"Only a feminism that fully integrates the expertise of all women, that does not indulge in a hierarchy of liberation agendas, will be capable of bringing large numbers of women together in long-term alliance. Therefore the theory we need to be developing is that which helps us understand the relationships between our different and multifaceted lives, with all their specific struggles and resources. Rather than build unity through simplification, we must learn to embrace multiple rallying points and understand their inherent interdependence. Such a theory needs to shed the metaphor of "intersections" of oppression and assume a much more organic interpenetration of institutional systems of power. The idea of intersection treats the social categories "woman," "working class," "lesbian," "person of color," and so on as if it were possible to separate someone's womanness from her class position, her “racial" or ethnic position, and so on. But these social categories do not exist anywhere in their "pure" state. Every woman is a woman of some class, some ethnicity, some sexual orientation, some country. The notion that working-class, colonized Women of Color suffer from triple jeopardy has always bothered me, because the implication is that racism and class oppression have no effect on those who are privileged by it. There is no such thing as single jeopardy. The only way to believe that the isms are separable is by ignoring privilege-so that upper-class, heterosexual, European and US white women are thought about only in the context of gender, as if people existed only in the categories in which they are oppressed. Social categories don't intersect like separate geometric planes. Each one is wholly dependent on all the others for its existence. For a liberation theory to be useful, it must address the way systems of oppression and privilege saturate each other, are mutually necessary, have no independent existence."