ABSTRACT
As sociologists attended to racial formation and to the social construction of race, the fluidity of gendered and class-based racial experiences became visible. In this chapter, the author identifies the key concerns and questions in the sociology of race, class, and gender and summarizes key findings and methods. He then turns to a critical discussion of the contributions race, class, and gender have made to development of a human rights paradigm. He then resituates race, class, and gender within a human rights paradigm and explores new questions doing so raises. International intersectionality provides a more complete picture and analysis of human rights, one that ultimately leads to a more complete or "universal" recognition of human rights. Oppression and privilege are systems that operate in tandem with racism, patriarchy, and capitalism, which mutually reinform each other. Understanding how racism, patriarchy, and capitalism are systems of privilege and oppression that operate in tandem is central to intersectionality.
