Intersectionality A short story inspired by the @bananafish

Once upon a time, Kimberlee - a smart bananafish law student - came across a legal opinion, written by a judge, who had dismissed bananafish Emma’s discrimination claim against a local manufacturer. Emma like so many other bananafishes sought better employment for her children and for her family. She applied for a job but was not hired because she was a bananafish.

The judge dismissed Emma’s suit. The argument for dismissing the suit was that the employer did hire fish and hired bananas. The real problem though, that the judge was not willing to acknowledge, was that Emma was banana and fish at the same time. Individuals who were hired for ocean jobs were all fishes, while bananas were hired for jobs in the forest. Only if the court could see how these policies came together would it be able to see double discrimination that Emma was facing. But the court refused to allow Emma to put two causes of action together to tell her story because the judge believed that by allowing Emma to do that she would be able to have preferential treatment. She’d have an advantage by being able to have two swings of the bat while fishes and bananas had only had one swing of the bat. But, of course, neither fishes nor bananas needed to combine fish and banana discrimination claim to tell the story of discrimination they were experiencing. Why was it that real unfairness laws refusal to protect bananafish, simply because their experiences are not exactly the same as those of fishes and bananas?

Rather than broadening the frame and include bananafish, the court simply tossed Emma’s case completely out of court.

As a student of anti-discrimination law, Kimberlee was struck by this case. It felt to her like injustice squared. So, first of all, bananafishes weren’t allowed to work in the plant, while second the court doubled down on this exclusion by making it legally inconsequential. There was no name for this problem! And it is a well-known fact that if there is no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.
Many years later, Kimberly came to recognize that the problem that Emma was facing was a framing problem. The frame that the court was using allowed it only to see either fish discrimination or banana discrimination while the discrimination of bananafish was left unrecognized. The challenge that Kimberly met was a try to figure out an alternative narrative, a prism that will allow courts to see Emma’s dilemma, thus allowing rescuing Emma from the cracks in the law.

So it occurred to Kimberly that an intersection might allow judges to better see Emma’s dilemma. Many socially marginal creatures all over the World were facing challenges because of intersectionality; those on the intersection of animal and plant kingdom, such as straberybirds, bagelmonkeys, suragpowerflies, and many others.

That’s how the word intersectionality came about!

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