Someone told me i was ” dancing around an idea called “Intersectionality” and that i was ignorant. I looked it up and i’m still super confused about what i did. Could you please explain it with examples or something ?
In: 6
People with overlapping marginalized identities often experience discrimination that a person with just one of their marginalized identities wouldn’t. The legal incident that sparked the invention of the idea was a company that would hire Black men and white women, but wouldn’t hire Black women. The courts didn’t originally find them in violation of the law, because they weren’t _technically_ discriminating in race or gender.
More or less, marginalization isn’t a competition, but it can interact in unexpected and poor ways when someone is multiply marginalized in things like class, disability, race, ethnicity, gender, and sex.
Suppose you’re a woman in the early 20th century, and you notice that society is pretty unfair to women. You get a bunch of friends together, and you campaign for things like allowing women to vote and go to university. If you’re exceptionally self-aware, you might notice that you and most of your fellow campaigners aren’t just any women – you’re pretty much all wealthy, educated white women. Why is this?
Well, the poorer women are mostly too busy doing their jobs and looking after their families to worry about whether they can vote, and many of them face problems that you have never dreamed of. For example, there is a whole underclass of women who have run away from their abusive husbands, or who have had children outside marriage, and they pretty much all live in extreme poverty because there are virtually no jobs or financial support available for women who are married or have kids – after all, they’re supposed to get money from their husbands. In fact, you might notice that a lot of your comrades look down on those particularly unfortunate women and blame them for their problems, and actively oppose taking any action to help them.
Those kinds of patterns were very common in earlier feminist movements. They were dominated by wealthy white women, who were often pretty conservative and bigoted themselves, and were largely oblivious to the needs and opinions of other subsets of women. While their campaigns certainly achieved positive change, they arguably failed to focus on the most important problems affecting women. Intersectionality is about recognising and trying to combat this pattern – even within a group that faces oppression, there are still people who have it worse than others, and there is a tendency for them to be ignored or shouted over.
Basically, intersectionality means that being privileged or marginalized isn’t a binary, where you’re absolutely one or the other; you can have privilege in some ways, and yet also be marginalized in others, all at the same time.
Privilege itself can be tricky to notice, as it tends to manifest as an absence of things we never need to deal with or think about because they don’t affect us personally; it’s hard to notice something missing from our experience that was never part of our experience to begin with. Rather than any obvious boons or favors being rendered, the “favor” extended to the privileged is usually just an *exemption* from particular hardships the marginalized suffer simply *because* they happen to belong to a marginalized demographic.
If you can agree that, say, Black people generally have a harder time of things because of how others have treated them on the basis of their appearance, and that white people are generally exempt from that type of pervasive hardship, you’ve just agreed that privilege is real. It doesn’t mean white people have no hardships at all; it just means that particular kind of hardship isn’t among them.
Now extend that to other kinds of privilege and marginalization — e.g., men over women, straight over queer, rich over poor, attractive over homely, cis over trans, able over disabled, etc. — and you can see how any individual might have the privileged end in some of those ways and the marginalized end in others, and thereby might overlook their privilege in the ways they have it and/or overestimate the extent of their marginalization compared to others.
Privilege isn’t anything to be ashamed of, just something to be *aware* of, and intersectionality is one more way to get savvier about recognizing it and understanding how it works.
Hey my dude. I saw your comment on r/feminism and I’d like to give you props for actually being mature enough to entertain the idea that you might be wrong/not know a topic and for doing some research to explore something you are unsure about.
Truly nice to see!:)
Latest Answers