“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.”
—FLAVIA DZODAN, TIGER BEATDOWN
The first time I heard the term intersectionality, I was in college. Surprise, surprise, the lady who ended up writing about women’s issues professionally spent four years discussing the merits of Judith Butler and bell hooks. Shocking, right? But I know that I felt relieved to finally have a word to describe a concept that felt totally integral to everything I was learning (and living).
At its core, intersectionality is simple, almost obvious: groups of people are not monolithic—our identities overlap and compound in myriad ways. Therefore, when you talk about “women” or “the LGBTQ community,” you are talking about groups of people who share some common experiences but whose lives vary in many other ways. The key is that these differences impact the way that individuals experience the world and therefore the way they experience whatever particular oppression an activist or organizer is trying to combat. If you are blind to—or willfully ignore—these differences, it becomes impossible to create lasting and meaningful solutions; if a solution addresses only a part of the problem, it’s not actually a solution at all—it’s a Band-Aid, reserved for only a few.
As gun-safety activist Lucy McBath put it, “You cannot focus on one issue without the intersectionality of all of the issues. It’s like you have a wheel and every issue is a spoke that ties into that wheel. Until we’re able to eradicate or work on all of these kinds of issues, we’ll never solve one issue. Because they’re all intricately connected.”
You might be thinking, “Well . . . duh.” And you’d be right! But putting intersectionality into practice is when things get tough. There’s not a social movement in history that hasn’t had issues with actually advocating for the entirety of the group it purports to be fighting for. Look no further than the suffragettes, many of whom chose to prioritize middle-class white women’s rights at the expense of women of color.1
This problematic idea of educated middle-class white women as a universal stand-in for “women” continues to be an issue today. But today we are, at the very least, better equipped to confront it.
In my experience, most young women already understand these concepts—or latch onto them quickly once introduced to them. They understand intersectionality and white feminism, which is more than I can say for my own teenage self. Young women today know that feminism without intersectionality is no feminism at all.
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Intersectionality theory was first named by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s to address a specific issue: the compounding and overlapping discrimination that women of color face in the workforce, and the failure of anti-discrimination laws—which looked at race and gender discrimination as completely separate entities rather than overlapping and compounding—to address that reality.2
In the more general sense, intersectionality is a lens and analytical tool through which to view the world holistically. It points to the varying and complex ways that different facets of our identities intersect, informing the oppression that we experience. A black woman is not going to experience sexism in the exact same way as a white woman. A butch, queer, Latina woman is not going to experience homophobia the same way a bisexual, femme, Asian woman does. And all of the corresponding isms and phobias ultimately serve the same common purpose: to keep most of us divided and down in order to lift up a vaunted few (a.k.a., able-bodied, affluent, straight, cisgender white men). And it’s historically been a reluctance—primarily by affluent, straight, cisgender white women—to acknowledge these differences and intersections that has created the erasure of many women in feminist spaces.
This is a reality that self-described “proud, unapologetic, queer, black, transgender woman from Augusta, Georgia” Raquel Willis spoke about at the Women’s March, nodding to the iconic “Ain’t I a Woman” speech women’s rights and antislavery activist Sojourner Truth gave at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Ohio.
“I want to stress the importance of us being intentional about inclusion,” Willis said to the thousands gathered in DC. “Black women, women of color, queer women, trans women, disabled women, Muslim women, and so many others are still asking many of y’all, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ So as we commit to build this movement of resistance and liberation, no one can be an afterthought.”
This idea has been key to the broadening of the feminist movement, especially in pushing white feminists to consider the many ways that race and gender interact. Because white feminism (that is, feminism by and for white women only, which doesn’t consider the nuanced experiences that women have depending on their varying identities) isn’t true feminism.
As Crenshaw put it during a 2014 interview: “Intersectionality draws attention to invisibilities that exist in feminism, in antiracism, in class politics, so . . . it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don’t ourselves experience.”3
The last few years have brought intersectionality solidly out of the academic realm and into the mainstream. Google searches for the term have increased pretty steadily since 2012, shooting up since December 2016, peaking between January 22 and 28, 2017—the week directly following the Women’s March.
It’s no coincidence that Women’s March organizers, many of whom are women of color, prioritized intersectionality in the march’s platform.4 The policy platform addressed the gender pay gap, reproductive access, and violence against women, as well as mass incarceration, the Flint water crisis, police brutality, and the rights of LGBTQ people, sex workers, people with disabilities, immigrants, and refugees.
As the authors of the Women’s March platform wrote: “Our liberation is bound in each other’s.”
We cannot fight for women’s rights without fighting for racial equality and LGBTQ rights. We cannot battle Islamophobia without battling xenophobia and anti-Semitism and ableism. We rise together or we fall together.
