The Roots of Intersectionality
Anna and the Grabbing Back Team
“There have always been black woman activists...contemporary Black Feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy and work by our mothers and sisters.”
This is the first article in a 3 part series on ‘Intersectionality.’ Grabbing Back calls itself an ‘intersectional’ feminist collective, so it’s about time we figured out what that means. This month, we’re thinking about the concept of intersectionality before the word ‘intersectionality’ was coined. Next month, we’ll think specifically about the coining of the term.
I have done a little thinking around this idea of ‘intersectionality,’ by which I mean: (1) watching the 2002 movie ‘Bend It Like Beckham’, and (2) reading a book called ‘Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology’ edited by Barbara Smith - both underrated gems.
You might have heard of the term ‘intersectionality’ before. In short, it is the idea that who you are is made up of multiple identities – for example, a black woman’s identity is a combination of her race and her gender. When you’re oppressed because of these identities, multiple kinds of oppression mix together to form your complete experience. For example, the combination of racism and sexism form a black woman’s experience. So, rather than being oppressed as black and being oppressed as women, they experience the combination - they’re oppressed as black women.
That’s a little bit of an oversimplification. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 – we’ll write more about that, and the nuances of the term, next month. However, the heart concept is perhaps as old as the oppression it considers (very). In this article, we’re going to be looking at three “roots of intersectionality” - three pieces of theory that have a similar core principle. This should help us understand the groundwork that Crenshaw built on and the context she was speaking into.
Sojourner Truth’s ‘Ain’t I A Woman’ Speech
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That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Sojourner Truth (we’ve added the bold formatting)
This extract is from a famous speech made by Sojourner Truth at a women’s rights convention in 1851. Truth gave herself that name after she found faith in God and, in an amazing and bizarre story, quite literally emancipated herself from slavery. After this, she travelled the US preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. Give her a Google some time.
Root of intersectionality
In the extract of the speech, Sojourner Truth asked why she wasn’t being considered ‘a woman’. The mainstream patriarchal narrative was that women were essentially physically weaker than men, and needed “helped into carriages.” It was clear from her physical strength and resilience that this wasn’t the case. This could have been a powerful idea for the mainstream feminist movement, but the movement was dominated by white women and riddled with racism. When she gave birth to children (an experience considered central to feminist thought) but had them taken away and enslaved — when she cried out with a mother’s grief — none but Jesus heard her. The feminist movement did not hear her, and for that she is challenging the people at the convention.
Although her focus may be challenging the people in the room, we also see her understanding of her womanhood and race being interwoven — interwoven identities and interwoven experiences. Both white and black women were being mistreated by men. However, because she was black and they were white, the ways they were mistreated were very different. The white middle-class women she was speaking to were treated like children by men, whereas she was beaten and abused by the same men while enslaved. So, she challenged them, repeating the question, “ain’t I a woman?”: isn’t this the treatment of a woman, the treatment of so many women?
I do think it’s important to recognise here that Sojourner Truth’s context was unimaginably different to our own. She experienced violent, explicit, and legal racism and slavery that was very widely accepted and supported within and outwith the white feminist movement. Where sometimes now an ‘intersectional framework’ helps us to reveal silenced experiences of injustice, her experience of injustice was silenced and, when seen, considered acceptable by many people. It’s also worth noting that Truth hadn’t written up a neat and carefully theorised case for ‘intersectionality’ here. However, her speech still illuminated the same underlying reality that she understood - that the way sexism functions varies depending on your other identities.
Sojourner Truth was an incredibly influential woman for feminists to come. We can see a root of intersectionality — combined identities and combined injustices — as far back as her speech.
Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective
The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.
Combahee River Collective (we’ve added the bold formatting)
Fast-forward a century from Sojourner Truth to the 1960s, 70s and 80s. A movement called the ‘Black Lesbian Feminist’ (or sometimes ‘Womanist’) movement is in full strength, and has inherited this understanding. The extract above is from a statement written by a group of Black Feminists called the Combahee River Collective (CRC). Barabara Smith was a founding member of the collective, which was set up in 1974, and editor of a book called “Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.”
