Intersectionality, as Kimberlé Crenshaw defined it in a 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum article, is a framework for understanding how overlapping identities like race and gender combine to produce forms of discrimination that single-category thinking cannot see. Crenshaw’s specific concern was Black women, who faced workplace exclusion that neither Black men nor white women experienced, and who kept losing in court because judges insisted they choose one basis for their claim.
The Core Idea
Crenshaw’s 1989 paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” argued that anti-discrimination law had a built-in blind spot. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination “because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”1U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Courts in the 1970s and 1980s read the word “or” literally. A plaintiff could allege race discrimination or sex discrimination, but combining the two into one claim struck many judges as an attempt to invent a new, stronger remedy.
To make the concept concrete, Crenshaw used the image of a traffic intersection. Discrimination moves through the crossing from several directions at once. A person standing there might be struck by traffic from any one street or by a collision of streams. Arguing over which car did the damage misses what makes the location dangerous in the first place.
The Three Cases That Exposed the Problem
Crenshaw did not develop the theory abstractly. She read three federal employment cases closely, and each one showed the same trap from a different angle.
DeGraffenreid v. General Motors
Five Black women sued General Motors over a seniority-based layoff policy. Before 1970, GM’s St. Louis plant had employed only one Black woman, who worked as a janitor. When layoffs hit workers hired after May 1968, every Black woman on the production line lost her job.2Resource.org. DeGraffenreid v General Motors Assembly Division, 558 F2d 480 The district court refused to allow a combined race-and-sex claim, writing that the plaintiffs “should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new ‘super-remedy’ which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended.” The case had to proceed as race discrimination or sex discrimination, “but not a combination of both.”3Justia. DeGraffenreid v General Motors Assembly Div, 413 F Supp 142 GM had hired white women and Black men before 1970, so neither a pure race claim nor a pure sex claim explained what happened to Black women specifically.
Moore v. Hughes Helicopters
Moore was a Black woman who sued over promotion discrimination. The Ninth Circuit noted that she “never claimed that she was discriminated against as a female, but only as a Black female,” then questioned whether her claims could adequately represent white female employees. The court treated the experience of white women as the default measure of gender discrimination, which made it harder for a Black woman to serve as a class representative.
Payne v. Travenol Laboratories
Black women at a manufacturing plant sued over discriminatory hiring. The Fifth Circuit acknowledged that race discrimination had occurred but limited the remedy to Black women, refusing to extend back pay or seniority relief to Black men on the reasoning that Black women plaintiffs could not adequately represent Black men. Even when they won, their combined identity became the reason the court narrowed the relief.
Read together, the three cases formed a closed loop. In DeGraffenreid, Black women could not combine their identities. In Moore, a Black woman could not stand in for all women. In Payne, a Black woman could not stand in for all Black people.
The Three Dimensions Crenshaw Mapped Later
In her 1991 Stanford Law Review paper “Mapping the Margins,” Crenshaw moved beyond courtroom doctrine and identified three dimensions of intersectionality.
Structural
Structural intersectionality describes how institutions organize services around a single-identity default and leave people at the crossroads without adequate support. Crenshaw documented domestic violence shelters turning non-English-speaking women away for lack of bilingual staff, and rape crisis centers serving women of color having to address housing and poverty alongside the assault itself, which put them at odds with funders operating on “standards of need that are largely white and middle-class.”4JSTOR. Mapping the Margins – Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color None of these failures required malice. They came from designing systems for a presumed standard victim.
Political
Political intersectionality addresses how movements themselves reproduce exclusion. Anti-racist organizing has historically centered men; feminist organizing has tended to center white women. People who belong to both groups get told to pick a side. Crenshaw argued that the flaw in identity politics was not that it emphasized group membership but that it “frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.”4JSTOR. Mapping the Margins – Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color When feminist and antiracist efforts “proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains,” women of color had no political home.
Representational
Representational intersectionality examines how media and popular culture depict people at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. Depictions tend toward invisibility or caricature, and those cultural patterns reinforce the same blind spots that show up in legal and political systems.
How Federal Courts Treat Intersectional Claims Today
The legal picture has shifted since DeGraffenreid, but unevenly. Federal appeals courts are split across at least four approaches, and no Supreme Court decision has resolved the question.
The first break came in 1980, when the Fifth Circuit ruled in Jefferies v. Harris County Community Action Association that Black women could bring combined race-and-sex claims under Title VII. The court held that “discrimination against black females can exist even in the absence of discrimination against black men or white women,” and that recognizing Black women as a distinct protected group “is the only way to identify and remedy discrimination directed toward black females.”5Justia. Jefferies v Harris County Community Action Association, 615 F2d 1025 The Eleventh Circuit adopted a similar approach.
The Ninth Circuit endorsed intersectional claims in Lam v. University of Hawaii, holding that “where two bases for discrimination exist, they cannot be neatly reduced to distinct components” and that splitting a person’s identity “at the intersection of race and gender often distorts or ignores the particular nature of their experiences.”6Justia. Lam v University of Hawaii, 40 F3d 1551 The Sixth Circuit uses a similar totality approach.
Other circuits are less receptive. The Second, Third, and Tenth Circuits use a “sex-plus” framework that can accommodate intersectional claims but requires the plaintiff to lead with sex as the primary trait, which subordinates the racial dimension. The Fourth and Eighth Circuits still require plaintiffs to separate their claims into distinct race or sex categories, echoing the DeGraffenreid logic.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has taken a clearer position than the courts. Section 15 of the agency’s Compliance Manual states: “Title VII prohibits discrimination not just because of one protected trait (e.g., race), but also because of the intersection of two or more protected bases (e.g., race and sex). For example, Title VII prohibits discrimination against African American women even if the employer does not discriminate against White women or African American men.”7U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Section 15 Race and Color Discrimination The EEOC extends the principle to other combinations, including race and disability or race and age.
The gap between the EEOC’s position and the restrictive circuits means where you file matters. A Black woman bringing a combined claim in the Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, or Eleventh Circuit has a recognized path. The same claim in the Fourth or Eighth Circuit may be forced back into the either/or framework Crenshaw first identified.