You've probably heard the word. But the concept is more powerful — and more practical — than the discourse makes it sound.
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 in a law review article about a discrimination case involving Black women at General Motors. The women sued on the grounds of both race and sex discrimination. The court dismissed their case — partly because the company employed Black people (in factory positions) and employed women (in secretarial roles). The discrimination the plaintiffs experienced, the court reasoned, didn't fit neatly into either category.
Crenshaw's insight was precise: the discrimination these women faced wasn't just racism plus sexism. It was something that emerged from the intersection of their identities — something neither legal framework, alone, could capture. The word she gave us was a tool for seeing what the existing system couldn't.
Why It Matters Now
Thirty-five years later, intersectionality is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It's in corporate diversity trainings. It's in academic curricula. It's also routinely invoked without the precision Crenshaw intended — used as a synonym for "complicated" or "involving multiple identities," rather than as the specific analytical lens it is.
In organizing spaces, this muddiness costs us. When we say "reproductive rights are a feminist issue," we're being accurate — but incomplete. Reproductive access in the United States is radically stratified by race, class, geography, immigration status, and disability. A white woman in a blue city and a Black woman in a rural red state face the same abortion ban on paper. In practice, they face entirely different obstacles.
Intersectionality isn't an add-on to movement work. It's not "and also remember marginalized people." It's an epistemological tool: a way of asking whose experience is centered when we define a problem, and whose is rendered invisible.
The Practical Work
In concrete terms, intersectional organizing asks: Who's in the room when decisions get made? Whose needs are treated as complications versus baseline requirements? Which communities are expected to wait for the "main" issue to get resolved first?
Organizations that have taken this seriously tend to share certain practices: leadership structures that center those most affected, not most available; issue framing that names compound harms rather than isolating them; coalitions built on shared analysis rather than shared optics.
The Combahee River Collective — a Black feminist organization active in Boston in the late 1970s — articulated what would become the foundation of intersectional politics before Crenshaw named it. Their 1977 statement remains one of the clearest articulations of why you can't separate political struggles: "We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity."
Wearing the Politics
At Rebels & Rights, we design toward this. Our products don't reduce political identity to a single cause — they're made for people who know that the fight for reproductive rights and the fight for LGBTQ+ safety and the fight for immigrant dignity aren't separate. They're the same fight, wearing different faces.
The royalties from every sale go back to artists who've lived this analysis. The cause contributions go to organizations doing the unglamorous work of making intersectional politics practical — legal defense, mutual aid, organizing infrastructure.
None of this is theoretical. It's just what it looks like when the framework actually works.