Indiscrete Oppression

All the Women Are White; All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave.

In Ain’t I A Woman, bell hooks writes: “when black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women”. In this way, despite black women having to bear what hooks calls the “dual impact of sexist and racist oppression”, it is rare to hear their voices in either feminist or civil rights discourse.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights activist and legal scholar, coined the term intersectionality to capture black women’s experiences since traditional feminist ideas and anti-racist policies exclude black women as a result of the overlapping discrimination they have to face. She writes: “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”

She further moves on to state that “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism”, which ties with the concept of ‘multiple jeopardy’. This term, commonly used by black feminist scholars describes how the culmination of the multiple oppressions and barriers individuals face contribute to a far greater overall oppression. Another, albeit a bit reductive, way of putting this would be to say, for example, that the level of oppression an individual has to face as a result of both sex and race discrimination is equal to 10. Most would argue that a black woman would face an oppression equal to 10+10=20. However, according to an intersectional approach that recognizes that oppression is not discrete and that multiple oppressions build on top of each other, a black woman’s oppression would equal 10*10=100.

The need for intersectional politics can also be seen in the justice system of the United States. For example, as Crenshaw highlights, in the DeGraffenreid vs General Motors case, where black women claimed they were discriminated against, the court stated: “(plaintiffs) should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new ‘super-remedy’… this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both.” In this way, although the jury recognized that those women might have been victims of race or sex discrimination, it completely invalidated the experiences of black women as being “multiply-burdened”.

Crenshaw states that “the boundaries of sex and race discrimination doctrine are defined respectively by white women’s and Black men’s experiences” and that “Black women are protected only to the extent that their experiences coincide with those of either of the two groups.” In instances like this, intersectional politics becomes important because it is the only way to capture the multiple, unique oppressions an individual faces, and in a world that is now further oppressing on the basis of sexuality, nationality, religion, and socioeconomic status as well, such a resource becomes absolutely necessary.