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Powerless Defense
Intersectionality refers to how different kinds of inequity—racism, sexism, classism, and so on—intersect to produce more complex forms of oppression. The term was coined by feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Intersectionality Quotes in How to Be an Antiracist
The How to Be an Antiracist quotes below are all either spoken by Intersectionality or refer to Intersectionality. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 15: Sexuality
Quotes
I gobbled up Audre Lorde, E. Patrick Johnson, bell hooks, Joan Morgan, Dwight McBride, Patricia Hill Collins, and Kimberlé Crenshaw like my life depended on it. My life did depend on it. I wanted to overcome my gender racism, my queer racism. But I had to be willing to do for Black women and queer Blacks what I had been doing for Black men and Black heterosexuals, which meant first of all learning more—and then defending them like my heroes had.
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Chapter 16: Failure
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To understand why racism lives is to understand the history of antiracist failure—why people have failed to create antiracist societies. To understand the racial history of failure is to understand failed solutions and strategies. To understand failed solutions and strategies is to understand their cradles: failed racial ideologies.
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Intersectionality Term Timeline in How to Be an Antiracist
The timeline below shows where the term Intersectionality appears in How to Be an Antiracist. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 14: Gender
...women, racism and sexism intertwine to create gendered racism. Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of “intersectionality” to explain why antiracist movements must also fight sexism, and vice versa. Kendi offers some...
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Kendi quotes Kimberlé Crenshaw’s call for feminism and antiracism to address the intersections of gender and race. Black women built an activist movement around intersectionality and made it...
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Chapter 15: Sexuality
...men). Queer antiracism creates equity among race-sexualities—which, like race-genders or race-classes, are defined by the intersection of two identities. Queer racism leads to worse outcomes for same-sex Black couples, compared to...
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Chapter 16: Failure
...that it’s possible to be “not racist.” Ultimately, policy solutions to racism have to be intersectional, behaviorally and culturally antiracist, and anti-capitalist to be successful. Most solutions aren’t, because they’re based...
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Chapter 17: Success
...because of his upbringing. Kendi then recognized what antiracism requires: developing antiracist power, recognizing the intersections between racism and other forms of oppression, and finally replacing racist ideas and policies with...
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