Intersectionality
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The concept was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap.
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The Urgency of Intersectionality
Kimberlé Crenshaw, TEDWomen 2016, October 2016
Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both. In this moving talk, she calls on us to bear witness to this reality and speak up for victims of prejudice.
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When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 30 years ago, it was a relatively obscure legal concept. Then it went viral. by Jane Coaston Updated May 28, 2019, 8:09 AM CDT vox.com
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"I also spoke with Kevin Minofu, a former student of Crenshaw’s who is now a postdoctoral research scholar at the African American Policy Forum, a think tank co-founded by Crenshaw in 1996 with a focus on eliminating structural inequality. In Crenshaw’s civil rights law class, he said, “what she did in the course was really imbue a very deep understanding of American society, American legal culture, and American power systems.”
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Minofu described Crenshaw’s understanding of intersectionality as “not really concerned with shallow questions of identity and representation but ... more interested in the deep structural and systemic questions about discrimination and inequality.”