As we move into the last week of Black History Month and anticipate the start of Women’s History Month, it seems appropriate to focus on a concept developed by Black women: intersectionality. Many Black women scholars have illuminated the concept of intersectionality. Most notably, legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw defined intersectionality as “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.”

Crenshaw offers context in her TED Talk where she describes a legal case where a Black woman filed a discrimination complaint against a car manufacturing plant that employed white women doing secretarial work and Black men working in industrial/maintenance jobs, but had not hired any women of color. The judge dismissed the suit given that the plaintiff couldn’t prove discrimination on the basis of gender or race, because the discrimination was based on both.

This legal example is indicative of something that happens in a variety of fields (criminal justice, education, healthcare, etc.), where those people who have multiple oppressed identities fall through the cracks. These people are rendered invisible or impossibilities. Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins refers to this intersectionality as a “matrix of oppression,” and discusses the ways that some people (e.g., people of color, women, LGBTQ+, dis/abled, etc.) are “multiply marginalized.” Within this matrix of oppression, multiple marginalized identities have a compounding effect on the level of oppression and marginalization a person experiences. Conversely, as Nolan Cabrera notes, other people (e.g., white, men, cis-gender, straight, able-bodied, etc.) are “hyperprivileged” by these same systems of oppression, having a compounding effect on the privileges and power they assume from these systems.

I think it’s important to also highlight that these systems not only affect people in concert, but actually work together to reinforce oppression. Black feminist scholar bell hooks, who we lost recently, referred to the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” as one concept to emphasize that these systems of racism, sexism, and classism cannot be separated without distorting the larger picture of how they are interdependent and strengthen each other.

So, what does this mean for those of us in veterinary medicine and the biomedical sciences? It means that if we don’t consider intersectionality and how it affects people differently, people who are multiply marginalized will fall through the cracks. If we are considering race in areas like research, admissions, and teaching and not simultaneously considering gender, ability, class, etc., people of color who hold multiple marginalized identities will be left out of the conversation and initiatives we develop. If we are focused on gender, and not centering LGBTQ+ women of color, we will be inadvertently centering white cisgender women.

Returning to Black history, this last example brings to mind Sojourner Truth’s speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” where she very intentionally highlighted who is served by and who is rendered an impossibility in our understanding of “woman” when we are not considering intersectionality. Yet, when we center the multiply marginalized people in our work, what inevitably happens is not only do those marginalized benefit, but everybody benefits. Not just a select/privileged few are supported, we are all uplifted.