4.14 - Interlocking Systems of Oppression
Defining Interlocking Systems of Oppression
The concept of "interlocking systems of oppression" describes how social categories like race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability aren't separate, isolated factors, they're deeply interconnected, and their interaction with broader social systems produces unequal outcomes for individuals. This framework examines the interrelated contexts, systems, and institutions that create oppression or privilege across many areas of life, including education, health, housing, incarceration, and wealth disparities.
Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins developed this concept in her book Black Feminist Thought (1990), where she also described a "matrix of domination," the way these interlocking systems are organized across a whole society. The concept has since become widely used within the field of sociology. But it didn't emerge in isolation. The Combahee River Collective had already described the major systems of oppression as "interlocking" in 1977, and the idea builds on a long tradition of Black feminist scholars, activists, and writers, including Claudia Jones and bell hooks, who critiqued the tendency to treat race, gender, class, and sexuality as separate, mutually exclusive categories. In 1949, Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born activist in New York, wrote that Black women, "as workers, as Negroes, and as women," were "the most oppressed stratum of the whole population," an idea often called triple oppression, and in 1981 bell hooks examined Black women's place in both the feminist and Black freedom movements in Ain't I a Woman.
How Black Writers Represented These Interlocking Systems
Writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde explored the lived experiences of Black women and men directly through their work, showing how race, gender, and social class together shaped how people were perceived, the roles available to them, and their economic opportunities. Audre Lorde in particular addressed questions of identity, representation, and womanhood to convey the distinctive perspective of being a Black woman navigating multiple overlapping systems of identity and inequality at once.
Lorde, who described herself as a "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," put the idea simply in a 1982 speech: there is no single-issue struggle "because we do not live single-issue lives."
Gwendolyn Brooks began writing poetry as a teenager in Chicago, and her work consistently documented the richness of Black urban life. In 1950, she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, a landmark achievement in American literary history. In 1953, she published her only novel, Maud Martha, a collection of vignettes that traces the life of its central character, Maud Martha Brown, from youth into adulthood on Chicago's South Side. Through this format, Brooks depicted how African Americans navigated the multiple, intersecting dimensions of their identity and social class as they moved through spaces both within and beyond their own communities.
Other writers took up similar themes from different angles. Angela Davis and Toni Morrison, for instance, detailed the experience of gender specifically within the broader context of race, sexuality, and class, showing how these categories were never really separable in the lived reality of Black women.
Required Sources
"We're the Only Colored People Here" by Gwendolyn Brooks, from Maud Martha, 1953
In this short chapter of Maud Martha, Maud Martha and her husband, Paul, leave their South Side neighborhood for an evening at a downtown Chicago movie theater. They turn out to be the only Black people there, and they feel the stares and their own self-consciousness, but they manage to enjoy the movie. The scene shows race and class working together: the couple's unease comes both from being Black in a white space and from being working people from the South Side in an upscale downtown theater. Through one ordinary evening, Brooks shows how African Americans weigh the different parts of their identity when they step outside their own communities. As the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, Brooks brought these everyday experiences to a wide readership.
Gwendolyn Brooks, "We're the Only Colored People Here," a chapter of Maud Martha (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953)
In this short chapter, Maud Martha and her husband, Paul, leave the South Side for a night at a fancy downtown Chicago movie theater, where they are the only Black people. They feel the stares and their own unease, but they stay and enjoy the movie. The CED includes it because one ordinary evening shows race and class working together, the idea of interlocking systems of oppression in this topic.
Gwendolyn Brooks, "We're the Only Colored People Here," Maud Martha (1953). Source: The Morgan Library & Museum, online exhibition