Intersectionality

The essentialization of the identity of the other is perhaps one of the most instrumental maneuvers in the enterprise of racial imperialism. Only by first constraining the being of the other to a singular paradigm (race, gender, class, or sexuality) can one have any hope of diminishing the complexity of their experience and achieving their thingification. Resistance movements and projects of social justice themselves fall victim to this manner of conceptualizing locations of social identity as compartmentalized, untethered, and categorized from least to most essential in the being of the other. Sadiya Hartman, for example, writes about the experiences of black, female laborers completely subsumed under the hetero-centric narrative of the black proletariat through which the slave has been represented such that the paradigms of gender and sexuality that produced distinct forms of violence are completely missing in the works of W.E.B Dubois written in the black radical tradition. So long as resistance movements operate on the monolithic understandings of social identity and privilege certain paradigms of identity over others (such as race over gender), there will remain an inability for said resistance movements to fully account for the distinct experiences of the people they seek to represent. Without intersectionalism, resistance movements create a fundamental disconnect between the collective identity they seek to cultivate and the experiences of the members to whom that identity is ascribed such that the experiences that correspond to said identity are not at all the only ones (if they are at all) that members live through. In other words, as long as racism, sexism, and classism intersect in people’s lives but not in the anti-racist and feminist projects that seek to represent those people, enterprises of social justice will reproduce the silencing of marginalized voices by creating discord between identity and experience. This essay will highlight the pitfalls of social justice movements created by the absence of an intersectional approach and highlight how said approach can correct them by bridging the gap between identity and experience in the context of what Kimberly Crenshaw calls political intersectionality.

As Crenshaw has argued, individuals belonging to multiple disenfranchised groups, such as women of color, end up having to divide their political energies to distinct and often conflicting agendas. One such conflict is that between minority communities and feminist movements with the former claiming that feminism imports white concerns into minority communities and may even seek to accentuate stereotypes about violence in minority communities. The intersectional experiences of white women and black men define the strategies of resistance and articulations of identity that mainstream movements of social justice offer. As Crenshaw argues, it is not that said discourses and strategies fail to acknowledge “additional” burdens, such as that of patriarchy atop racism, but rather that they cannot fully acknowledge the complete scope of the burden and as such dominant conceptions of anti-racism and anti-sexism are limited even in their own terms. The highly critical reaction to the portrayal of the character Celie in Walker’s The Color Purple which depicted gendered violence in the black community exemplifies how fuller narratives of racial and gendered experiences are sorely lacking in the mainstream. This highlights one pitfall created by the lack of an intersectionalism approach that would understand identity not in terms of compartmentalized social locations but intersecting social locations that create distinct experiences that need to be correlated to distinct identities and thus distinct resistance strategies.

Taking this point further to demonstrate another pitfall is bell hooks who states that when the women’s movement raised the concern of sexist oppression, black women felt it their duty to concede that sexism was insignificant in light of the challenges of racism and thus clung to the hope that the end of racism would spell the end of all other problems as well. Here we see what Crenshaw describes as the reconfiguration of gender domination as a consequence of the racial oppression of men and is thus once again a silencing of marginalized voices. As Crenshaw argues, to see the problem of domestic violence as a consequence of the power differential between white and black men, re-enforces the socially damaging notions of male dominance and male agency legitimized by a gendered monopoly over violence.

The pitfalls elaborated upon thus far highlight how divorcing identity from experience condemns individuals from intersectional backgrounds who live intersectional experiences to rely on non-intersectional approaches to social reform that will ultimately force them to divide their political energies and have their voices silenced.