This is the third monthly installment of the DEI 101 series1, where I pick a concept or term that tends to be misunderstood or misapplied, in an effort to build the acumen that helps us in any of our workplaces —on campuses or in other organizations —support meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Last month’s was diverse, and before that, equity. What topics would you like to see for future DEI 101 posts? Send them to me at MeghanB@gmail.com, or submit your anonymous questions in relation to this or any relevant content here!
This month’s term is “intersectionality,” or “intersectional.”
I confess I’m holding myself back here, as I taught an entire 300-level course on Intersectionality in Fall 2019 (incidentally, my last full-time semester in the classroom —the pandemic and then my former university’s dismantling of tenure would come in the months that followed, and my exit from academia soon after). Even then, there was buzz around the term in activist and academic circles. The murder of George Floyd and the racial uprisings in the summer of 2020 further elevated this term into the mainstream, as folks in a variety of spaces began to grapple with the realities of racism in new ways, and found their way to terms like “intersectionality” for the first time.
This is a good thing! But it also means that, lacking expertise, some have misapplied the concept, in instances like :
“As an intersectional woman, Kendra has faced an uphill battle in the workplace….”
“Because of intersectionality, my whiteness is offset by my identity as a woman….”
In both cases, “intersectionality” is misapplied as an individual characteristic (or some kind of “oppression score” for individuals where every disadvantage is a -1 and every privilege is a +1, somehow ranking our lived experiences in a bizarre kind of Oppression Olympics) rather than a reflection of the reality that our lives are shaped by multiple and interlocking social hierarchies of power and privilege. In short, intersectionality is about systems, not the identities that are shaped by them.
It also helps us understand how those same systems shape one another so that the experiences, say, of immigrant women is not merely the sum of women’s experiences plus the experiences of immigrants (both concepts void of the diversity actually present within them), but rather takes a specific form where the marginalization of immigrants depends on sexism (e.g., feminized care work), and the sexism that they experience also depends on their non-citizen status (e.g., sexual assault in detention practices). Sexism is not just sexism in this scenario —it is supercharged by oppression in our immigration system, and vice versa.
It’s also highly dependent on the specific institutional contexts where it is playing out —on a campus, in a workplace, etc. So it’s not just “the racism” {gestures vaguely at the world out there} that interacts with “capitalism” (broadly), but rather the specific ways that racism and our social class system play out in, say, your local public school system to make some parents’ demands carry greater weight than others’, and the impact this has on the educational disparities that might not otherwise be so exacerbated by those practices. In this way, it also means that “intersectionality” is something that applies to all of us, as it’s simply a way to name the interacting and mutually-reinforcing nature of multiple systems of power and privilege.
When legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in the early 1990s, she was highlighting how very specific social and political forces converged to shape women of color’s experiences with violence in concrete contexts —this also allows us to diagnose the tangible problems in those systems in order to create more equitable outcomes, which is the crux of all good DEI work.
So what is the best way to make use of this term / concept in the institutions where we spend our time and hope to make a positive impact? Fundamentally, like with the term “diverse,” it should not be used as an adjective —there are no “intersectional” individuals or even populations. But if we use it as an analytical tool, one that teaches us to understand a complex web of political, ideological, and social hierarchies and how they shape the lived experiences of communities inside of a given institution, it is our best lens to diagnose and intervene to try to close the gap between our ideals and realities. It will get us closer to interventions that actually support those whose challenges are better understood through this paradigm.
For the comments, where have you seen this concept best applied, or the consequences of its misapplication, in the places where you spend your time? It’s also worth noting how this concept is inherently theoretical —how can we help to make its value concrete in the places where we live and work?
As always, the perspectives shared in this newsletter are my own, and do not reflect those of my current or any previous employers.