Six Thoughts on Intersectionality

In search of the particular; in search of the specific; in search of the fullness of human experience.

Hello,

In issue #50, What is in the 1619 Project Anway?, I reference the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, law profesor at Columbia and the University of California Los Angeles. In particular, I referenced “intersectionality.” As I’ve introduced feminist international relations theory to my students, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the similarities of the two. So, this is what I’ve been curious about lately.

This is Six Thoughts.
~Intersectionality

#1 - It’s Definition; or, What Is It?
In a recent issue of TIME, Kimberlé Crenshaw was asked how she understands the term she coined 30 years ago today. I think her answer is illustrative, interesting, and important.

“These days, I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.” - Crenshaw

#2 - It’s Supposed Origins
Discrimination, oppression, repression, erasures, and indignities based on personal, whether immutable, social, or cultural characteristics, have been with us since Homo sapiens have been around; and most likely before we were Homo sapiens, too. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, in a easy-to-read and easy-to-comprehend University of Chicago Legal Forum law article, introduces “intersectionality” to describe a phenomena that was not being captured, understood, or explicitly considered: the discrimination of black women qua black women. That is: black women being discriminated because they were both black and female. These characterisitics intersect and become, as Crenshaw articulated above, emergent or something more than its parts. Here is her own words (emphasis mine):

“I will center Black women in this analysis in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women's experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences. Not only will this juxtaposition reveal how Black women are theoretically erased, it will also illustrate how this framework imports its own theoretical limitations that undermine efforts to broaden feminist and antiracist analyses. With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. I want to suggest further that this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group. In other words, in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women.”

Some people are black women. Black women can be discriminated in different, unique ways than black men or white, or non-black, women, for example. That’s it. In the paper, Crenshaw examined three court cases with black women plaintiffs that exhibited this under acknowledged or even blatantly ignored problem. And Crenshaw only means to use black women as an example as “a starting point.” Scholars since have highlighted both the discriminations but also the different types of benefits that our multidimensional identities that we create and that are placed on us allow for.

#3 - Why is it Badly Misunderstood?
There are three categories that fit here: (1) ignorance, (2) malice, (3) mixture. Most people walking around who might have heard of this term almost certainly don’t understand it’s origins, or it’s—until recently—mostly academic and legal existence. Or, that is is simply one tool/lens to help create a more nuanced, thoughtful, and truthful conversation regarding people’s shared life experiences. Rightwing pundits, politicians, and authors have co-opted the term to throw as an epithet (kind of like “You’re a communist!”) of derision against people who they don’t like. Oh, you see the world intersectionally. Look out. Load your guns. Hide your pocket books. Or…something? And the biggest failure here is that it’s presumed to be a term that erases nuance when it is literally the opposite.

Back to the categories of wrongness. I will use one example to highlight ignorance bordering on malice. But for this exercise, let’s assume earnest misapprehension. Take this piece from Karen Lehrman, from JewishJournal.com with a horrendous subtitle “The New Caste System.” Lehrman defines intersectionality as “whereby a person’s power and privilege are determined by the amount of melanin in their skin.” There is no determinism in intersectionality; there is simply specific, individualized lives, that scale to categories of people, due to share lived experiences.

Then there is malice. Similar to how Frank Bruni excellently showcases in his article “Republicans Have Found Their Cruel New Culture War,” that transgender rights has become a political cudgle of reactionary, rightwing Republicans, the same way that gay and lesbian rights were used in the 1990s. Many people simply do not want to examine anything that makes them uncomfortable. And reactionaries are obsessed with how other people live out their personal lives, but never there own. “Intersectional” is used as a cudgel to say “those people who use that term are not ‘us’.”

Malice coupled with apathy and laziness is a hell of a combination. Who better to illustrate malice, apathy, and laziness than Ben Shaprio? There are countless examples; but, here, Shapiro uses the very definition of “intersectionality”—"you probably think you’re an individual with unique experiences, thoughts, and amitions, but, according to current leftwing orthodoxy, you’re wrong”—to create a straw man to pretend like intersectionality is the exact opposite of what it actually is. Then he engages in some weird ranking of oppressions; bastardizes Crenshaw some more by stating the very definition of intersectionality is that “we aren’t individuals who are to be judged on the basis of how we act.” The whole exercise is grotesque. And, of course, he aims to salve “white men,” the target audience for the video.

I do not have an example of the “toxic mix” category, but most people exist in a space of earnestness plus motivated reasoning; that’s kind of how our brain works: more like a trial lawyer than a scientist or engineer.

