4.14 Interlocking Systems of Oppression

'Interlocking systems of oppression' describes how social categories such as race, gender, class, sexuality and ability are connected, and how they interact with social systems to produce unequal outcomes. Instead of studying racism in one box and sexism in another, the concept looks at how they work together.

It examines the institutions and settings where oppression or privilege plays out, including education, health care, housing, the prison system and wealth. For example, a Black woman's experience of the health care system may be shaped at once by her race, her gender and her income, in ways that studying any one of them alone would miss.

The sociologist Patricia Hill Collins developed the concept in her work on Black feminist thought around 1990, and it's now common in sociology. It grew out of generations of Black feminist writing and activism that objected to the habit of treating race, gender, class and sexuality as separate categories. The Combahee River Collective's 1977 Statement had already described oppressions as interlocking (4.13).

Earlier thinkers include Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born activist who in the 1940s wrote about the 'triple' oppression of Black women by race, gender and class, as well as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and Toni Morrison, who explored how race, gender, sexuality and class shape Black lives.

Gwendolyn Brooks began writing poetry as a teenager in Chicago, and her poems capture the richness of Black urban life. In 1950 she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Maud Martha (1953) was her only novel. It's a series of short vignettes following Maud Martha Brown from girlhood to adulthood on Chicago's South Side. In 'We're the Only Colored People Here', a required source, Maud Martha and her husband go to a fancy downtown movie theater where they are the only Black people in the audience. The vignette shows how race, class and gender shape how they're seen, how they see themselves and where they feel they belong.

Writers like Brooks and Audre Lorde explore how race, gender and class affect how Black women and men are perceived, the roles they're expected to play and the economic opportunities open to them. Their characters negotiate several parts of their identity at once as they move through spaces inside and outside their communities.