Black women has it the worst. When a black woman experiences discrimination, it can be due to her gender or race. Black women don’t only fight for gender equality, they fight for their civil rights.
I have the utmost respect for black women. They have to fight battles I never have to. Hence why understanding the importance of intersectionality in feminism must be the highest priority for any feminist today. American civil rights advocate and a scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw saw this gap and introduced the term intersectionality in a brilliantly written 1989 essay, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist eory and Antiracist Politics.
Black women are discriminated against in ways that often do not fit neatly within the legal categories of either “racism” or “sexism”—but as a combination of both racism and sexism. Yet the legal system has generally defined sexism as based upon an unspoken reference to the injustices confronted by all(including white) women, while defining racism to refer to those faced by all (including male) Blacks and other people of color. This framework frequently renders Black women legally “invisible” and without legal recourse.
As a feminist and anti-racism activist I wasn’t aware of an important term – intersectionality. At first I couldn’t comprehend white there would be segregation between white and black feminist. I started looking into the history and realized that when white feminist fought for gender equality it wasn’t inclusive of other races. They only represented white women. I found it disappointing, but racism is nothing new to black women. It was just news to me.
PS: For those of you interested, here is the link to the essay: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf