In 1976, five Black women, led by Emma DeGraffenreid, sued General Motors. Their claim was straightforward: during a seniority-based layoff, all Black female employees hired after 1970 were let go. They argued this was a clear case of employment discrimination.

General Motors had a defense that, on the surface, seemed logical. They pointed out that they hired Black people for factory jobs and women for secretarial roles. Therefore, they argued, they couldn't be discriminating against Black people or women. The court agreed.

The problem was that the factory jobs went to Black men, and the secretarial jobs went to white women. The plaintiffs were Black women. They fell into a gap, experiencing a unique form of discrimination that was invisible to both the company and the court.

The court forced the women to choose. Were they suing based on race discrimination or sex discrimination? They couldn't combine the two claims. This legal approach is known as a single-axis framework, where discrimination is analyzed along one dimension at a time—race or gender, but not both.

This legal quandary is what legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would later call a "conceptual black hole." The law had frameworks to protect Black people (men) and women (white women), but it had no concept for the specific, overlapping discrimination faced by Black women. Their unique experience was legally unrecognizable.

In her groundbreaking 1989 paper, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," Crenshaw used a powerful metaphor to explain this failure. She described identity as an intersection of different roads. Discrimination, she argued, can be like traffic flowing from all directions.

A white woman might face sexism, flowing from one direction. A Black man might face racism, flowing from another. But a Black woman stands at the intersection where both streams of traffic can hit her. The injury isn't just one plus the other; it's a compound harm that is distinct and more severe.

The women in the DeGraffenreid v. General Motors case were standing in that intersection. By forcing them to choose a single road of discrimination, the law failed to see the collision that had already occurred.

This case wasn't an isolated incident. It was one of several that highlighted a fundamental flaw in how the legal system understood identity and harm. It demonstrated why a new framework was necessary—one that could see the whole person and the complex ways in which power and discrimination operate.