The term was coined by Dr. Deborah K. King in her 1988 essay, "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology" to account for the limitations of the double or triple jeopardy models of discrimination, which assert that every unique prejudice has an individual effect on one's status, and that the discrimination one experiences is the additive result of all of these prejudices.
Deborah K. King likens this model to a mathematical equation: "racism plus sexism plus classism equals triple jeopardy".
[5] Under intersectionality, each identity is understood to interact with others to create a distinct experience of discrimination, but it does not necessarily assume a multiplicative effect.
[6] Multiple jeopardy can be thought of as standing at the intersection where a car accident occurred, causing an amplified sense of trauma due to the compounded nature of the collisions.
Additive models can obscure the unique, compounded forms of discrimination faced by those with intersecting marginalized identities, often reducing these experiences to individual components that fail to capture the full context of oppression.
For instance, in an additive framework, a Black woman’s experiences of racism and sexism might be treated as separate issues, ignoring how these forms of bias combine to produce a distinct type of discrimination that cannot be dissected into parts.
By acknowledging the compounded effects of intersecting identities, multiplicative models reveal that marginalized groups may need targeted strategies to address the challenges they face.
For Black women specifically, this awareness helps them recognize how race, gender, and other social hierarchies could interact uniquely in their lives.
Unlike individuals experiencing discrimination based on a single identity, Black women, and others facing intersecting oppressions, develop a nuanced understanding of how systems of power could interlock and reinforce one another.
Both of them argue that focusing on a single aspects of identity, such as merely the factor of gender or only race, is insufficient for understanding the entire scope of discrimination.
[11] Crenshaw goes on to emphasize how the intersection between identities creates inherently distinct experiences, particularly in the contexts of law, policy, and social justice.
Dr. Deborah K. King, inspired by the works of bell hooks, sought to avoid this when she coined the term multiple jeopardy.
By recognizing the multiple consequences of homophobia and heterosexism for lesbians and gay men, King's multi-jeopardy theory provides a deeper comprehension of the matrix of domination.
[15] This term, used by Patricia Hill Collins, refers to how each prejudice intersects and overlaps to form an inseparable link, creating an interlocking system of oppression.
[18] This data supports the multiple jeopardy theory, which suggests that intersecting identities may correlate with increased experiences of discrimination.