The Intersectional Identity of the Black Woman

The Intersection Identity of the Black Woman While the term ‘intersectionality’ was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the idea had been employed in Black feminist texts decades before. This essay examines how African-American women experience intersections of gender and race. First, I briefly look at how the concept of intersectionality was conceived and its importance as a tool of analysis. Second, I examine the oppression Black women are subject to within both gender and race. Then, I employ different case studies to demonstrate how the intersectionality of identities shapes unique experiences of discrimination for Black women and their exclusion from both anti-sexist and anti-racist protection. I argue that African-American women are subject to multifaceted subordination due to their intersecting identities in gender and race, and as a result, experience sexism and racism differently to their counterparts in each social category.

Leslie McCall (1771), a noted theorist, defines intersectionality as “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations.” The concept first appeared in Black feminist texts during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a critique of second wave feminism, a movement of the 1960s that was largely based on the idea of the “essentialist woman,” a homogenized identity and experience of being female, based on white, middle-class women (Mann & Huffman 60). That is not to say women involved in the second wave were not aware that the discrepancies between race and class affected feminism. In fact, the movement recognized those subject to multiple sources of domination, however, inadequately approaches the issue by either acknowledging the sources of oppression separately or in hierarchical order (Mann & Huffman 59). Wini Breines (1122) suggests this inaccurate interpretation can be attributed to the rarity of social interaction between White and Black women. Conceptual theorizing