In the video “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” the orator Kimberle Crenshaw talks about the different amount of social problems many African American women go through. The cause for this is as Kimberle referred it to “intersectionality,” in which African American women are subjected to experience an overlap of race and gender. She discusses about this urgent issue and provides a real life scenario in which an African American women Emma DeGraffenreid whose claim was dismissed by a judge. Emma believed she was facing race and gender discrimination against the local car manufacturing plant. She was not hired because of her skin color and her gender, the judge who dismissed her claim did it purely because it is not completely true. However, it is known that most African Americans that were hired were men and the women that were hired was mostly white. Kimberle Crenshaw goes on by mentioning the main problem of this issue which is the “framing problem.” She explains how many people in our society fail to see race or gender discrimination which is as she explains “partial and distorting.”

Something that really caught my eye was when she started her speech with an exercise that involved her audience to stand up. She mentioned a variety of different names and the audience would either sit back down or stay standing if they recognized these names. Mostly everyone stayed standing when male African American names were mentioned, as soon as female names were mentioned only 4 people remained standing. By, doing this exercise her audience will realize how serious this issue is and how there should a change to this. As she said “if we can’t see a problem, then we can’t fix a problem.”

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