Thinker — Intersectionality — The Gap the Law Could Not See

Kimberlé Crenshaw

b. 1959

American legal scholar, born in Canton, Ohio. She went to Cornell, then Harvard Law School, where she was one of very few Black women in a profession built by and for a very specific kind of person. She arrived at the intersection constantly — in her coursework, in the cases she studied, in the frameworks she was being trained to use.

01The intersection

The law could see race. It could see sex. It consistently could not see Crenshaw — not because she was invisible, but because the categories the law used had been built around other people's experiences, and the combination was unspeakable within the available frameworks.

02DeGraffenreid v. General Motors

In 1976, five Black women sued General Motors, arguing that its seniority-based layoffs discriminated against them as Black women specifically: GM had not hired Black women before 1964, so the Black women hired afterward were the first laid off once "last hired, first fired" took effect. The court ruled that Title VII's protections against race discrimination and sex discrimination could not be combined into a new protected category — the plaintiffs could show discrimination against Black people, or discrimination against women, but not, as a matter of law, discrimination against Black women as such. Reading the case thirteen years on, Crenshaw named the gap the ruling had fallen into. Her word for it: intersectionality.

03Not first

Crenshaw was not first. The Combahee River Collective had named the same structure twelve years earlier, in a different register — collective practice rather than legal theory. Crenshaw's naming gave the courtroom a word for what Combahee had already been organizing around.