Let’s wash this Shapiro taste out of our mouths. Quickly. There is wisdom in intersectionality and it can be applied everywhere. Which brings me to my next point.

#4 - A Small Example of How It Can Help Nuance “Policing in America.”
Check out this short, three minute clip, from Real Time w/ Bill Maher. Rosa Brooks, who I know as the brilliant writer of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (2016) has a new book out called Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City (2021). Brooks gives some insight here that immediately made me think of intersectionality, strange as that might sound.

Rosa Brooks point out how undertrained in fire arms police are. Then, she goes on to talk about how suicide is the most common cause of death for police officers. And this quote is striking:

“We ask cops to be social workers, and medics, and warriors, and mediators. And any one of those jobs is really hard. And most people can’t do any one of those jobs very well. If you ask some 25 year old to do all of them in the same 10 hour shift, they’re going to do them really badly. And suicide kills more cops every year than any other cause combined. …[cops] are working in a system that even if you are a good cop, you are going to screw people’s lives up.”

It’s that last sentence that matters. Cops face a different social reality than almost any other group in the country. Therefore, an intersectional lens would assist us in better understanding them. Moreover, a structural lens that examines just how policing and the criminal justice system works, would allow us to really understand how individual cops are incentivized to do what they do. I think any discussion of cops that doesn’t examine the structure they are within, is doing a disservice. And leftwing politics has most of the conceptual tools needed to do so. If police are to be understood, it will be the leftwing that helps paints the complete picture.

#5 - Feminist International Relations Theory Builds on Intersectional Insights.
A seminal read for all international relations scholars, in my opinion, is Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1990). It’s intersectional without using the word. (The author, Enloe, similar to Crenshaw, also capitalizes Black before many authors decided to.)

Cynthia Enloe makes visible the contributions of women in the global political economy. Not just at the elite level (though her coverage of “diplomatic wives” is powerful), but at the every day level. She is particularly convincing on (1) how sexual politics have been socially constructed; (2) and how gender makes the world go around. A political economy that priorities a particular type of masculine and militarized world order means that we don’t often hear about the dislocation, informal economies, and prostitution that keeps it all running. Have you ever heard of the Campaign Against Military Prostitution? Are you aware of “the monkey house” or the “state-controlled prostitution industry that was blessed at the highest levels by the U.S. military,” that existed in South Korea from 1954 to (at least) the early 1990s. Ask yourself, why not? What experiences do we privilege? And, why might that be so? What I bet you have heard of is American Sniper. Are the experiences that we are aware of, gendered, perhaps?

While reading Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, Enloe really gets you to see the importance of the particular and the specific. A Filipino women who is the chambermaid of a English tourist sees the world, and experiences the world, differently. What these women do share in common though is living in a patiarachal political economy. Gender—like race— is absolutely crucial in understanding the global political economy. And any analysis that excludes them as a variable isn’t being “race or gender blind.” It is being blind regarding those very important social realities.

#6 - Conclusing Thoughts: What are your motivations? What is your level of curiosity? Time for self-reflection: if you have read about intersectionality, but haven’t read the original contribution, ask yourself why? I don’t know how many people throw around “Marxist” as an epithet but haven’t read The Communist Manifesto, Capital: Vol. 1, or any other Marxist tract, but I would bet that it’s nearly, well everyone. Before this reads as haughty; I must include this: People have this tendency. All of us. We are all guilty of this. I am guilty of shallow banter just as often as the next guy. Though, I try to limit this banter when I’m aware of it. Scholars, too. We are often given excerpts of stuff, in textbooks, for example, but we aren’t assigned The Wealth of Nations. We criticize libertarian economics but rarely read Fredrich Hayek, Schumpeter, or Mises. Same goes for liberals: we love John Maynard Keynes but haven’t gone back to read the boring General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

This situation goes for topics, too. I was talking with my students about how as an international relations grad student, I had to read thousands of pages but maybe only dozens on “US-Africa,” excluding the Middle East and North Africa region. Dozens! So, if one wanted to specialize they were starting from scratch, unless they had personal experience before grad school. It is hard to even begin understanding anything that matters. But it’s always amazing how easily terms get thrown around in the mainstream, public debate, with reckless abandon.

But, just because we are all guilty doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t state this. It might even mean that we should state it outloud even more. I think one big reason we carelessly discuss stuff without proper context is political hobbyism—but this is not the newsletter to flesh that out.

~
Think intersectionally,
Patrick M. Foran