Intersectionality Intersectionality is the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. — submission from the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, NARF project, May 2021 – April 2022 Across consultations and submissions, an intersectional approach was raised by participants as an overarching imperative for a national anti-racism framework, with practical importance that reaches across personal, social, cultural, economic, and political terrains. As described in the previous section, intersectionality was identified by the Commission as a guiding principle of an anti-racism framework. Intersectionality is ‘the multiple social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimised.’1 An intersectional framework acknowledges that multiple social categories, such as race, sexuality, class, gender, and disability, combine to create distinct experiences and identities that are lived and perceived in ways that cannot be reduced to any one category, such as that of ‘race’. Race is only one of many forces that inform lived experience. At the heart of intersectionality is an emphasis on specificity. While social categories can be useful tools and are used by the Commission in this report, intersectionality recognises that there is no single way a person exists in the world, nor is there a single mechanism through which inequalities are produced at institutional and systemic levels. Rather, these intersections are themselves the result of systemic, structural, and institutionalised patterns of power and privilege. Racism plays out in different ways for different cohorts in society, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. — community consultation participant, NARF project, May 2021 – April 2022 In this way, intersectionality is a crucial touchstone for the themes identified in this Report. Just as consultations and submissions captured feedback from specific perspectives, each theme in this Report will affect people and communities in specific ways. Accordingly, this consideration of intersectionality includes greater detail than the following thematic sections to reflect the importance of taking an intersectional approach to anti-racism. Intersectionality is central to guiding the Commission, both as it reports the thematic findings, and as it develops a process solution to progress implementation of a national approach to anti-racism. National Anti-Racism Framework Scoping Report 2022 | 60