Sociology Plus
Double Burden Definition
Double burden is a term used to indicate the oppression experienced by black women as a result of both sexism and racism. It captures the fact that black women occupy a distinctive social position at the intersection of two systems of disadvantage: they face the gender inequalities directed at all women, and simultaneously the racial discrimination directed at all black people, so that their experience cannot be reduced to either form of oppression taken alone.
Compounding Disadvantage
The value of the concept lies in its insistence that these oppressions do not simply sit side by side but compound one another. In employment, for example, black women have historically been concentrated in the lowest-paid and least secure work — disadvantaged relative to black men by gender and relative to white women by race. Analyses in this tradition have sometimes extended the idea to a “triple burden” by adding class disadvantage to the picture, recognizing that most black women have also been workers in low-reward positions within the labor market.
Related Concepts
The double burden belongs to a family of concepts developed largely within black feminist thought to name the layered character of black women’s oppression. It anticipates the influential idea of intersectionality, which argues that race, gender, and class must be analyzed as interlocking systems rather than separate variables, since the experience produced at their intersection is qualitatively distinct. The term also highlights a long-standing criticism made by black feminists of both mainstream feminism and anti-racist politics: that the former has tended to generalize from the experience of white women, while the latter has tended to generalize from the experience of black men, leaving black women’s specific situation — the double burden itself — invisible to both.