Intersecting bigotries produce compound racisms targeting specific Black subgroups

Evidence

Like the other identifiable races, Black people are in reality a collection of groups differentiated by gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, skin color, profession, and nationality—among a series of other identifiers, including biracial people who may or may not identify as Black. Each and every identifiable Black group has been subjected to what critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw has called “intersectionality”—prejudice stemming from the intersections of racist ideas and other forms of bigotry, such as sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia. For example, sexist notions of real women as weak, and racist notions of Black women as not really women, have intersected to produce the gender racism of the strong Black woman, inferior to the pinnacle of womanhood, the weak White woman. In other words, to call women as a group stupid is sexism. To call Black people as a group stupid is racism. To call Black women as a group stupid is gender racism. Such intersections have also led to articulations of class racism (demeaning the Black poor and Black elites), queer racism (demeaning Black lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people), and ethnic racism (concocting a hierarchy of Black ethnic groups), to name a few. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 19

Categorization

• DEFINE: Crenshaw’s intersectionality applied to the racist-idea taxonomy: how sexism + racism compound into ‘gender racism,’ etc. — useful precision when placing an argument that targets Black women rather than Black people generally.
• XREF: Crenshaw’s intersectionality originally coined around law and identity; Kendi repurposes it as a discriminator within the racist-idea classification scheme — the reader can connect this to ‘The Social Control of Impersonal Trust’-adjacent identity work. — connects to: Racisms against different groups bleed into and combine with one another; Racisms against distinct groups blend and combine without fixed borders.