To understand the concept of intersectionality, and the problems with not recognizing it, you must first understand what it is. Intersectionality is a term, coined by Professor Beverlé Crenshaw in 1989, used to refer to the interconnectedness of race, class, and gender, meaning that no one part of your heritage is more or less important than the other. As Crenshaw puts it, “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite-that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.” In other words, Crenshaw’s point is that we all have different intersecting identities and no part of yourself is more or less important, nor can one be used as a defining trait or a label. For someone who is (as an example) African-American and Muslim, their experience as an American is different in many ways from, for example, a Muslim with Middle Eastern ancestry, or an African American who was raised Christian. In that vein, using that one person’s life experience doesn’t mean you can apply it to just any Muslim or African-American.
Often, intersectionality is applied as a reminder to various media (books, TV shows, etc.) that use one person’s life or experiences as representative of a whole group of people. For example, a show like Donald Glover’s Atlanta is intended to serve as a microcosm of inner city life, but through its three main protagonists ~ all young, black men ~ it can only represent a certain demographic effectively. This demographic is, simply, young black men in Atlanta, as different groups would certainly have different life experiences. A white man living in the same neighborhood as the main characters on Atlanta would have a fundamentally different day to day life, as would a black woman, or a member of the LGBT community. Intersectionality even tries to account for differences smaller than those. For example, an author writing about her experience as a south Asian woman in New York City in the 1990’s can’t really accurately represent a south Asian woman living there in the 2000’s, or a south Asian woman living in a different neighborhood at the same time, or even the author’s next door neighbor who grew up with a fundamentally different childhood experience. When one doesn’t recognize intersectionality and subsequently tries to create a work of art that is representative of all people, or a certain demographic, they cannot possibly do so.