Black Feminism and Intersectionality: A Primer

You can’t understand modern feminism—or modern social justice—without understanding Black feminism. And you can’t understand Black feminism without understanding that Black women have always been fighting battles on multiple fronts.

White feminism focuses on gender. Black feminism recognizes that race, class, sexuality, and other identities intersect—and that liberation requires addressing all of them.

What Is Black Feminism?

Black feminism centers the experiences of Black women, who face both racism and sexism in ways that can’t be separated. It rejects the idea that gender oppression affects all women the same way.

White women fighting for the vote in the suffrage movement often excluded Black women and used racist rhetoric to advance their cause. Mainstream civil rights movements often centered Black men’s experiences while sidelining Black women. Black feminism said: we need a movement that actually includes us.

The Origins: Combahee River Collective

In 1977, the Combahee River Collective—a Black lesbian feminist organization—published a statement that became foundational to Black feminist thought. They wrote: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”

That’s intersectionality before the term existed.

They also said: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

Black women’s liberation isn’t a side issue—it’s the frontline.

Sojourner Truth: “Ain’t I a Woman?”

In 1851, Sojourner Truth gave a speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. White feminists were arguing that women were too delicate for voting and public life. Truth, a formerly enslaved woman, responded:

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”

She worked in fields. She bore children and saw them sold away. She endured violence and labor that white women never faced. And she was still denied basic humanity.

Her speech exposed the lie that all women share the same experience.

Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality

In 1989, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how systems of oppression overlap.

She used the example of Black women facing employment discrimination: courts often ruled it wasn’t sex discrimination because white women were hired, and it wasn’t race discrimination because Black men were hired. Black women’s specific experience—facing both simultaneously—was legally invisible.

Intersectionality gave a name to what Black women already knew: our oppressions aren’t separate. They compound.

bell hooks and Accessible Theory

bell hooks (who insisted on lowercase letters to center ideas over ego) brought Black feminist thought to a wider audience with books like Ain’t I a Woman and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

She argued that feminism couldn’t achieve liberation while ignoring race, class, and capitalism. She critiqued white feminist movements for prioritizing white middle-class women’s concerns—like access to corporate jobs—while ignoring issues like poverty, domestic labor, and state violence that disproportionately affected Black women and working-class women.

hooks wrote about patriarchy, but also about how Black communities sometimes used sexism to cope with racism—and how that still harmed Black women.

Audre Lorde: Poetry as Resistance

Audre Lorde—Black, lesbian, feminist, poet, warrior—wrote about surviving as a marginalized person in multiple ways. Her work explored cancer, motherhood, racism, homophobia, and ageism.

She famously wrote: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

She also said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” She meant that using oppressive systems’ methods—like respectability politics or assimilation—won’t bring liberation. Real change requires radical reimagining.

The Invisibility of Black Women’s Labor

Black feminism highlights the exploitation of Black women’s labor—enslaved women forced into domestic and reproductive labor, post-slavery Black women working as maids and caretakers in white homes, modern-day Black women disproportionately working service jobs with no benefits.

Black women have always worked. The myth that women belong in the home never applied to Black women, who were denied that option.

And yet, when white feminism celebrated women entering the workforce in the 1960s and 70s, it ignored that Black women had been working—often raising white women’s children while neglecting their own families—for centuries.

Black Feminism Today

Black feminism continues through scholars, activists, and everyday people demanding better. The Movement for Black Lives centers Black women, queer people, and trans folks—not as an afterthought, but as leadership.

Organizations like Black Women’s Blueprint, Southerners on New Ground, and Black Youth Project 100 carry forward Black feminist principles: centering the most marginalized, addressing multiple oppressions simultaneously, and building collective power.

Why White Feminism Still Fails

White feminism—feminism that centers white women’s experiences and ignores race—still dominates mainstream narratives. It celebrates CEOs and politicians while ignoring incarcerated women, domestic workers, and undocumented women.

It treats Black feminism as an add-on, a “special interest,” instead of the foundation.

What Intersectionality Means in Practice

Intersectionality isn’t about ranking oppressions or playing oppression Olympics. It’s about understanding that people hold multiple identities simultaneously, and those identities shape their experiences.

A queer Black woman faces different barriers than a straight Black woman, a white queer woman, or a Black man. Policy, activism, and community building must account for that.

Moving Forward

Black feminism isn’t just for Black women. Its principles apply to anyone committed to liberation: center the most marginalized, address root causes, reject band-aid solutions, and build collective power.

Read Black feminist theory. Support Black women-led organizations. Amplify Black women’s voices—especially those who are queer, trans, disabled, and working-class.

And when feminism claims to be for all women, ask: Does it center Black women? If not, it’s not feminism—it’s racial supremacy in disguise.