What Is Intersectionality? A Scholar of Organizational Behavior Explains
by Christina Hymer - Assistant Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, University of Tennessee 11/03/2023(Caption: Civil rights advocate and legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw speaks in New York City on Feb. 7, 2015. Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images)
In modern conversations on race and politics, a popular buzzword has emerged to describe the impact of belonging to multiple social categories.
Known as intersectionality, the social theory has a complex history and refers to the intertwining of different identities, such as class, gender and age. It is often applied as a way to understand how individuals may experience multiple forms of prejudice simultaneously.
The theory assumes that meanings associated with one identity are insufficient to explain the experiences associated with multiple, coexisting identities.
The origins of intersectionality
The term has its roots in feminist, racial and legal academic literature.
In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists, issued the Combahee River Collective Statement. The statement introduced the idea that one’s race, sex, sexual orientation and class were subject to different forms of oppression but ought to be examined simultaneously.
The term was formally coined a dozen years later by Columbia Law Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the scholars behind critical race theory.
That theory comprises a set of concepts that frame racism as structural, rather than simply expressed through personal discrimination. Scholars such as Crenshaw point to racial discrepancies in educational achievement, economic and employment opportunities and in the criminal justice system as evidence of how racism is embedded in U.S. institutions.
In her 1989 paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” Crenshaw drew upon several legal cases to describe how Black women experience discrimination “greater than the sum of racism and sexism.”
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