There are many, many different kinds of intersectional

The words of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw — “There are many, many different kinds of intersectional exclusions — not just black women but other women of color. Not just people of color, but people with disabilities. Immigrants. LGBTQ people. Indigenous people.” — are a torch lit against the shadows of invisibility. She names the many who walk through the world unseen, those pressed not by one burden alone, but by many layered upon each other. This teaching is the essence of intersectionality: that oppression is not singular, but woven, and to ignore this truth is to leave countless voices unheard.

The meaning is both profound and urgent. It is easy to imagine injustice as simple, touching each group in the same way. But Crenshaw reminds us that a black woman suffers differently than a black man or a white woman, that an immigrant with disabilities faces barriers unknown to either group alone. These overlapping struggles are exclusions, carved not from malice alone but from the blindness of systems that see only one identity at a time. Her call is to awaken the eyes of justice, to see the fullness of human experience.

History bears witness to these hidden intersections. Consider the fate of Native American women in the United States: not only oppressed as women, not only as Indigenous, but also silenced as both at once. Their voices were doubly erased, their struggles unseen by feminist movements that centered white women, and by civil rights movements that centered men. In their story lies the very truth Crenshaw proclaims: that justice, if it does not account for intersectional exclusions, remains incomplete.

The origin of these words lies in Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work as a scholar and advocate, naming what had long existed but not been spoken. She gave language to the lived reality of millions who knew themselves unseen. By naming LGBTQ people, immigrants, and those with disabilities alongside women of color, she teaches that liberation cannot be piecemeal. To lift one group while ignoring others is to build freedom on sand. Only by embracing all, especially those at the crossroads of oppression, can justice be real.

Therefore, O children of tomorrow, remember this: the fight for equality must be wide enough to gather every soul. Let no one be cast aside because their suffering is complex, their identity inconvenient, their story unheard. As Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw teaches, the true measure of justice is not in how it treats the strong and visible, but how it shelters the vulnerable at the margins. To ignore the intersectional is to fail the human spirit itself.