Intersectionality is the idea that different social categories and identities (such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation) are all interconnected, meaning you cannot look at just one in isolation from all the others. These multiple aspects combine and intersect in ways that create new and unique forms of discrimination.

The word intersectionality was coined by the African-American scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe a problem that she and many others saw with feminism: that it assumed all women share similar life experiences as white women. What early mainstream feminists failed to understand was the way black women experienced discrimination very differently from either white women or black men. In other words, you can’t understand the experience of black women by simply adding together the experiences of being black and the experiences of being a woman. Being a “black woman” also comes with its own unique experiences and forms of oppression not explained by either category separately.

See also: marginalized populations

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