At the crossroads of injustice

In 1989, American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw published an article in the University of Chicago Legal Forum entitled "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex." In it she proposed a word that would travel around the world: intersectionality.

To explain it, she tells the story of Emma DeGraffenreid, an African American woman who sued a manufacturing company for not hiring her because of her race and sex. The judge dismissed her complaint: the company hired Black people, and it hired women. Only, the Black people were men and the women were white. No one was both Black and a woman. Crenshaw then imagines this worker standing at an intersection, hit by two roads at once. By examining each road separately, the court saw nothing.

The lesson goes beyond the law. Systems intersect too: being turned down for a job limits the choice of housing, which in turn weighs on health. When you live several belongings at once, being Black, a woman, an immigrant, the obstacles do not simply add up; they create an experience of their own, which tools designed for a single category leave in the blind spot.

Ubuntu invites us to look at each person as a whole, never in pieces. Designing a policy, a service or a hiring process with those standing at the crossroads in mind first often makes the road safer for everyone.