THE DIVERSITY PRIZE ESSAY Basements and Intersections

In this paper, I revisit Kimberle Crenshaw's argument in Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989) to recover a companion metaphor that has been largely forgotten in the mainstreaming of intersectionality in (white-dominated) feminist theory. In addition to the now-famous intersection metaphor, Crenshaw offers the basement metaphor to show howby privileging monistic, mutually exclusive, and analogically constituted categories of race and sex tethered, respectively, to masculinity and whitenessantidiscrimination law functions to reproduce social hierarchy, rather than to remedy it, denying Black women plaintiffs legal redress. I argue that in leaving the basement behind, deployments of intersectionality that deracinate the concept from its origins in Black feminist thought also occlude Crenshaw's account of the socio-legal reproduction of hierarchical power.