In Brent Staples essay, published in MS Magazines in 1986, “Just Walk on By: Black men and Public Spaces”, we see how he interaction of gender and have a major impact on not only the people he encounters, but on Mr. Staples himself. Brent Staples, when written, was a mid-twenty African American man. He demonstrates how his everyday evening bus ride and walks from work have shaped the community around him. He encountered a white, early twenties woman, who began to change how he acts. O the woman Brent was nothing more than danger. “It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse.” His race and gender working together, sets off the negative affect of Brent. Later in the essay, you begin to feel for him and understand why he must change his people around him. “I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classic composer.’ He does this to seem less of threat to men and women in his everyday life because of the intersectionality …show more content…
It was widely taken up because the word simultaneously expressed the multiple oppressions faced by Black women. Black woman have eloquently described multiple oppressions of race, class, and gender as ‘interlocking oppressions. Crenshaw argues that Black women are discriminated against in ways that do not fit within the legal categories of “racism” or ‘sexism’. This framework frequently renders Black women legally invisible and without legal resources. She illustrates several employment discrimination-based lawsuits to describe how women of color’s complaints often are unimportant because they are discriminated against both as women and as African American. The ruling in the case Degraffenreid v. general Motors demonstrates this point vividly. General Motors had never hired African American women for its workforce before 1964. All of the black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs fairly quickly in mass layoffs during the 1973-1975 recession. With the huge loss of jobs among the African American women, the plaintiffs argued that seniority-based layoffs discriminated against the Black women workers. Yet the court refused to allow the plaintiffs to combine sex-based and race-based discrimination into a single category. In the court’s decision, the court rejected the creation of a “new classification of ‘black women’ who had a greater standing than a black male.