Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to describe what Black women already knew from experience: that the categories of race and gender do not simply add to each other but interact to produce experiences that neither category alone can capture. The Black woman who is discriminated against in ways that are simultaneously racial and gendered cannot get redress from a legal framework that treats these as separate tracks. In practice, intersectionality is a tool for seeing complexity — for asking not just what category you occupy but how the categories you occupy interact in specific systems and contexts.
Each step builds on the last.