Sexism isn't a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. It doesn't happen

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s words—"Sexism isn’t a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. It doesn’t happen to Black and White women the same way."—carry the force of revelation, as if chiseling truth into stone for the generations to come. She teaches that oppression is not uniform, but layered, striking each life with a different weight depending on history, identity, and circumstance. To name this is not division, but clarity: to see that justice cannot be blind to difference if it wishes to heal.

The heart of her teaching is what she herself named intersectionality—the truth that a woman who is Black experiences not only sexism, but also the crushing inheritance of racism, and the two together create a burden unlike that carried by her White sisters. Thus, while all women endure sexism, the form and intensity of that suffering shift with the lines of race, class, and culture. To ignore this complexity is to misremember the reality of their lives, and to risk building a justice that leaves some still in chains.

History bears witness to this distinction. During the American women’s suffrage movement, leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought valiantly for women’s rights, but too often excluded Black women from the cause. Sojourner Truth, once enslaved, stood before them and thundered her immortal cry, “Ain’t I a woman?” Her plea revealed what Crenshaw reminds us: that the struggles of Black women could not be swallowed up in the struggles of White women, for their battle was doubled—against both racism and sexism.

Crenshaw’s words pierce with compassion and warning. They remind us that to truly dismantle injustice, one must look deeper than the surface, acknowledging that oppression wears different masks for different faces. To deny this is to build walls where bridges are needed. To accept it is to weave solidarity strong enough to bear the weight of every voice.

Let this teaching endure: no fight for equality can triumph if it forgets those most burdened. Sexism, like all human cruelty, is not monolithic, but many-faced. And only when each face is seen, and each suffering honored, will liberation become whole. For as Truth cried to her sisters, and as Crenshaw now teaches us, justice that excludes is not justice at all.