The connection between Lorde and Crenshaw comes from their shared belief that positive change will not happen in our society until we are able to look at our discrimination issues as a whole and not as individual issues. Lorde spent her entire life focusing on this issue that Crenshaw was able to term as Intersectionality.  Both women focused their  studies on the experiences of the "Black Woman". 

INTERSECTIONALITY

​​Audrey Lorde believed there were differences between race, age and sex and that by accepting the differences, you can have a deeper understanding of others. She critiqued the feminists movement because she believed that White women were only interested in the issues that affected women in general, but failed to acknowledge the additional challenges of the Black woman. Lorde says "it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes"(Sister Outisder "Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,"  Pg. 114). She believed that majority of the time, the responsibility of educating on wrongdoings is left to those who are oppressed. She also mentions that in order for change to actually happen,the oppressors will need to take responsibility and educate themselves to determine what their own issues are. In the essay "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" Lorde states "When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are “creating a mood of hopelessness,” “preventing white women from getting past guilt,” or “standing in the way of trusting communication and action.” (Sister Outsider, 129) The intersectionality in this statement is that women should not speak about their anger towards racism, but Black women are judged more harshly for speaking out. 

During an interview with Sara Hayet a student from Lafayette College, Kimberlé Crenshaw describes intersectionality as "the idea that we experience life...on a number of different identities that we have" (Hayet and Crenshaw, 2015). Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" based on a case involving black women who were discriminated based on the fact that they were Black and women. Crenshaw believes that focusing on a single issue of discrimination is what causes Black women to be overlooked. She talks about the tendency to look at experiences and focus on those who are privileged in each category, which leaves those who are dealing with more than one situation are not understood. She argues that Black women are left out of feminist theories because their experiences do not compare with those of White women. In an article from The University of Chicago Legal Forum  she states "any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated" (Crenshaw, 1989). In Mapping the Margins, Crenshaw discusses how intersectionality and politics are key factors in violence against women of color. She states "Among the most troubling political consequences of the failure of antiracist and feminist discourses to address the intersections of racism and patriarchy is the fact that, to the extent they forward the interest of people of color and "women," respectively, one analysis often implicitly denies the validity of the other" (Crenshaw, 1994). This leads back to the discussion of how feminism fails to recognize racism as a cohesive issues and instead ignores it as a problem for Black women to deal with on their own.