In 1989, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw gave a name to something Black women had always known but were rarely allowed to say out loud: intersectionality. The term describes the unique and compounded discrimination faced by individuals who exist at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities — specifically, how Black women are often excluded from both antiracist and feminist advocacy, as if their struggle must be split in half to be recognized at all.
Intersectionality isn’t just a concept. It’s a mirror held up to movements that claim to fight for justice but repeatedly forget those who live in the overlap.
How Systems Erase Black Women
Crenshaw argued that the frameworks used to understand racism and sexism were never designed to account for people who experience both at once. A Black woman facing workplace discrimination, for instance, might not be protected under a race discrimination claim if her Black male coworkers weren’t targeted — or under a gender claim if her white female colleagues were left untouched. Her experience gets lost in a system that only knows how to process one axis of oppression at a time.
This isn’t just theory. It’s history.
History Written in the Margins
During the civil rights movement, Black women were the backbone of organizing efforts. Ella Baker was a strategic powerhouse behind the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), mentoring an entire generation of activists. Fannie Lou Hamer endured beatings, forced sterilization, and political violence to fight for voting rights and speak at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Yet their stories are often footnotes, overshadowed by male figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
As Paula Giddings wrote in When and Where I Enter, the fight for Black liberation has often come at the cost of Black women’s autonomy. Their contributions were seen as labor, not leadership. Their ideas were welcomed — so long as someone else got the credit. They were told to wait. To support. To be the backbone, never the voice.
And white feminist spaces weren’t any safer. Mainstream feminism in the 20th century centered white, middle-class women’s experiences, leaving Black women to choose: fight for race or fight for gender. You couldn’t be both in the eyes of either camp.
The Pattern Didn’t End
Fast-forward to today, and the language may have evolved — but the pattern hasn’t.
When movements say Black Lives Matter but ignore police violence against Black women, or celebrate feminist wins that only reach white women, the erasure continues.
The Fight Isn’t Whole Without Them
Intersectionality is not a buzzword. It’s a demand for nuance. It’s a refusal to be dissected for other people’s comfort. And it is essential if any movement hopes to be more than just a partial liberation.
Because when we fail to center Black women, we aren’t just missing pieces of the story — we’re upholding the very systems we claim to resist.