Hi! It’s the Anthro Minute with Dr. Melissa Vogel. Today I’m sharing a concept that relates to everyone--intersectionality. Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw coined this term to describe how multiple social identities—such as gender, race, class or sexuality—overlap and intersect to create unique experiences, especially when it comes to power, discrimination and inequality. While she was originally referring to the experiences of Black women, the idea has proved broadly useful for examining the complex relationships between identities and power imbalances across many groups, including such dimensions as age, ability, immigration status or even parenthood.
Why does this matter? Because we all identify with more than one group that is important to how we see ourselves and how we relate to the world. In some cases, these identities may grant us privileges while in others we may experience discrimination. Intersectionality challenges us to examine and change traditional power structures and to rethink binaries and hierarchies to create a more just world, and that is the kind of world many of us would prefer to live in.
Read Prof Crenshaw’s reflections on intersectionality 20 years later here: https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later
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