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 ?
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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.
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