Scholar and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw first introduced the term “intersectionality” in 1989, eight years after bell hooks published Ain’t I a Woman. However, the word characterizes a phenomenon outlined by hooks in in her feminist text. In fact, Crenshaw credits hooks for providing the theoretical framework that inspired the term (Schuessler, Jennifer. “The Wide-Angle Vision, and Legacy, of bell hooks.” New York Times, 16 Dec. 2021). Intersectionality describes how forms of discrimination intersect with one another, including race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. These discriminatory elements cannot be separated. Instead, they work together to create complex webs of oppression that can be challenging to untangle. At the heart of hooks’s text is the idea that racism and sexism intersect for Black women, providing them with unique challenges and placing them in a position of marginalization, devaluation, and invisibility.

The intersectionality of racism and sexism for Black women can be seen in slavery, within which Black women bore specific abuse, violence, and discrimination. hooks notes the spectrum of this oppression:

The black male slave was primarily exploited as a laborer in the fields; the black female was exploited as a laborer in the fields, a worker in the domestic household, a breeder, and as an object of white male sexual assault.