approach to understanding oppression, we’ll call it the single-issue approach. This is essentially the idea that we can deal with racism, sexism, and all forms of oppression in isolation. So, for example, we can theorise and fight sexism without looking at racism.

We’re going to explore all of this in a bit more detail. In the next couple of sections we’ll have a look first at what the single-issue approach is, then at Crenshaw’s intersectional approach. Finally, we’ll look at some examples of what this all means in the real world.

The Single-Issue Approach

The single-issue approach rests on the idea that oppression is unidirectional. In other words, it’s the idea that people are oppressed as Black or women or poor, and so on, and that we can understand oppression by looking at each category in turn.

An important consequence of this, is that it only really allows us to understand a Black woman as being oppressed as Black and as a woman, not as both at the same time. In other words, the single-issue approach doesn’t allow us to look at the ways that racism affects a Black woman’s experience of sexism, and it assumes that we don’t need an understanding of each to understand the other.

Crenshaw argues that the upshot of this is that when using the single-issue approach, we’re only really able to deal with “pure” cases of oppression; where someone can say that, but-for their race or gender, they would have been treated fairly and equally.

A little later on we’re going to have a look at some of the problems Crenshaw argues stems from this approach. For now, let’s contrast this with Crenshaw’s intersectional approach to understanding oppression.

Life at the Intersection

Unlike the single-issue approach, intersectionality is the idea that individuals aren’t oppressed as Black or women separately and in predictable ways, but that these identities work together to produce unique and often unpredictable experiences of oppression.

Crenshaw’s metaphor of an intersection is useful for getting to grips with this. Imagine traffic at an intersection, where the traffic flows in multiple directions — often what we would call a ‘cross-roads’ in the UK. Let’s say that racism flows from one direction, sexism from another, classism from another, and so on. Many people stand at the intersection; they exist in a place where traffic flows from many or all directions. So, while a white, middle-class woman will be standing only in the lane from which sexism flows (and so could only be injured by sexism), a poor, Black woman will be standing in the intersection at which racism, classism, and sexism flows. This means she could be injured by any or all of the cars passing through.

The really important idea here isn’t that a Black woman has more sources of oppression than a white woman. Rather, it’s that there are a lot of different ways she could be oppressed. Crenshaw argues that a Black woman may be oppressed in virtue of her race and gender separately, in virtue of both at the same time, or as an inseparable mix of both; like a really horrible oppression broth.

This sounds a bit abstract right now, so we’ll look at some examples to make it clearer.

Racist employer: Imagine a racist employer who requires much higher qualifications from Black people to consider employing them. In this case, a Black woman who isn’t given a job is being discriminated against on the basis of her race.

Sexist employer: Consider the same situation, except the employer is sexist. In this case she’s being discriminated against on the basis of her gender.

Racist and Sexist Employer: Now imagine an employer that’s both racist and sexist - in this case she’s facing double discrimination; she’s even less likely to get the job.

Sexual Assault: There’s another way a Black women could be discriminated against: specifically as a Black woman. In this case her identities “Black” and “woman” are inseparable. One example offered by Crenshaw, is rape as a weapon of racial terror. Historically, Black women have been vulnerable to rape by white men. Crenshaw argues that in this case, Black women were being raped specifically as Black women. Here’s Crenshaw:

“When Black women were raped by white males, they were being raped not as women generally, but as Black women specifically: Their femaleness made them sexually vulnerable to racist domination, while their Blackness effectively denied them any protection.”

So how does this differ from the single-issue approach? Most importantly, on this understanding we can’t separate out people’s identities and understand oppression by looking at each category individually. Rather, intersectionality sheds light on the fact that these identities interact in really complicated ways. This means you can’t discuss oppression on the basis of race without also looking at the impact of gender, and vice versa.

Why do we need intersectionality?

So far, we’ve focussed on the intersectional account of how oppression actually works. We’re now going to look at the importance of understanding this for effective theory and activism.

Intersectionality and Feminism

To illustrate Crenshaw’s point, we’re going to use feminism as a case study. Feminism has often operated under the single-issue approach. In other words, mainstream feminist theory has often been written as though there is some experience of oppression common to all women, and feminists can theorise and fight it by looking at sexism on its own. The problem with this for Crenshaw, is that isolating sexism as an issue means that the experiences of white-women become central to the feminist movement, whereas the issues facing Black women are side-lined.

As we saw earlier, Crenshaw argues that this is because dealing with gender on its own means looking at “pure” cases of sexism. This experience of oppression is mainly the experience of those who are otherwise privileged, so white, middle-class women. The upshot of this, is that when operating under this approach, Black women’s experiences are only accounted for when they match the experiences of white women. Even worse, the theories and solutions which result from looking at white women’s experiences often at best don’t do much for Black women, or at worst harm them. We’re going to look at one example of each.

