Black feminist theory contends that black women have an acute understanding of the negative impacts of sexism, racism, and class discrimination. Furthermore, race, gender, and class discrimination are all aspects of the same system of hierarchy, namely the "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy". Due to their inter-dependency, they combine to create something more than experiencing racism and sexism independently. The experience of being a black woman, then, cannot be grasped in terms of being black or of being a woman but must be illuminated via intersectionality, a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe that each identity—being black and being female—should be considered independently, but also for their interaction effect, while understanding that intersecting identities deepen and reinforce one another, and potentially lead to aggravated forms of inequality.