Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American legal scholar and civil rights advocate who developed intersectionality, a framework for understanding how overlapping systems of discrimination shape people’s lives.

Intersectionality: A framework for analyzing how interacting social identities and systems of power shape experiences and outcomes. Crenshaw coined the term to show how race and gender discrimination can combine.
DeGraffenreid v. General Motors: A 1976 federal court case in which five Black women challenged General Motors’ seniority system as discriminatory. Crenshaw used the case to illustrate how courts could overlook discrimination specific to Black women.
Mari Matsuda: An American legal scholar known for work on critical race theory, feminist jurisprudence, and social justice. Matsuda and Crenshaw were among the scholars who developed critical race theory.
Intersectional feminism: Feminist analysis that considers how gender interacts with race, class, sexuality, and other structures of power. Crenshaw’s framework gave feminist movements a vocabulary for examining exclusions within their own politics.
Critical race theory: An intellectual movement examining how law and institutions produce and maintain racial inequality. Crenshaw helped establish this movement, which provides a broader context for her scholarship.
Moore v. Hughes Helicopters, Inc.: A 1983 federal appeals case rejecting a Black woman’s attempt to represent women in a sex-discrimination class action. The court’s reasoning exemplified the representational limits Crenshaw identified.
Derrick Bell: An American legal scholar regarded as a founder of critical race theory. Bell’s scholarship helped establish the intellectual movement Crenshaw later advanced.
Identity politics: Political organizing grounded in shared experiences of social identity and the inequalities attached to it. Crenshaw argued that identity-based politics can address differences within groups rather than erase them.
Black feminism: A tradition of thought and activism centered on Black women’s experiences and struggles against interconnected forms of oppression. Its analysis of race and gender informed Crenshaw’s account of intersectionality.
Pay equity: The principle that workers should receive equal compensation for work of equal value, without discrimination. Intersectional analysis can reveal disparities obscured by comparisons that separate race from gender.

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