Demarginalizing the Intersection

Summary, part 2

The Antidiscrimination Doctrine

Crenshaw begins the first part of her article by showing how intersectional experiences interact with antidiscrimination doctrine using three U.S. District Court cases as examples. The following table is best viewed on desktop.

From these cases, Crenshaw acknowledges that she is presenting a contradiction. On the one hand, Black women's claims will get rejected if they are not similar to white women's experience. On the other hand, Black women's claims were seen as so different to white women and Black men that the court chose not to include Black women in a larger protected class.

"It seems that I have to say that Black women are the same and harmed by being treated differently, or that they are different and harmed by being treated the same. But I cannot say both," she wrote (p. 148-149).

Crenshaw argues that this contradiction is “but another manifestation of the conceptual limitations of the single-issue analyses that intersectionality challenges" (p. 149). She employs an analogy of car accidents happening at a four-way intersection to highlight Black women's complexities that a single-issue framework include. In a four-way intersection, harm can be caused by cars coming from any number of directions, and sometimes all. However, when accidents happen at this intersection, it is not always easy to reconstruct the accident and identify where the danger came from.

From this, Crenshaw states that Black women can be harmed similarly to white women or Black men (accident came from one direction), doubly as the sum of their experiences as women and Black (accident came from two directions), and compounded through experiences unique to Black women (accident was muddy, and the source of the accident cannot be determined to be coming from any particular set of directions).