Eric W. Maroney
Teacher Created Materials
Respond to the quote by black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term “intersectionality” in her insightful 1989 essay, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”
3
The concept of intersectionality is not an abstract notion but a description of the way multiple oppressions are experienced.
Step One: Read the quote 2-3 times.
Step Two: Circle/Highlight any words or phrases that stick out to you.
Step Three:
Paraphrase
the quote in your own words. What is it
literally
saying?
Step Four: Consider why the author included this quote. How does it
connect
to the
big picture
of the text?
Step Five: Consider the
author’s tone
and
word choice
(
diction
).
What are your thoughts on her statement and how might this relate to The Color Purple.
“Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. . . . But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm.
”