A group of Black women sued their employer for discrimination. They said they were being treated unfairly because of their race and their gender.
They lost.
The court’s reasoning was simple: the company wasn’t discriminating against Black people (some Black men worked there) and wasn’t discriminating against women (some white women worked there). The Black women fell through the gap between the legally recognized categories. What was happening to them — discrimination because they were Black women specifically — had no legal name.
Kimberlé Crenshaw named the gap. She called it intersectionality.
The General Motors case
The case was DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, heard in 1976. General Motors had not hired any Black women before 1964. When it began laying off workers under a last-hired, first-fired policy, it eliminated almost all of the Black women it employed. The women argued this was discriminatory. The court disagreed on the grounds that the company employed both Black people and women — just not Black women.
Crenshaw’s analysis of this case, published in 1989 in the University of Chicago Legal Forum, was not primarily a legal argument. It was an argument about how frameworks shape what can be seen. The legal framework available — race discrimination, sex discrimination — was adequate for people who experienced one form of discrimination at a time. For people whose discrimination arose from the combination, the framework was invisible.
The invisibility was not accidental. The frameworks had been built around particular experiences — the experience of Black men in race discrimination law, the experience of white women in sex discrimination law. Black women’s experience was at the intersection, and the intersection was unmapped.
What the gap actually is
The gap is not a crack in an otherwise coherent system. It is the system working as designed — which is to say, working for the people whose experiences shaped its design.
Legal frameworks, social programs, organizing movements, analytical categories — all of them were built by people whose experiences determined what counted as a problem worth naming. The people left out of those conversations had experiences the frameworks couldn’t accommodate. Not because nobody tried, but because the architecture of the framework made those experiences invisible.
This compounds. The most oppressed are the most likely to fall through multiple gaps simultaneously — not just legally but materially. The immigrant woman whose employer uses her documentation status as leverage. The disabled woman of color whose needs fall outside both disability services (which weren’t designed for people of color) and the racial justice infrastructure (which wasn’t designed for disabled people). The formerly incarcerated woman whose criminal record makes her ineligible for the housing programs, employment programs, and benefit programs that might otherwise help her.
Each gap seems, from within the framework that produced it, like an edge case — a specific situation that falls slightly outside what the system was designed for. Crenshaw’s contribution is to show that the pattern of who falls through is not random. The people at the intersections are systematically the most vulnerable, and the gaps in frameworks designed around single axes of oppression are not coincidental failures. They reflect the experiences and interests of the people who built the frameworks.
What the commons has to confront
The commons cannot reproduce this error. Commons governance — governance by the people who depend on the resource — must grapple with the question of who counts as depending on it, and whose dependence is most acute.
The trap is to build a commons that serves the most visible, most politically organized, most resourced among its dependents, while treating the most marginalized as edge cases. This is the trap that the suffrage movement fell into, that the labor movement fell into, that the environmental movement fell into — building governance structures that nominally include everyone but functionally serve those whose power makes them most legible.
The intersectionality framework is not a demand for perfect inclusivity before anything can be built. It is a demand for building from the most excluded rather than from the most advantaged — for asking, at every stage, whose experience the framework can’t see, and adjusting accordingly. That is a harder, slower way to build. It is also the only way to build something that actually serves the people who need it most.