Women of color understand intersectionality because they live and breathe it every day. A lack of intersectionality within social justice movements often means that people of color are ignored, spoken over, and devalued. For those of us who don’t experience racial discrimination, being aware of those intersections of identity and experience may take a bit more work. If you’re white (and straight and cisgender and able-bodied), you may be able to check out from the struggle sometimes—a privilege that women of color simply don’t have. That just means you need to listen, learn, and, as writer Flavia Dzodan stresses, try.
Sarah Sophie Flicker, who worked on the Women’s March platform, speaks decisively to the particular responsibility that white women have to follow rather than always trying to lead in the fight for social justice. Over coffee, I asked her how women, especially white women, who are just dipping their toes into activism can make sure that intersectionality is an integral part of that activism.
Her advice was pretty simple: listen.
“Linda Sarsour said something that I loved the other day, which is that people who are closest to the problem are often closest to the solution,” she told me. “I think a big part of intersectionality and accepting your privilege is just taking a deep breath. Take a beat before you say something. Don’t suck the air out of the room. Show up for a community outside your own, but don’t try to speak for them. If you have the mic, pass it on if it’s someone [else’s] story. And that also takes the pressure off of you. You don’t need to know everything.”
Sarsour’s fellow national cochair Bob Bland stressed that as a white woman, planning the Women’s March involved a huge amount of learning and listening on her part—particularly about the ugly history of racism within feminist circles.
“I had only heard the term intersectional once before,” Bland told me. “A lot of the phrases, a lot of the words, a lot of the quotes, a lot of the names—I didn’t know any of that before planning the Women’s March. And I think it’s important for people to know that, not just because it’s the truth. But also so that it emboldens women to know that it’s okay. You need to start where you are, and if you’re committed to intersectionality and if you’re committed to justice, then you can learn.”
As a white woman, I get an education every day from women of color, and my understanding of how best to practice intersectionality in my daily life—and especially in my work—continues to grow. I asked many of the women I interviewed for this book to tell me what intersectionality meant to them, and how it played out in the work they do. I learned a lot by listening to them—listening is key—and I wanted to share that wisdom with you, dear readers.
Here’s what intersectionality means for eighteen active, influential women:
DEJA FOXX, High School Student and Reproductive Justice Advocate
“Intersectionality is really what activism is all about. Our identities and experiences are unique to us, and working to appreciate that in the methods we use to resist oppression makes us more united. To appreciate the intersections of an issue like reproductive justice is to look at the larger machine of oppression and the ways it affects each of us in different ways. But what is most important about this understanding is meeting the experiences of others with compassion.”
LUCY MCBATH, Mother of the Movement, Spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and Faith Outreach Leader for Everytown for Gun Safety
“Gun violence prevention is related to systemic racism, poverty, lack of education, mass incarceration, unequal pay for equal work. You cannot work on one issue without it being directly or indirectly related or correlated to any of those issues. When you look at something such as gun violence prevention, you’ve gotta understand the dynamics of what has helped to create gun violence. Why is there such rampant gun violence, and why is it disproportionately people of color who are affected by gun violence? It’s understanding, like I said, poverty, mass incarceration, unlawful police [action]. You cannot focus on one issue without the intersectionality of all of the issues.”
JANAYE INGRAM, National Organizer and Head of Logistics for Women’s March
“Intersectionality means embracing the cross section of the issues impacting our lives. Whether you’re a black woman like me—that’s my intersection: I’m black, and I’m a woman—[or] whether you are Latina and a woman who is disabled, the cross section is where your advocacy has to come from. When we go out into the world, when we experience life, we are experiencing these things from the perspective of all of who we are. We don’t get to pick and choose, ‘Today, I’m going to be black. Today, I’m going to be a woman.’ We have to encounter the world from that perspective, and the issues that we’re dealing with are because of that cross section, so our advocacy has to be focused and centered in that space. Bringing that to the table also increases the awareness that other people have about those various issues or perspectives.
I have done a lot of work with the disability community. I have been a partner of the disability community in making sure that their voice is heard at the table for the civil rights community. For me, through the process [of planning the Women’s March], I had my own discovery of yes, I’ve been an advocate, yes, I’ve been an ally, yes, I’ve been a partner to the disability community, but I still had an opportunity to learn when I was sitting there having these calls with members from the disability community and hearing the various issues. [. . .] The way that we treat the disability community in this country is like lumping together all people of color, just assuming that what one needs, they all need. And that’s not the case. [. . .] All of that [is] to say, the intersection of our advocacy is able to inform others and educate others about things that they may not be aware of.”
