“If we aren’t intersectional, some of us, the most vulnerable, will fall through the cracks.”— Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
“A Negro woman has the same kind of problems as other women, but she can't take the same things for granted.”— Dorothy Height
“We have to be able to talk about the complex issues of race and gender and class and sexuality.”— Anita Hill
“The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country... She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both.”— Anna Julia Cooper
“Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow from one direction, and it may flow from another.”— Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
“The female subject is a site of differences; differences that are not only sexual or only racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these together and in conflict with one another.”— Teresa de Lauretis
“In this country, lesbianism is a poverty — as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor.”— Cherrie Moraga
“Feminism involves so much more than gender equality...Feminism must involve a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism...”— Angela Davis
“So, what is intersectionality? It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”— Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
“A white woman has only one handicap to overcome - that of sex. I have two - both sex and race... I am doubly handicapped in the race of life.”— Mary Church Terrell
“Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.”— Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
“I want to be able to be black and a woman and a lesbian and a feminist and a socialist and a human being and be who I am.”— Barbara Smith
“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.”— Barbara Smith
“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that 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.”— Barbara Smith