We Are Both Women. Now What?

Race, Sex, and the Limits of Intersection

Several years ago, during a discussion about the convergence of race, class, and feminism, a white woman told me that women are second-class citizens “no matter what space we occupy.” I considered that phrase an idea based on a misguided understanding of a term I don’t hear much anymore but was certainly evident in 2019: “intersectionality.”



The operative words I found the most challenging and felt the need to push back on the most were the space we occupy, or don’t, as the case may be. I know I don’t need to state the obvious, or that we live within a patriarchy, but we do not occupy the same racial position within that patriarchy, nor does our shared sex place us into the same relationship with the other systems operating around us.



Womanhood does not suspend whiteness for white women any more than it suspends Blackness for Black women.



This is what makes intersectionality far more pivotal to this essay than simply acknowledging that multiple identities can exist in the same person. It is important to understand what those identities mean structurally when they meet, particularly when one shared identity is used to imply a degree of commonality that the other simply doesn’t support.



What exactly intersects between Black women and white women besides sex? The reality is that our vaginas are where any intersection…