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Intersectionality
INTRODUCTION
Psychological science that examines racial and gender bias, primarily located within social psychology, has, to this point, insufficiently engaged the ways in which race and gender mutually construct each other to shape people's vulnerability to and experiences with race and gender discrimination. This omission has produced androcentric conceptions of racism, that is, conceptions of racism that focus on men (Goff et al., 2008) and Euro-centered conceptions of sexism, that is, conceptions of sexism that focus on White women. In other words, social psychology conceptualizes racism primarily from the perspective of how Black men are treated and conceptualizes sexism primarily from the perspective of how White women are treated. These approaches reflect a "single axis" (Crenshaw 1989) framework that marginalizes the experiences of women of color generally, and Black women in particular. This article demonstrates the precise ways in which this marginalization has occurred and offers suggestions to correct this bias.
To do so, we first articulate the specific habits of methodology and thought within social psychology that produce prototypical targets of discrimination--Black men vis-à-vis racism and White women vis-à-vis sexism.3The employment of these prototypes facilitates conceptualizations of discrimination that ignore or obscure individuals who are not prototypical (i.e., male and/or White). In pursuing this argument, we should be careful to note that we are not the first to call attention to psychology's limited engagement with intersectionality (Cole 2009; McCall 2005; Shields 2008; Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan, 1990). Some scholars have referred to similar arguments regarding intersectionality as psychology's "intersectional invisibility" (Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008). As a result of this work, psychology is coming to acknowledge that the meaning of race depends on gender (and vice versa [Cole 2009]). However, the field still needs to theorize further the results from this intersection of race and gender. Our aim is to illustrate the methodological challenges to doing so.
This is not to say that one should become preoccupied with intersectional psychology as merely a "methodological challenge" (Shields 2008). At the same time, the methodological frames of disciplines play important roles in forming disciplinary habits of thought and, consequently, provide important information about the route a discipline can take to arrive at a more intersectional approach (McCall 2005; Walker...