Root of intersectionality
Later in the same statement, the CRC named Sojourner Truth as someone who helped form their ideas. One of the ideas that they inherited was that “major systems of oppression are interlocking” and “the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” Like we mentioned earlier, they were saying that the oppression they experienced on the basis of their identities combined (or ‘interlocked,’ or ‘intersected’) and that it’s the combination (or ‘synthesis’) that created their everyday experiences of injustice.
It’s interesting to see all the different phrases used to describe this common idea. Linda Tillery, the musician, described the experience of being a black lesbian woman as living a “life of triple jeopardy.” In the introduction to Home Girls, Barbara Smith described the same idea as the “concept of simultaneity of oppression,” Smith said it was the crux of Black Feminist thought.
For some of us, ‘intersectionality’ might seem like a not-all-that shocking revelation. For me, learning about it for the first time was groundbreaking, but once I had learned about it, it seemed obvious. It was certainly intuitive for these women — it was their daily reality. Smith has said: “We examined our own lives and found that everything out there was kicking our behinds - race, class, sex, and homophobia.”
Implications for their actions
So this idea of “interlocking oppression” was at the core of the CRC’s theory. It’s interesting to look at what the CRC thought this implied for what their activism should look like. One implication was an idea known as ‘identity politics,’ a phrase they coined. You might have heard the phrase before being thrown around in newspapers or on your always-got-something-to-post uncle’s Facebook newsfeed. Nowadays, a lot of people think identity politics suggests exclusion or ‘separatism,’ but that wasn’t the implication at the time.
When asked to define ‘identity politics,’ Barbara Smith said this:
“We acknowledge that people have different relationships to systemic oppression based upon who they are. And that we have to take that into account when we’re trying to figure out the best way forward when we’re trying to challenge and eradicate that oppression…we [were] all fighting vicious homophobia…but what identity politics would bring to that was that, yeah, but if you are a black trans woman, you’re in a different relationship to those issues that seemingly have been already defined. So we have to look at the specificity of who we are to figure out the solutions for what we face.”
Mainstream politics considered identity irrelevant. So, in resistance to this, they chose to put their identities and experiences right in the centre of their political theory and practice. They asserted their “right to build and define political theory and practice based on that reality.”
CRC thought this mattered generally, but also that they were in a unique position. They believed that since they had so many of the identities which were subject to oppression under our mainstream systems, centring their experience would lead them to “the most profound and potentially most radical politics,” — the biggest challenge to these mainstream systems.
So ‘identity politics’ said that someone’s identity affects their experience of injustice, which makes identity politically relevant. This idea of ‘intersectionality’ or ‘interlocking oppressions’ says that CRC members’ everyday experiences were a product of the combination (or interaction, or intersection) of their multiple identities and multiple oppressions. These two ideas tie into one another. Because these women had many identities, and those identities were all politically relevant, their political theory and practice had to engage in very many causes.
In order to address the oppression they experienced in its fullness, they had to interact with systems that affected absolutely everyone. So, completely in contrast to exclusion or ‘separatism,’ they committed to standing in solidarity with loads of other movements. Smith says this:
“I have often wished that I could spread the word that a movement committed to fighting sexual, racial, economic, and heterosexist oppression, not to mention one which opposes imperialism, anti-Semitism, the oppressions visited upon the physically disabled, the old and the young, at the same time that it challenges militarism and imminent nuclear destruction is the very opposite of narrow.”
Bernice Johnson Reagan’s ‘Coalition Politics’ Speech
Watch these mono-issue people. They ain’t gonna do you no good. I don’t care who they are…Watch groups that can only deal with one thing at a time. On the other hand, learn about space within coalition. You can’t have everybody sitting up there talking about everything that concerns you at the same time or you won’t get no place.
Bernice Johnson Regan
This extract is taken from Bernice Johnson Reagan’s speech at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival in California in 1981. The speech is recorded in Home Girls, that book I mentioned, which is edited by Barbara Smith. Actually, Smith decided to end the entire anthology on this speech, so I reckon the sentiment of the speech was pretty important to their movement. In the speech, Reagan picks up on those ideas we just mentioned: Black Feminism standing in solidarity with others. She uses the term ‘coalition politics.’
