In the 1970s, a District Court in Missouri held that a class of Black women could not obtain any form of relief for discrimination because the record established that neither white women, nor Black men, had experienced discrimination. According to the court, you can either be discriminated on the basis of sex, or race, but not both ("this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both.") And since the putative class of Black women couldn't establish one or the other, but only both, they were not entitled to relief.
The decision in DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/413/142/1660699/) was rendered more than 40 years ago. Today, thanks to the work of Professor Kimberle Crenshaw and others, there is a more general acceptance that the intersectionality of multiple identities compounds oppression.
Or is there?
When speaking of the murders of several Asian American women near Atlanta, the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office noted that the murders were not motivated by race because the murderer had alleged that he was motivated by sex. As if the victims were women, but not Asian American. As if the two were not intrinsically linked. As if hate is only ever motivated by one dimension of identity.
Apparently racialized misogyny isn't recognized everywhere.
“People on here literally debating if this was a misogynistic attack against women or a racist attack against Asians,” Jenn Fang, the founder of a long-running Asian-American feminist blog, Reappropriate, wrote in a scathing Twitter thread. “What if — wait for it — it was both.”
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