# Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics

*Crenshaw · Power & Equity, Critique & Boundary, Voice & Silence · University of Chicago Legal Forum · 1989 · Open access*

This is the paper that gave the world intersectionality, and it did so by noticing that the law could not see Black women. Crenshaw examines antidiscrimination cases in which Black women's claims failed, not because the discrimination was absent but because the categories available to describe it were single-axis: a claimant could allege race discrimination, in which case the courts looked to the experience of Black men, or sex discrimination, in which case they looked to the experience of white women. A person standing where the two roads cross could be harmed by traffic from both directions and still find that no available account of the collision fit. Her metaphor of the intersection makes the structural point precisely: discrimination is not additive, and the experience of being a Black woman is not the sum of racism plus sexism but something with its own shape, which frameworks built on the most privileged member of each subordinated group will systematically miss. The critique cuts both ways, at antidiscrimination doctrine, at a feminist theory that had generalised from white women's experience, and at an antiracist politics that had generalised from Black men's. For this map the relevance is direct and uncomfortable, because psychological safety research is largely a single-axis literature. It asks whether a team is safe, sometimes whether it is safe for women, occasionally whether it is safe by race, but rarely whether it is safe for people at the intersections, whose experience will not be recovered by averaging the categories. Crenshaw supplies the reason why measuring safety for each group separately will not add up to the truth, and why the person for whom a team is least safe is likely to be exactly the person its instruments are worst at seeing. Its limits, if they are limits, are that it is a work of legal theory rather than organisational study, so its transfer to workplace research is a task the reader must undertake; the concept has also travelled so widely since that it is often invoked far more loosely than Crenshaw's careful structural argument warrants. (Text drawn from the 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum article, 1989(1), art. 8.)

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