Black History Month: What Is Intersectionality?

Dra. Nicole Caridad Ralston, (she/her/hers), Associate Director of Education and Programming

At Beloved Community, we frame our work in Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1989) theory of Intersectionality. We recommend Intersectionality as a framework for organizations to use to examine how multiple layers of oppression may be impacting their stakeholders and community members. Intersectionality is a term that is thrown around a lot today, and we wanted to take a moment during Black History Month to uplift and unpack the theory from our beloved Kimberle Crenshaw. Let’s get started!

Ok, so, what is Intersectionality? The theory of Intersectionality is the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and their related systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. Intersectionality was developed by Crenshaw in the 1980s to address the double oppression that women of color, particularly Black women, experience due to their marginalized racial and gender identities (Ralston, 2019). At Beloved Community, we frame how race is an exponent of all other identities as the R Factor. Our R Factor explains how when all other identities are the same, race will exponentially change a person’s outcomes. For example, a white woman, or white-passing heterosexual woman who is an immigrant will have more positive experiences and outcomes than a Black or Brown woman who is also heterosexual and an undocumented immigrant.

Intersectionality suggests that and seeks to examine how, various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, age, nationality and other spectrums of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels in a person’s life experiences and outcomes. Intersectionality proposes that we should think of each element or trait of a person as inextricably linked with all the other elements to fully understand a person’s identity, lived experiences, and shared experiences with others of similar social identities. (Crenshaw, 1989). This framework can be used to understand how systemic injustice and social inequality occur on a multidimensional basis (Crenshaw, 1989).

There are three aspects of intersectionality that Crenshaw defines in terms of how they shape the lives of women of color (Crenshaw, 1991). The three aspects are structural, political, and representational intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991). I outline these three aspects and provide examples below:

• Structural intersectionality looks at how structural policies and practices fail women of color because they do not take into account all of the layers of oppression they experience (namely racism and sexism, not to mention additional marginalized identities they may have). For example, within both public and private sectors, White women surpass the employment rates of people of color, including women of color, even when affirmative action policies are utilized (Kohn, 2013; Massie, 2016). Therefore, a structural policy that was put in place to increase racial and gender representation still maintains, albeit unintentionally, the current power structures which disenfranchise people of color in the United States (Ralston, 2019).
• Political intersectionality defines how women of color exist with two subordinate identities that often involve conflicting political agendas. Crenshaw (1991) explains that, “the need to split one’s political energies between two sometimes opposing groups is a dimension of intersectional disempowerment that men of color and White women seldom confront” (p. 1252). When racial political issues are represented in the dominant paradigm as men of color issues, and when feminist political issues are represented in the dominant paradigm as White women issues, women of color fall into a gap in which they are not being viewed, represented, or held as individuals who experience both racism and sexism.
• Representational intersectionality provides a way to understand how beliefs about women of color are built and maintained by how their intersectional interests are represented, misrepresented, or not represented in the media. A contemporary example of how representational intersectionality shows up can be found in how we rarely hear about the rates at which Black women suffer similar fates as Black men at the hands of police. Black women make up 6.6 percent of the United States population, yet account for 33% of all women killed by police according to the African American Policy Forum (American Community Survey, 2016; Crenshaw & Ritchie, 2015). If you’ve ever seen Kimberle Crenshaw speak, she often opens her talks with the names of Black community members who have been killed by police. She asks audience members to stand up for the names that they recognize, and once she starts reading the women’s names, few to none of the audience members are still standing. She ties this back to a lack of media representation of violence against women of color.

You may be asking yourself: how does this author know so much about the theoretical details of Intersectionality? Well, let me tell you! I graduated with my Ph.D in Educational Administration from the University of New Orleans on May of 2019. I used Crenshaw’s Intersectionality as the theoretical framework for my dissertation which explored how Black women and Latinx women who serve as Chief Student Affairs Officers (CSAO), navigated both their racial and gender identities in their professional role, how they were prepared for this identity navigation throughout their career, and how they mentored younger women of color. Crenshaw’s theory of Intersectionality was immensely helpful for me as a lens to view and code their shared experiences. If you want to read her original theory in totality, follow this link, and if you want to review how Intersectionality showed up for the women in my dissertation, you can read more at this link.

We hope that a deeper understanding of Intersectionality leads you to a deeper examination of how structural, political and representational intersectionality is effecting historically and socially marginalized populations in your organization’s work. If you’re ready to examine how diversity, equity and inclusion manifests in your organization’s policies and practices, we recommend our free Equity Audit. The Beloved Community Equity Audit is a comprehensive assessment tool designed to assess Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for schools, nonprofits, companies and local governments. It is a four hour, practice-based self-study that measures DEI indicators across all functional areas of an organization’s operations (governance, executive leadership, finance, talent, operations, programming and grant-making) and stakeholders (board, management, staff, grantees, community members and students). Check out our user guide to learn more!