Who was Emma DeGraffenreid?
Group of answer choices
An early Civil Rights leader, contemporary with Sojourner Truth.
None of the options.
Author of the first text of intersectional feminism.
A Freedom Rider.
A critic of Dr. ?King’s activism.
A Black woman who unsuccessfully sued a car manufacturer for racism and sexism.
The Correct Answer and Explanation is :
The correct answer is:
A Black woman who unsuccessfully sued a car manufacturer for racism and sexism.
Explanation:
Emma DeGraffenreid was an important figure in the history of legal battles surrounding racism and sexism, specifically within the context of employment discrimination. In 1976, she became widely known for her involvement in a landmark legal case against the General Motors (GM) corporation. DeGraffenreid, a Black woman, sued GM, claiming that the company’s hiring practices discriminated against her both because of her race and her gender. She argued that GM’s hiring practices were racially discriminatory because they only hired Black women for the lowest-paying jobs, and were also sexist because they limited their hiring of Black women in higher-paying, skilled positions.
Her case, known as DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, became an important example of the difficulties of proving discrimination in cases where both race and gender intersected. The court, however, dismissed her case, ruling that GM’s policies could not be seen as discriminatory in a way that violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court essentially ignored the idea that Black women could face a unique form of discrimination based on both their race and gender, which would later become a crucial point of analysis in the development of intersectional theory.
Though DeGraffenreid lost her case, her struggle highlighted the inadequacies of the legal system in addressing intersectional discrimination and laid the groundwork for later legal and academic discussions around how race and gender discrimination can combine to create specific forms of inequality. Emma DeGraffenreid’s case is a pivotal moment in understanding how systemic racism and sexism intersect, and it influenced future work in both civil rights law and feminist theory.