Intersectionality

What it is. Intersectionality is a framework for understanding how different parts of a person's identity — like race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and immigration status — overlap and interact. It recognizes that these identities don't simply add up. They shape each other, producing experiences of advantage and disadvantage that can't be understood by looking at any one identity on its own.

Where it comes from. The term was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. In her 1989 paper "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," she examined how anti-discrimination law treated race and gender as separate categories — a framework that consistently erased Black women, whose experiences fit neither a single-axis "race" nor "sex" analysis. In her 1991 work "Mapping the Margins," she extended the idea to show how structural racism and sexism compound to make Black women's experiences of violence and marginalization invisible. Intersectionality began as a way to name that erasure and make it visible.

Privilege and positionality. Privilege describes the advantages any of us carry in a given context — often ones we didn't earn and don't notice. Positionality is the practice of recognizing our own social location: where we sit in relation to power, and how that shapes what we can see, what we assume, and what we experience. Neither is fixed. Most of us hold a mix of privilege and disadvantage depending on the room we're in. Naming our positionality isn't about guilt or ranking hardship — it's about staying honest so we can listen more carefully and make space for experiences that aren't ours.

Why it matters here. Our guidelines ask each member to come with open ears, mind, and heart, and to do no harm. Understanding intersectionality helps us live up to that: it reminds us that no one's story can be reduced to one label, that we each arrive with a particular vantage point, and that care means accounting for the whole person in front of us.