What Is Intersectionality?

How understanding interconnections between people, different forms of dominance and oppression, capitalism, other economics, and ecology, informs analysis & activism to make them far more powerful.

An intersectional analysis involves examining the interrelationships and power dynamics between a full spectrum of groups and interests, from corporations, to elites, to colonized peoples, religious adherents, ethnicities, genders, races, ages, disabilities, the middle class, the poor, and even species and ecosystems.

Intersectional analysis understands that power, influence, and oppression cannot be fully understood, without unpacking and understanding such interrelationships.

Intersectional Strategies Of The Black Panthers

For example, the Black Panthers were successful because they did not merely analyze white dominance and oppression of Blacks, they also actively brought in and elevated Black women, and in the process analyzed their own internalized male/female power dynamics. Crucially, the Black Panthers also incorporated a class analysis.

This joining together of the analysis of anti-Black racism, sexism, and classism (and how classism fundamentally depends on the subjugation of racial ‘others’ as a permanent economic underclass) was a key triangulation of power analysis which made the Black Panthers far more insightful and successful than they would have been if they had only focused on immediate issues of Black male liberation.

Understanding Intersections Of People, Power & Subjugation In 3 Dimensions

Consciously addressing the nature of how male privilege and dominance over women impacted their own work (both internally and from the outside greater society) while also employing Marxist class analysis, enabled the Panthers to triangulate their understanding of power, making that understanding *three dimensional* rather than a flat, two dimensional examination.

In turn, this triangulation enabled the Panthers to develop far more inner strength and effectiveness, incorporating feminism and powerful female Black leaders, and joining with organizers of other movements challenging status quo economic and racial power, like the Young Lords and the Brown Berets.

The Panthers used their understanding of how race and class oppression intersect, to much more powerfully organize against white dominance. The best example of this is in the work of Fred Hampton in Chicago, in which he and others formed a Rainbow Coalition which united Blacks, Latinos, and poor white migrants from locales like Appalachia into a unified movement against class oppression. See:
“Want to learn about productive allyship? Look to the Rainbow Coalition”

Expanding Intersectional Analysis To Include All People & Living Beings

Intersectional analysis at its best, incorporates other interrelated factors such as ecology and the capitalist domination of nature, LGBTQ oppression and rights, disability rights, and animal rights. Hierarchies and oppression (still led by dominant white male capitalist power) impact all of these, both individually and together in a global social and biological system.

Here is a particularly incisive four minute riff by Angela Davis (in dialog with another excellent practitioner of intersectional activism Grace Lee Boggs) on the intersection between capitalism and the food we eat (especially in our domination and eating of animals).

Expanding Intersectionality To The Global Biosphere

This basic analysis by Angela Davis of the intersections between capitalism and food, can be further expanded into an analysis of the entire global capitalist food system. This has been done by organizers like Vandana Shiva, who gets to the very heart of the concept of intersectionality by recognizing the deeply interconnected relationships of all living beings in the web of life, and how these intersect with modern neoliberal corporate agriculture. See: "Why We Need an Organic Future" (45 mins).

All of this laid out above (and the intersections of economics and injustice, with and between any two or more groups, regions or systems) is what intersectionality is all about and how it serves us.

Asking The Framer Of The Term, Kimberlé Crenshaw.. What Is Intersectionality?

To close, here is a definition of the term intersectionality recently put forward by its originator..

“Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LGBTQ problem there.” ~ Kimberlé Crenshaw

To read the 2017 interview in which Crenshaw replied with that synopsis when asked about the term, see:

"Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later"

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Eric Brooks is a full time grassroots organizer specializing in the interplay of global capitalist economics and war, with energy policy, the climate and extinction crisis, and environmental justice.