many years ago I began to use the term intersectionality to deal with the fact that many of our social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping creating multiple levels of social injustice now the experience that gave rise to intersectionality was my chance encounter with a woman named Emma de Graaff and read emma de Graaff and read was an african-american woman a working wife and a mother I actually read about him a story from the pages of a legal opinion written by a judge who had dismissed Emma's claim of race and gender discrimination against a local car manufacturing plant Emma like so many african-american women sought better employment for her family and for others she wanted to create a better life for her children and for her family but she applied for a job and she was not hired and she believed that she was not hired because she was a black woman now the judge in question dismissed emma suit and the argument for dismissing the suit was that the employer did hire African Americans and the employer hired women the real problem though that the judge was not willing to acknowledge was what Emma was actually trying to say that the African Americans that were hired usually for industrial jobs maintenance jobs were all men and the women that were hired usually for secretarial or our front office work we're all white only if the court was able to see how these policies came together would he be able to see the double discrimination that Emmitt DeGraaf and Reid was facing but the court refused to allow Emma to put two causes of action together to tell her story because he believe that by allowing her to do that she would be able to have preferential treatment she have an advantage by being able to have two swings after that when african-american men and white women only had one swing at the bat but of course neither african-american men or white women needed to combine a race and gender discrimination claim to tell the story of the discrimination they were experiencing why wasn't the real unfairness laws refusal to protect African American women simply because their experiences weren't exactly the same as white women and african-american men rather than broadening the frame to include African American women the court simply tossed their case completely out of court now as a student of anti-discrimination law as a feminist as an anti-racist I was struck by this case it felt to me like injustice squared so so first of all black women weren't allowed to work at the plant second of all the court doubled down on this exclusion by making it legally inconsequential and to boot there was no name for this problem and we all know that where there's no name for a problem you can't see a problem and when you can't see a problem you pretty much can't solve it many years later I'd come to recognize that the problem that Emma was facing was a framing problem the frame that the court was using to see gender discrimination or to see race discrimination was partial and it was distorting for me the challenge that I faced was trying to figure out whether there was an alternative narrative a prism that would allow us to see Emma's dilemma a prism that would allow us to rescue her from the cracks in the law that would allow judges to see her story so it occurred to me maybe a simple analogy to an intersection might allow judges to better see Emma's dilemma so if we think about this intersection the roads to the intersection would be the way that the workforce was structured by race and by gender and then the traffic in those roads would be the hiring policies and and the other practices that ran through those roads now because emma was both black and female she was positioned precisely where those roads overlapped experiencing the simultaneous impacts of the companies gender and race traffic the law the law was like that ambulance that shows up and is ready to treat Emma only if it can be shown that she was harmed on the race road or on the gender road but not where those roads intersected so what do you call being impacted by multiple forces and then abandon to fend for yourself intersectionality seem to do it for me I would go on to learn that african-american women like other women of color like other socially marginalized people all over the world we're facing all kinds of dilemmas and challenges as a consequence of intersectionality intersections of race and and gender of heterosexism transphobia xenophobia ableism all of these social dynamics come together and create challenges that are sometimes quite unique