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Now, welcome to the award-winning BestOfAleft podcast with hope today from an intersection, criticize after dinner, propaganda, radio dispatch, redacted tonight, on being and the Benjamin Dixon show.

Now, I couldn't do a podcast called Intersection without having the woman who coined the term intersectionality on the show. Joining me now is Kimberly Crenshaw, law professor at both UCLA and Columbia University. Kim, thanks so much for coming on the show.

It's really a pleasure to be here.

So, Kim, what is intersectionality?

Intersectionality refers to the fact that many of our modes of talking about discrimination, many of the laws designed to intervene against it, some of our popular tropes are all problematically framed around a singular idea, namely that you experience either racism or sexism or any other ism and they're mutually exclusive and separate.

And as a consequence, a lot of the laws that have been developed only look at one issue at a time. So, first you have to make your claim about race discrimination and then you have to make your claim about sex discrimination.

And the problem is that many times those who are subject to both or more than one form of discrimination can't prove these one step at a time.

And because they can't prove it one step at a time, they often are told that they have an experience or have not experienced any kind of discrimination.

And so, that's where intersectionality originally came from. I was looking at cases where black women were told they could not prove discrimination because black men were hired and they couldn't prove discrimination of basic gender because white women were hired.

So, they were basically told you don't have a claim. So, I wanted to use a metaphor that said, okay, you see race coming along this road, right? And you see gender coming along this road. Imagine what happens when they connect, when they collide.

That's what discrimination is. And when we send an ambulance to the scene of the crime to actually lift up the women, it's terrible when the ambulance just drive away because it couldn't be proved that they are not.

It couldn't be proved that the women who were hitting that intersection were hit just by race traffic or just by gender traffic.

So intersectionality was just a quick way to imagine a world in which there are all these collisions and to raise the awareness so that we would be able to address those who fall in the intersection.

We've been talking about the future of gay life in America and the recent Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. How can we better engage in debates about topics like this with an intersectional lens, do you think?

Intersectionality draws our attention to the fact that there is no one moment where everyone who is subject to a particular discrimination is free unless the other intersecting dimensions of their lives like race and class are also included within it.

So the real challenge is now that marriage equality is virtually one and a constitutional right. Where else will the energies go to ensure those populations that are women or that are poor or the black have the same functional access to the many benefits that those who are more privileged will get from marriage equality?

That's the challenge that intersectionality raises for us.

Now talking about resources being diverted to marginalized communities, I want to talk a little bit about the say her name report that you co-authored earlier this year about police brutality and black women.

We have two big cases in the media right now, 28 year old Sandra Blant, early this month was pulled over in Texas and three days after that found hanging in her jail cell dead.

Then we have 18 year old Kendra Chapman who allegedly committed suicide in her jail so.

Kim, how can those two cases help us understand intersectionality?

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