Intersectionality: Part 2

In part 1, I introduced the concept of intersectionality.

Here’s how intersectionality can help companies and organizations who want to better understand those interacting with their products and services:

It gets at the lived experience of people. Kimberlé W. Crenshaw doesn’t live parts or moments of her life as a woman, and other parts as black. She lived her life as a black woman, and a whole assortment of other things.

It avoids overgeneralization. Black women don’t all do x, y, or z.. Black women who are low-income may do one thing and black women who are middle class may do another. If the low-income black woman is in the midwest, she may have some things in common with other midwesterners that she doesn’t have in common with black women in the south. You get the idea.

It accounts for the compounding effects of marginalization. A low-income person who is highly educated may have a different set of options than a low-income person who dropped out of high school. 

It de-centers whiteness. Before the UX chapter of my life, I spent over a decade learning about the US, Europe, and the Global South — from undergrad to a PhD in African History as well as postdoctoral training and research. If it taught me anything, especially about colonialism, it’s that our conceptual categories are products of our culture and the power dynamics we live in. Western/Northern/White categories are inadequate in encompassing most of how humanity lives and thinks. 

It allows us to solve for convergences: This move towards overlapping, non-binary thinking may at first seem muddled and less actionable. However, it’s actually easier and simpler to build and design for commonalities; this is a major principle of universal and inclusive design. Design for marginalized groups often benefits a broader set of people. A perfect and often-cited example of this is the curb cut, that helped not just those in wheelchairs (who it was originally designed for), but also those with strollers, etc. This concept is so crucial it has its own name: the curb cut effect.

In the UX world, people often talk about being human-centered, but less often do they question or make explicit what model of “human” they are centering. We take analytical short cuts with models such as personas that are more static and simplified than people’s lived experiences.

Even today, many forms of privilege — white, male, cis-het, et cetera — are often the implicit and default, the unspoken and unrecognized “universal” human. It’s time we decenter singular categories of humans and move towards an intersectional approach, and a different kind of universality based on accessibility and inclusivity. Curb cuts for all.