I recently tuned into a webinar on “Intersectionality in Action: A Conversation with Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw.” My daughter-in-law, a non-native-English speaker, naturally wondered what “intersectionality” meant. As would most native English speakers.

I made a traffic joke. That all I know is stop at red, go at green, proceed with caution at yellow. Also not easily understood. In any language.

For the best definition of Intersectionality, Crenshaw drew from the Oxford Dictionary: “The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise.”

The intersection is often where racists and misogynists blow through red lights. But I think it’s also much more.

As intersectionalists go, I also think back to what a friend told me once of his father, then sheriff in Yonkers, N.Y., helping protect a visiting Paul Robeson, in part from angry construction workers in the days before labor and civil rights advocates understood their common interests.

I also always thought environmentalists and labor organizers should be natural allies … finding compromises to preserve species like rare owls and jobs like lumberjacking.