Separate Spheres Ideology

The first example comes from Crenshaw’s paper where she discusses the popular feminist idea of “separate spheres ideology”. In a nutshell, separate spheres ideology is the idea that life is separated into two spheres: public outside of the home, and private within the home. Feminists have argued that women are penned into the private sphere, and that this is justified using gender stereotypes. So, think when people say things like “children want their mothers”, “women are more caring”, and all the kind of stuff that makes you think you might kill them. The point of theorising this, is to debunk some of the ways in which women are trained to behave, and how this works to justify sexist roles.

Crenshaw argues that this piece of theory basically bottoms out in the experiences of white women. In fact, it doesn’t really capture the way in which Black women are and have been oppressed at all. Crenshaw gives a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, Black women have historically worked outside of the home far more than white women; they haven’t been limited to the private sphere in the same way. Without paying attention to intersectional experiences, you might think that Black women have just luckily escaped some of these sexist norms. However, as Crenshaw points out, doing so ignores the fact that Black women having to work has placed them at odds with the traditional idea of being a woman, and that this causes real emotional, personal, and relationship problems.

Secondly, the stereotypes separate spheres ideology is based upon generally don’t apply to Black women. For example, in the literature on separate spheres ideology, statements like, “women are taught to be submissive and men dominant” are common. Crenshaw points out that this just isn’t the case for Black women. The way that gender and race interact means that Black women are often not seen as submissive at all, but quite the opposite.

The point of this example is to show how basing theory on the experiences of white women means that it just doesn’t cater to the experiences of the vast majority of the people we’re supposed to be fighting for. Further, it shows that this results from ignoring the impact of racism when theorising sexism, so from ignoring intersectionality.

Mandatory Arrest Policy

We’re now going to look at an example where ignoring intersectionality doesn’t just fail to cater for women, but actively harms them. This example comes from Amia Srinivasan’s book, The Right to Sex. Srinivasan discusses the mandatory arrest policy that many feminists in the US successfully campaigned for in the 1980s. The mandatory arrest policy essentially means that the police have to make an arrest when they’re called out on a domestic violence complaint.

At first glance, the mandatory arrest policy sounds pretty good - who wouldn’t want women to have more power when reporting their partners for domestic violence. The problem only comes when we think about how race and class interact with gender.

As lots of women of colour predicted, the consequences of this law being brought about aren’t great for Black women. A study in 1992 found that, while mandatory arrest reduced the amount of violence perpetrated by employed white men, it increased that perpetrated by unemployed Black men. Further, due to “dual arrest” policies, a lot of Black women were arrested as well as or instead of their violent partners.

This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, retaliatory violence perpetrated by the men who are arrested is strongly linked to unemployment, drug and alcohol use, and poverty; something which particularly affects Black communities. Secondly, due to these factors, as well as lack of state support and higher distrust of police, a lot of Black women aren’t in a position to have their partners arrested. This means that they’re less able to call the police for immediate protection.

The key point here is that this policy was campaigned for before considering the impact it would have on all women. This, Crenshaw would argue, is because it didn’t take an intersectional approach. Instead, it focussed on the experiences of white women, and built its activism from there.

Conclusion

The concept of intersectionality has had a huge impact on our understanding of oppression, as well as our attempts to fight it. This is the incredible thing about Crenshaw’s paper - although a lot of social justice movements still don’t account for intersectionality enough, it paved the way for really thinking about how we need to be doing better.

This article has been an attempt to outline what that really means. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, intersectionality today is understood in a lot of different ways, and it informs our theory and activism in a lot of different ways too. However, the key idea remains: without looking at how different oppressions interact, we’ll never be able to get rid of them.

References and Recommendations

This TED Talk from Prof Kimberle Crenshaw is one of the most succinct and helpful explanations of ‘intersectionality’ you’ll ever find. She explains her theory in the context of police brutality towards Black women in the USA.

Kimberlé Crenshaw. 1989. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. (Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 1241-1299)
Highly influential article credited with coining the term ‘intersectionality.’ Important within Black feminism, this concept would go on to be central to the third wave too.

Amia Srinivasan. 2021The Right to Sex

Cutting-edge contemporary feminist theory on sex, intimacy and power.

Anna Carastathis. 2014. The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory (Philosophy Compass)

Anna Carastathis. 2016. Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons. (Book)

We haven’t referenced it in this article, but if you’d like to deep-dive into ‘intersectionality’ as a theory, we recommend writing by Anna Carastathis. She has written a lot on what the concept of intersectionality has meant for the feminist movement, and gives a great overview of its implications, criticisms, importance.

While you’re at it, why not check out the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research that Anna Carastathis co-directs. They describe themselves as: a space for reflection, collaboration, exchange, knowledge production, political interventions, and trouble-making…

They run community courses on feminist theory and want feminists in all spaces to share, collaborate, and form knowledge together, not just those in academic spaces. We think they seem pretty cool! Let us know what you think.