Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw (who laid out the theory of INTERSECTIONALITY in the 80's) writes that you can find an anti-racist practice and a feminist practice, but you hardly ever find them in action together. Anti-racist and feminist politics created constituencies by imagining and acting for an essential “type,” the dominant image of a raced person being a man and a gendered person being White.
When the primary subjects of anti-racist politics are men, and those of feminism are White women, the particular needs of women of color to be free from both racism and sexism are ignored at best and compounded at worst, often with life and death consequences. As a result, anti-discrimination law brings relief to only some victims. When we’re trying to get relief for women experiencing, say, police violence, the remedies are weak because they’ve all been designed with someone else in mind.
In domestic violence policy and practice, for example, second-wave feminists insisted that violence affects all women equally, to prevent domestic abuse from being dismissed as a minority problem. “All women” were actually White, middle class women; policies created to address domestic violence assumed access to services that poor women of color did not have. Some battered women’s shelters required residents to participate in group therapy sessions, but monolingual Spanish-speaking immigrant women could not comply. The 1986 Marriage Fraud Amendment required immigrants to be married for two full years before applying for permanent residency. That rule created a barrier to reporting abuse and accessing resources – caught between the threat of violence and the threat of deportation, many immigrant women chose the violence. These policies and practices were created without an intersectional analysis.
Crenshaw’s recent work in starting the #SayHerName campaign expresses her critique of anti-racist strategy that isn’t also feminist. The campaign elevates the stories of women killed by police and seeks recourse in their cases, which receive far less attention than the killings of men. Andrea Ritchie’s book Invisible No More tells dozens of stories of Black women and other women of color being raped, beaten and killed by police. She names, among many others, Sandra Anton, Rosann Miller, and Alecia Thomas, whose situations mirrored those of Rodney King, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, but whose names are unknown to most people. A truly intersectional analysis would identify the mechanisms that enable abuse and target those for change. Considering the intersection of race, gender and disability, for example, Ritchie calls for policies that do not involve police in addressing mental health breakdowns, but rely instead on community-based crisis interventions.
This methodology will inherently deconstruct sexist/racist hierarchies that presume that only "professionals" (ie white academics) can solve the problems of a community. When in fact, nobody knows better than the community how to help the community. You can't give power - that's an assumption rooted in privilege - but you can actively dismantle systems of institutionalized sexism and racism that prevent people from embodying the power they already have. How this begins in real time is by actively listening, which sounds easy but is extremely specialized and rare, as it requires a humility that few can truly practice.
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To be intersectional (and also effective), then, we have to consider how a problem plays out differently for different people, raising the likelihood that we will come up with remedies that actually solve the problem for all.
The qualities and skills that matter most for intersectional leadership are curiosity, listening, openness and creativity. By asking questions, we can look at a problem not just through the lens of our own experience, but also those of others whose identities might make them vulnerable to harm. Find out who is experiencing the problem you want to solve, seek them out (or respond when they seek you out), listen to them deeply, share your truth and apply that new understanding to your strategy. The standard isn’t how intersectional is your identity, but how intersectional is your analysis. Regardless of identity, the analytic tools are always available to help us work with each other to solve problems for everyone.
RINKU SEN
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