FLAVIA DZODAN, Writer
“[Intersectionality is] a lens through which I look at all political, and social, and cultural issues. I try—I say try, because we all have blind spots, but what I try to do is look at everything from that intersectional lens. To me, it’s a tool that you apply trying to understand any given situation. It’s an exercise of thinking of the world outside yourself, outside of your own lived reality. I’m specifically thinking here of young white women, because you [don’t need] to explain this to young women of color, who have already lived through this. For young white women, it’s a matter of thinking outside their own subjectivity.”
WINNIE WONG, Founder of People for Bernie
“Intersectionality, to me, on a very practical level means that we are all equal; that there are no walls. We have to move forward and understand that liberation in one person means liberation of all people. When you wake up and when you deal with someone on the street, you cannot think of them as being anyone else other than your neighbor, your brother, or your sister.”
AMANDA GORMAN, Activist and Youth Poet Laureate of the United States
“Intersectionality is kind of a buzzword, and sometimes if you say a word too much, you forget its meaning. But intersectionality for me, at least in the feminism movement, is a willingness to interrogate [the ways] in which our experiences converge and diverge. And also the commitment to unite for women’s rights with that awareness. Young women of today have excavated something that is quite significant and builds upon the work of previous feminists. We’re more open to interrogating the intersections of race, gender, class, ability, immigration, et cetera. And that type of critical thinking, which looks at a woman’s identity as a mosaic, rather than a one-color painting, I think that is the power behind women and girls of today.”
CARMEN PEREZ, Women’s March National Cochair
“Intersectionality for me is my own existence as a woman of color. I am intersectional. I grew up in poverty. I also have a family member who’s formerly incarcerated, a sister who passed away. As a woman of color, I see my intersectionality being my own existence, being able to navigate in multiple worlds, being able to understand that I’m not monolithic. As women, we’re not monolithic. We can care about different things that impact us personally. Having a mother who was from Mexico and a father who was born in the U.S., again, that’s being intersectional. It’s understanding that we live in multiple worlds.”
WENDY DAVIS, Former State Senator and Founder of Deeds Not Words
“Here’s how I think about [intersectionality] in terms of gender equality. If you go back to the early 1970s, women were demanding passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have created the backbone against which all of our fights for equality could have been supported. The fact that we weren’t able to pass that created a different strategy. It was a strategy that decided we were going to take on issues separately and distinctly, bit by bit, so taking on equality of pay as a distinct issue, access to affordable contraception as a distinct issue, access to safe and legal abortion as a distinct issue, and so on. Each of those, of course, is an important piece of our overall goal of full equality.
I think the same could be said when you look at the social justice movement, whether we’re talking about reforms that need to be made in the criminal justice arena, whether we’re talking about making sure that we’re providing legal protections against discrimination for people who are part of the LGBTQ community. Each of these pieces is an important part of an overall goal of equality, and we have to understand that they intersect, and that when we fight for one, we are fighting for a goal that benefits all. Where we can find ways to intersect and support each other, we’re going to do a better job of advancing that big goal and not just the separate little pieces and parts of it.”
KAYLA BRIËT, Filmmaker, Composer, and Musician
“I was familiar with the term intersectionality, but what I didn’t realize is that my whole life experience revolved around intersectionality—like, ‘Whoa, that’s the word to describe it.’ I grew up with a multicultural background—my mom is Chinese and Dutch-Indonesian, my dad is full-blooded Native American. I grew up going to powwows and traditional dancing, Native American style. I also grew up folding dumplings and celebrating Chinese New Year. And there was this really confusing experience where I never knew exactly where I fit in, because I was a part of all these communities, but I never felt like I belonged to any specific community. In order to create my own story, I had to connect the dots between all of those different inspirations and infuse them into my own stories, and rediscover that. That was my experience with intersectionality: connecting the dots between many different communities and finding your own ground amongst all of that.”
GABRIELLE GORMAN, Filmmaker and YoungArts Winner
“I think intersectionality is understanding the parts of your identity that could be privileged [and] the parts of your identity that are not. As a black woman, I am oppressed in that way. I also have a citizenship to America, which is something that a lot of people do not have and a lot of people really want. That gives me a lot of privilege. I don’t have to worry about people misgendering me, and therefore I don’t have to worry about people discriminating against me because of that. In [the] feminist [movement], you have to realize that women are oppressed in different ways depending on citizenship, race, sexuality, et cetera.”
