Intersectionality: How Anti-Blackness Deepens Through Other Systems

Anti-Blackness does not operate in isolation. It is layered onto gender, class, disability, immigration status, sexuality, and other social identities, creating compounded forms of vulnerability.

Black women face misogynoir, a fusion of sexism and anti-Blackness that devalues their labor, undermines their authority, and erases their pain in health care. Black girls are adultified in schools, disciplined more harshly, and denied the innocence granted to white peers.

Black disabled people experience some of the harshest consequences of intersectional oppression. Disability becomes criminalized when layered onto Blackness: noncompliance is treated as threat, communication differences as defiance, and medical needs as neglect.

Class does not shield Black people from the hierarchy; it only changes how the hierarchy presents itself. Even wealthy Black people—executives, professionals, and homeowners in affluent neighborhoods—face discriminatory policing, unequal medical treatment, workplace exclusion, and bias directed at their children in schools. Wealth may ease some burdens, but it cannot override the structural position assigned to Blackness.

Black immigrants confront both xenophobia and anti-Blackness, navigating immigration enforcement alongside domestic racial profiling. Their experience reveals how U.S. racial hierarchy absorbs global Blackness into its structure.

Black LGBTQ+ people face anti-Blackness within queer spaces and queerphobia within Black spaces, producing higher rates of homelessness, violence, and state neglect.

Across these intersections, the pattern remains: the systems intensify anti-Blackness rather than dilute it. Intersectionality reveals that the racial contract is not one-dimensional—it is reproduced across criminal law, education, housing, health care, family regulation, and public assistance programs, all of which impose layered penalties on Black people with multiple marginalized identities.

The more intersections present, the more forcefully the racial contract is enforced.