I. I just. I know the original post of this is old, and the screenshot is also therefore old but this is literally the first paragraph of Kimberlé Crenshaw's paper, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race
and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist
Theory and Antiracist Politics:
One of the very few Black women's studies books is entitled
All the Women Are White; All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of
Us are Brave. I have chosen this title as a point of departure in
my efforts to develop a Black feminist criticism because it sets
forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and
gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.'
In this talk, I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated
by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination
law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist
politics.
This is fully free to read online, published in 1989 in the University of Chicago Legal Forum, and cited at least 53,395 times according to Google.
You might wonder, does the seminal paper about intersectionality talk about men as a point of intersection?
The point is that Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion
must be unidirectional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination,
like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and
it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it
can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and,
sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is
harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result
from sex discrimination or race discrimination.
Judicial decisions which premise intersectional relief on a
showing that Black women are specifically recognized as a class are
analogous to a doctor's decision at the scene of an accident to treat
an accident victim only if the injury is recognized by medical insurance. Similarly, providing legal relief only when Black women
show that their claims are based on race or on sex is analogous to
calling an ambulance for the victim only after the driver responsible for the injuries is identified. But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts
to determine which driver caused the harm. In these cases the tendency seems to be that no driver is held responsible, no treatment
is administered, and the involved parties simply get back in their
cars and zoom away.
To bring this back to a non-metaphorical level, I am suggesting that Black women can experience discrimination in ways
that are both similar to and different from those experienced by
white women and Black men. Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to white women's experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences with Black men. Yet often they experience double-discrimination-the combined effects
of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and on the
basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as
Black women-not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as
Black women.
And the answer is yes, of fucking course it does, because people experience both having racial and gender identities and discrimination can happen on the basis of such identities, and people can get hit in the intersection in more than one way at the same time, that's literally the whole fucking point of the essay.
It's also free to sign up for Jstor and read her other article, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991.
For the low low price of $zero dollars and reading 30 and 59 pages respectively, people could stop themselves from being embarrassingly wrong on the internet.
Just what the fuck do people even think intersectionality MEANS? I'm so baffled!!! Of course "man" is a meaningful point of intersection. OF COURSE IT IS!!!