SARAH MCBRIDE, National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign and LGBTQ Activist
“No one is walking through this world or navigating this world with only one identity. We’re all walking through this world with, frankly, an infinite number of identities, some of which give us privilege and some of which are marginalized. [Intersectionality] is an understanding of that multitude of identities in every person. For me, it’s important to ingrain that in my work because if in my advocacy on LGBTQ equality I’m not also working on issues of racial justice, or immigrant rights, or gender equity, or combating xenophobia and Islamophobia, then I’m only gonna create change for the most privileged in my own community. I’m only gonna create change for those who maybe have one marginalized identity, but all of their other intersecting identities are identities of privilege. That’s not the kind of change we need, and it’s ignoring those who need it the most. So, I think being intersectional in your approach, it’s not just necessary, it’s the only way to go about change making.”
AI-JEN POO, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Codirector of Caring Across Generations
“Intersectionality to me is about power. It’s about how we come together from the place where our stories meet and how we build movements and campaigns, and how we essentially build power from the places where our interests intersect and come together. So if you’re somebody who cares about the future of American families, I believe that that includes immigration reform and making sure that immigrant families can stay together because they’re so much a part of the fabric of American family life. It’s about how we tell stories that knit people together, and help people see their common interest and the way that their futures and their dreams are knitted together.”
WAZINA ZONDON, Cocreator of Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love
“To me intersectionality means being willing to recognize that there are multiple ways and lenses through which one experience can be lived and received. Those lenses include race, geographic location, sexual orientation, faith, language—that kind of thing. And for me intersectionality impacts me at the core of my work, it reflects the primary form or method through which I have to approach anything that I do. Initially I came into this experience of intersectionality—[at least] the words of it—because I kept realizing that when I talked about gender or sexual orientation or whatever it was in college, and as a sex educator, my perspectives and the perspectives of the people who kind of looked like me or sounded like me were absent. And now intersectionality is also what I have to keep in mind when I do my work, because my students come in with a whole other range of ways that they are experiencing my classroom.”
BOB BLAND, Women’s March National Cochair
“We can’t be activists and organizers only to the areas of our self-interests. That’s really the heart of intersectionality, to take an issue that does not directly affect you and see yourself in that. Lift this other human being, who you may know or you may not know. And know that there will be no justice for you, for your children, for your family, for your community, until there’s justice for all people, and all women.”
JAMIA WILSON, Executive Director and Publisher of the Feminist Press at City University of New York
“Intersectionality is really about understanding the pillars of oppression in the world that impact our lives based on the various identities that we hold. So, when I think of systems of oppression that impact me, there’s ableism because I was born with a visual disability, antiblack racism because I’m African American, and sexism because I am a cisgender woman. But I also have privileges that make it so that I get benefits that I was born into as well. So, I was born into an upper-middle-class family, I was able to access elite education, I’ve always had health insurance or it was somewhere within my grasp. And so those are the kinds of things, too, that when we show up with our identity, we’re showing up with either the detriments that these systems have thrust upon us or the advantages that have helped us get where we are that have nothing to do with our merits or our own individual talent.”
TINA TCHEN, Former Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama and Executive Director of the Obama White House Council on Women and Girls
“The issues that we have at hand—immigration reform, education reform, criminal justice reform, reproductive justice—each of those is impossible to understand in full without an intersectional lens. We have systems in place that historically and continuously create disadvantage for certain groups, and we can’t fully appreciate the extent of that without looking at the cross section of identity. In this work, intersectionality means a deepened layer when we talk about diversity and inclusion. It means more than just having more women or more people of color at the table or in government. It means having more women of color, more immigrant women with disabilities, more LGBTQ women from low-income areas, just to name a few. That’s intersectionality. And when we don’t take on that lens, someone will get left behind.”
ASHLEY JUDD, Actor, Author, and Activist
“Ally is a verb as well as a noun, so I need to approach folks who are different from me with an open mind and say, ‘I need your help, please teach me about your experience.’ Being an ally requires a constant self-scrutiny for humility. Admitting my lapses is important. My Papaw Judd used to say assuming makes an A-S-S out of you and me. Intersectionality means, to me, that so many factors are at play in creating the lived experience of every individual, including social, economic, educational, ethnic, and racial access to resources or lack thereof, and the type of political system in which one has been raised or is living.”
ALICIA GARZA, Cofounder of Black Lives Matter Network and Special Projects Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance
“Intersectionality looks at the ways in which race, class, gender, and other social positions impact our lived experiences. I see a lot of people talking about intersectionality these days, but they haven’t taken the time to understand what it means and how it shows up in our lives. Intersectionality isn’t diversity—it is fundamentally about relationships of power and how we embody those relationships, and the impacts that power has on our lives and on the lives of others. I encourage everyone to actually read Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s essay on intersectionality. We owe it to ourselves to get it right and not cut corners.”