What is intersectionality, and why should we know about it?

I spent the majority of my day today putting together some data on the experience of women in Los Angeles County as part of a report we are developing for the Women and Girl’s Initiative. This is our first attempt at developing a deeper gender lens in our work. And it’s really important.

To me, what’s most interesting about this is how to approach our work with “intersectionality.”

Intersectionality was something that I learned about in policy school and has since helped me reframe a lot of issues about race/ethnicity/gender/immigration. Since most people aren’t really exposed to this idea in an everyday context, I want to take a moment to explain it and then give some examples of it for you.

So, what is intersectionality?

Intersectionality is “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise,” according to the Oxford Dictionary.

It was originally coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor and social theorist in her 1989 paper “Demarginalizing The Intersection Of Race And Sex: A Black Feminist Critique Of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory And Antiracist Politics.” You can read more about the long history and politics of it here.

This video is a helpful explanation of how Professor Crenshaw thinks about intersectionality:

I was lucky enough to do a workshop on intersectionality as part of efforts for Partnership for an Equitable Los Angeles, a student group at USC.

So, now that we know what it is, how can it be useful to people and organizations to think about?

I’ll break down a chart to illustrate this.

This is an interactive chart I made using data on renter data available through the 2013-2017 5-year American Community Survey. These charts are available for city, regional, and state governments on the National Equity Atlas, a data portal many researchers, nonprofits, philanthropic groups, and government leaders use to guide where they should invest.

Now, what’s interesting about this data is that you’ll see it breaks down renter burden or those paying more than 30% of their income in rent for the Los Angeles metro area by race/ethnicity and gender.

What do we notice when we look at this type of data? Well, my experience of rent burden varies significantly based on whether I am Black or Latino, but it also varies based on whether I am part of a male- or female-headed household.

Now, there are a lot of reasons why one of these groups may be paying more rent than others – but if we have a bit of understanding of US history, we will parse together that there is a long period of racial segregation forged through practices such as racially restrictive housing covenants, redlining, and discriminatory lending. We would also see that people of color in the United States have had a lot of barriers to homeownership and historical dispossession and discrimination have prevented accumulation of wealth and upward mobility.

And if I am a single mother of Asian or Pacific Islander decent, I am more likely to be impacted by rent burden then someone with a male-headed household of the same race/ethnicity group (which is usually two people). However, I can still acknowledge that I might not be as impacted as a Black woman-headed household.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this discussion because it doesn’t cover things like my income, whether I’m an immigrant, my age, whether I have children, or whether I am disabled. It also is not an absolute representation of everyone’s experience. But, it is helpful to understand these as larger trends because it can help us be more aware of social dynamics that might be happening around us. It can also help us be a little more aware of our own privilege.

Hope this is helpful!

Warm wishes,

Arpita