Root of intersectionality
Her speech is an absolute monster - every time I read it I feel like I learn 10 new things. She began by telling everyone in the room that she couldn’t breathe. Most people in the room were having an amazing time; they felt safe, they felt at home, because they were at a women’s festival with people like them. But Reagon didn't feel that; she felt so stressed out, so much like an outsider, so at-risk that she couldn’t breathe.
She said: “The women’s movement has perpetuated a myth that there is some common experience that comes just cause you’re women. And they’re throwing all these festivals and this music and these concerts happen. If you’re the same kind of woman like the folk in the barred room, it works.” But the moment you’re not that ‘kind of woman’, you’re vulnerable. She was referencing the way that her race made her an outsider there, in a context where it was dangerous to be such an outsider.
The mainstream feminist movement at the time was massively white-dominated, it had created a cultural norm, it was still full of racism - you can read a little more about that in our article from last month. It was a movement which Reagan and the other women ‘struggling to breathe’ did not fit into at all. Engaging in it meant putting yourself in a position where you were more likely to experience exclusion and abuse. Minimally, it took loads of emotional energy from them, sometimes it also meant physical threat. This is why she said she ‘can’t breathe,’ this is why she said it was a dangerous place for her to be.
Implications for their actions
But, wildly, despite the danger, she chose to be there, and challenged others like her to do the same.
“I belong to the group of people who are having a very difficult time being here. I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really coalescing.”
What a wildcard statement! These women’s lives were characterised by a combination of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism in a way that nobody else’s was. They knew it, they quite literally wrote the textbook! You’d think the implication would be that they’d put their feet up for once, take a break, find a safe space, find home. But instead they learned about space within coalition.
Why? Again, they understood ‘interlocking oppressions,’ and the direct implication was that they needed ‘interlocking movements.’ They saw liberation for themselves as liberation for all, and liberation for all the only way of achieving liberation for themselves. They wanted that liberation for themselves, their sisters, their daughters. Coalition politics was their practical solution to this.
Most of the women engaged in the Black Feminist movement had been engaged in either the Civil Rights movement, or the Black Panthers, or the white-dominated feminist movement – ‘mono-issue’ groups.Coalition politics was a different way of doing things. They were mostly lesbians, but consistently active in reproductive rights action, although it was not a ‘central issue’ for them. They were active in trade union strikes in the 70s, representing themselves, but also standing in solidarity with any and all working class people. They persisted in the Civil Rights and white-dominated feminist movements, despite feeling that any moment they might “keel over and die”.
Their understanding of intersectionality led them to coalition and radical solidarity with other movements.
Conclusion
For centuries, black women activists have understood that their everyday lives were characterised by the combination of multiple oppressions based on their combination of social identities. Crenshaw created a powerful term because it gathered and synchronised these descriptions and concepts that had already existed as collective understanding for generations within black feminists. She condensed the idea with detail and nuance and clarity, but the thought stretches back centuries.
This was the context that she wrote out of: a movement with an intuitive and inherited understanding that people have many interweaving identities which form who they are, each used as a basis for their oppression, and each characterising the experience of their life.
One final thought, then I promise it’s over. We’ve considered some of the important implications of the concept even before the word ‘intersectionality’ was coined: centering multiplely marginalised identities, working in coalition. It’s fascinating (and maybe completely vital) to consider the relationship between these theoretical frameworks and the political practices that tended to come with them. In our manifesto, we say that we believe theory is important because it helps us to understand our experience and form our actions. For me, nothing demonstrates this more than frameworks which deeply understand the ways that different identities and the corresponding different forms of oppression interlock. It led to revolutionary practice in the 1850s, the 1950s, and I expect it will in the 2050s too. 2050: the year of actually hovering hoverboards, Bend It Like Beckham 4, and revolutionary intersectional political action – a girl can dream.
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