Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity

Intersectionality is a critical lens for examining the interaction between various parts of a person’s social identity, particularly within systems of discrimination. These identity categories include sex, ability, age, orientation, religion, immigrant status, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, and class; according to intersectional theory, these categories do not exist discretely but rather overlap to produce unique nexuses of oppression and/or privilege.

Intersectionality’s history in the US originates in the work of Black women; its underlying ideas can be seen even in Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” which pointed out the ways in which society did not treat supposedly universal standards of femininity as applying to Black women. Similar critiques emerged in response to mid-20th-century social movements like the civil rights movement and second wave feminism. Because these movements focused on racism and sexism, respectively, they often overlooked the particular challenges that Black women faced. In the 1960s and 1970s, texts such as The Black Woman, the essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” by Frances Beal, and the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” outlined the fundamental ideas of intersectionality. Other women of color, including Chicana and Latina women, Indigenous American women, and Asian American women, produced similar critiques in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1980s and 1990s, women of color brought these ideas to academic institutions, and the term “intersectionality” itself was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in a 1989 journal article. In this essay, Crenshaw uses an analogy to illustrate the intersection of social categories:

Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination (Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989).

Although intersectionality originated in Black women’s responses to exclusion from women’s rights organizations, its scope has expanded beyond feminism. Tell Me Who You Are takes as a premise the idea that Identity Is Intersectional, and Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi draw on intersectionality to discuss racism and other forms of discrimination in the US. They note that the point of intersectionality is not merely to name “all of our oppressed identities [...] and, crucially, not to use them as excuses to avoid the central injustice of race” (85). Their book emphasizes race as “central,” but other scholars and activists foreground other axes of identity or seek to give equal weight to each.