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 DeGraffenreid. I actually read about Emma's 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. She applied for a job, and she was not hired,
and she believed that she was not hired because she was a black woman. 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 front-office work, were 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 Emma DeGraffenreid
was facing. But the court refused to allow Emma to put
two causes of action together to tell her story because he believed that, by allowing
her to do that, she would be able to have preferential treatment. She would have an advantage by having two
swings at the bat, 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 law's 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.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. 8:49
Many years later, I had 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. 9:32
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 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
impact of the company's gender and race traffic. The law — the law is 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. Heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism,
all of these social dynamics come together and create challenges that are sometimes quite
unique.