In 2009 and 2011, ABC aired two special episodes of 20/20 that told the stories of children and young adults living in poverty in two different parts of the United States. Children of the Mountains (2009) follows youth in Central Appalachia, while Children of the Plains (2011) follows youth that live on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although both groups face immense obstacles to overcome poverty, the children living on the Pine Ridge Reservation may have a particularly difficult time improving their situation because of several overlapping social identity markers that cause them to face discrimination.

This activity asks participants to analyze these two specials using Sisneros et al.’s (2008) web of oppression and the concept of intersectionality and consider how identity contributes to discrimination and disadvantage. According to the Oxford Dictionary, intersectionality is “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 term was first coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor and social theorist, in her paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: The Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”