507 © Te Author(s) 2017 B. Gough (ed.), Te Palgrave Handbook of Critical Social Psychology, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51018-1_25 25 Intersectionality: An Underutilized but Essential Theoretical Framework for Social Psychology Lisa Bowleg Police Brutality in the News: An Introduction to Intersectionality F.B.I. Investigating Police Accounts of Black Woman’s Death in Custody. (Rogers, 2015a) Questions After Unarmed Ohio Man Is Killed in Trafc Stop. (Rogers, 2015b) Jarring Image of Police’s Use of Force at Texas Pool Party. (Cole-Frowe & Fausset, 2015) Texas Police Fatally Shoot Unarmed College Football Player (Te Associated Press, 2015) Tese grim US newspaper headlines—from July and August 2015 alone!— reveal the disturbing frequency of excessive police force against Black people in the USA. Tree common threads link these cases: White male law enforcement ofcers as perpetrators, unarmed Black people as victims, and cell phone or dashboard camera images of the violence. Te focus on Sandra Bland, the woman who died in police custody in Texas (Rogers, 2015a), and the “jarring” image of a White male police ofcer violently tackling a young Black woman in a bathing suit at a pool party in Texas (Cole-Frowe & Fausset, 2015) notwithstanding, the media and policymak- ers have framed excessive police force against Black people primarily as a L. Bowleg (*) Te George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA