In case you haven’t been aware, this is International Blog Against Racism Week. It is, in fact, the fourth annual such week. A bunch of our posts this week have been tagged ibarw, but I did want to provide a pointer to the community where there is a massive collection of links from dozens, maybe hundreds, of bloggers taking part. As I say every year, we always blog against racism on the ABW but I still like to take part in ibarw. This time around I decided to tackle an issue I have not specifically written a post about.
Lately I’ve been thinking about intersectionality a great deal. In terms of my own work as an activist against racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression and in how I would like to see the anti-oppression structures and organizations around me behave. Recently I had a big intersectionality fail which set the gears in my head turning. The more I contemplate it, the more I feel as though I want to center my activism around this concept. Well, moreso than I am doing at present.
For those of you unaware, Intersectionality is a theory which “holds that the classical models of oppression within society, such as those based on race/ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, class, species or disability do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate creating a system of oppression that reflects the “intersection” of multiple forms of discrimination.”1 You’ve seen us talk about it a lot as concerns feminism, and how mainstream feminists relate (or don’t relate) to women of color. How the issues that we face as people of color, as people of color from various cultural, ethnic and national backgrounds, AND as women are different to the ones faced by white women. They are related, but not always the same. We cannot divorce our gender from our race/ethnicity.2
As an antiracist activist I like to think that I am less prone to fail when it comes to issues of race and ethnicity, but as recent events have shown, I am not completely devoid of it. I hope that my experiences have helped me in that I can admit it when I fail and apologize and do better, but obviously not failing at all is the goal. I don’t often recognize what I’m on about in instances like that because I enter territory where the oppression is not about me, it’s about someone else. I can understand on one level and still not Get It on a deeper level.
This is why intersectionality is important — so that we can all strive to Get It on every level.
Striving for better understanding of intersectionality will help eliminate instances of Oppression Olympics — folks going on and on about who has it harder or better in this or that area is not going to solve the core issues. Focusing on just one oppression without considering how it intersects with others is alienating and often results in a lack of real progress.
This is true on the big picture level and all the way down to individuals. It’s even harder for some people to grasp that the resolution to one group’s problems may not lead to the resolution for everyone’s.
When groups or individuals fail at intersectionality it can often lead to people who should be working together instead feeling resentful or hostile toward one another (see again: feminism and WOC). It gets particularly messed up when people who work against one aspect of prejudice engage in prejudicial or oppressive behavior themselves then get upset when folks call them on their problematic behavior.
A recent example: A few months ago during a coda to RaceFail (called MammothFail), a series of events led a POC that goes by the handle neo_prodigy3 to call for a day of creativity featuring fans and writers of color. He created a LiveJournal community called Fen of Color United, hilariously shortened to foc_u. A lot of people were excited and jumped on board and loved the idea (because it was a good one).
Then (white) blogger Nick Mamatas pointed out that neo_prodigy had been involved in a heated debate a few years ago with Nick’s then girlfriend and, in that debate, neo himself had called the girlfriend a bitch and used other gendered or otherwise prejudicial slurs against her and her friends. Then neo’s female best friend, alundra0014, came along to call her a cunt, and neo had no problem with that at all. He encouraged alundra’s going after her.5 Nick pointed out that this was the guy in charge of our new “safe space”, as neo had advertised foc_u.
Many people were Not Pleased. When commenters and members of foc_u attempted to bring this up on the group and get clarification or explanation or even some kind of “that was wrong of me”, the comments were, as I understand it, often deleted or ignored. I participated in the foc_u day of creativity and had joined the community, but after it became clear that neo was not going to address the issue in any real way (see: evasion, blaming everyone else, strawmen, you name it6 ), I left.
I got the impression that neo_prodigy felt he shouldn’t have been called out on his past actions or that they did not matter in the context of the work he was doing with foc_u. They do matter, though, because the membership of the community (both that specific one and the wider SF/fan one) is made up of women as well as men. And the language he used and condoned and encouraged is not beneficial to, is offensive to, and is actively worked against by most of those women.
This is the biggest evil of Intersectionality Fail: not recognizing that your activism, useful and wonderful though it may be, does not give you a pass on other problematic behavior. No matter if that behavior is active, such as the above, or passive, as when the concerns of one group are simply ignored or not considered. People aren’t going to ignore your sexism just because you work against racism. People are not going to ignore your racism because you campaigned for marriage equality. No one is going to allow you to oppress others just because you’re oppressed yourself.
This issue is not limited to sex and race, it applies to all oppressions, marginalizations, prejudices, discriminations.
As activists, as people who wish to eliminate -isms, I think it’s imperative to get a better grasp on intersectionality and incorporate it into the work we do and the words we speak. I feel that marginalized groups have a better than average chance of making this work because we already know what it means to be casually dismissed or slurred against or even to have to suffer cluelessness. We just have to be willing to admit it when we don’t get it right and learn from that. I hope it then makes it easier to deal with when someone says “You’re engaging in these activities/this speech and it’s offensive/hurtful/wrong.” Even if they say it in anger or with the wrong “tone”.
Intersectionality doesn’t have to be about reactions to mistakes or fail, though. It’s also about taking in on yourself to learn, to form better bonds, to understand, to change yourself the way you’ve asked others to change. I’m working on it, and it’s hard. But I won’t stop, it’s too important.
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Footnotes
- that would be from Wikipedia, yes.
- Recent example of this very discussion right here.
- neo_prodigy publishses under the name Dennis R. Upkins, which I assume is his real name.
- It’s been postulated that alundra is actually just neo’s sockpuppet. This seems likely since she seems to exist solely to ego boost, back up, and attack people for neo. Specifically to say things he can’t/shouldn’t say — like calling a woman a cunt; because it’s completely acceptable for another woman to do so. Tip: it is not.
- You can no longer see the original posts where this went down because they are locked/private, but you can see Nick’s post and the explanations in the comments. Having seen neo’s original posts myself, I can say that the descriptions are accurate.
- After he made a public post on foc_u about it in May I messaged him privately about my concerns. He body-swerved the issue by claiming I was only against him because I know the people involved and insisted that everyone else had “moved on.” Note: they had not. He then sent possible-sockpuppet alundra to taunt me a second time, telling me I was “doing feminism wrong”.
Super smart post. Seriously.
I am glad that you raised intersectionality, because I realized recently that while it is taken as a given among most people actually interested in thinking about and discussing forms of bias and privilege, it is still very much resisted by other people.
For example, I was discussing the “birther” controversy with a Republican who is not a birther, but who was claiming that there existed some folks who actually would be satisfied if Obama would just pull out his “real” birth certificate rather than the Certification of Live Birth. I noted that the first modern president for whom anyone has even asked to see some proof of his birth place is also our first black president. The R with whom I was discussing this got very offended by the implication that there was any touch of racial bias in the birther movement, but when pressed, agreed that the movement was essentially a xenophobic and perhaps religiously biased one as well.
The R maintained that if Obama’s biography were exactly the same, with the only difference being that his father was a *white* guy from Africa, precisely the same concerns would have arisen simply because people were reacting to Obama’s foreign background (father from Kenya, spent 6 of his formative years in Indonesia). I asked if he would make that claim if the father had been from Europe and the formative years spent attending a Roman Catholic school in Vatican City. He said no, because Africa and Indonesia are “more foreign” than Europe, and Islam “more foreign” than Catholicism.
These assertions, the R treated as a good argument as to why there was no racism to being a birther; some individuals birthers might have racist sentiment, but racism wasn’t necessary to being a birther. And since Republicans have accepted that racism is bad, but then spent the rest of their lives declaring that almost nothing can be attributed to racism, he saw it as an unfair slur on birthers to suggest racial bias, but perfectly OK to state that they were motivated by xenophobia and religious bigotry.
To someone who thinks in terms of intersectionality, this is just fundamentally ridiculous, because xenophobia, religious bigotry and racism stem from the same psychological impulse of different is bad, and their manifestations cannot be clearly sorted into separate bins.
I got called “dot head” by some classmates when I was growing up. I didn’t realize until much later that this actually was a very common slur against Hindus in other parts of North America — and I don’t think the kids who called me that knew it either. They were just seizing on something that marked me as different from any other kid in the class. Is the fact that the “dot” is specifically worn only by Hindus a sign that these kids were definitely bigoted against Hindus? I don’t think so, because I don’t think those kids could have told you anything about Hinduism. They just came up with an insult based on what was different about me. Was it xenophobia? racism? I suppose that would require a control child who was Hindu and brown but whose family had been in America for generations, and one who was both Hindu and from India but white-skinned, to try to distinguish out what the kids’ reaction to each would be.
Predictably, when I tried to offer this example from my own life of the difficulties of distinguishing among different forms of bias toward those who are different, the R got offended and said I was just saying it was racism in order to exercise my privilege as a non-white person to call white people a bunch of racists. Also, the R said that HE was taking racism SERIOUSLY, while my perceiving a racial aspect to the birther movement meant that I was not taking racism seriously. Apparently a person who takes racism seriously cannot attribute to racism anything that could instead be attributed to what are evidently the more respectable biases of xenophobia and religious bigotry.
So yeah, I think there is a long way to go in getting intersectionality accepted among the larger population, and we sometimes forget that because it has become so accepted among liberal/progressive folks.
I think that it’s important to not let intersectionality be a term. Talking about a disabled woman of color and refering to intersectionality is an unproductive mechanism that allows microfactionalization.
The *point* of thinking about intersectionality is to regard the mechanism of oppression clearly. I know we already know this, but we often stop right at the identifiers and the limitations on the identified. This happens instead of regarding oppression as a type of interpersonal mediation of conflict for private gain. The point of, say–racial oppression, is as a conquer and divide tactic that allows one to extract labor at subsistence cost all the while contenting the lowly paid “nonvictims” with plenty of haterade. However, the strategy changes when it’s a black woman, in which the system’s profiteers feel more comfortable in hiring for many types of profession because they feel that the general patriarchy assists in keeping such women docile. Of course, many black women view this kind of utility as both a)causing internal friction with male loved ones and b)ensuring that black males are disposable into jails and c)being so much more prone to glass ceilings and workplace sexual issues.
You can go from this classic example to any mix of interactions, but the fundamental key of intersectionality is that we build webs of political, economic, and social interaction (informed by anthropology, complexity theory, whathaveyou) that starts with who stands to gain, how they stand to gain, who acts and who mediates (as well as the nature of the act), who are the victims (do they lose directly, do they lose opportunity costs?), and put all this together in a kind of conflict web. In this way, people can operate within the web, analyze what signals they are getting from the TPTB, and act on the basic urges. Really, one way or another, either flattery or Esau opportunity cost games are the primary means of extracting satisfaction for the social elite. Intersectionality can help remind us that this is a conflict, with real motives and the creativity + determination to maintain oppressive social climates. Changeups should be expected.
The biggest problem is always going to be the blame game. You have to ask Cui Bono, and the people who’s got the honey, usually have the muscle to make it not worth it to talk about this. And, of course, the temptation to think you, yourself, are so hip to all that, for obvious reasons.
And oh yeah, this stuff will happen even at a low level like, say, the dude that owns the blog might play plenty of these games in some conflict. Even nominally progressive ones. Don’t always look at The Man, because The Man is everyone of us who’s King or Queen of the Hill in relational terms.
shah8 @ 3:
I’m having a really hard time comprehending what you mean by your opening statement —
I understand all the words, it’s the argument that “intersectionality” shouldn’t be allowed to become a term (presumable for discussing oppressive schemes) that I’m not getting.
Microfactionalization is only a risk if people want to assert that a member of multiply oppressed classes is somehow in a unique class that is distinct from those other classes — “Lesbian of Color”, for example, being uniquely situated APART FROM those classes as a “queer woman of color”, rather than uniquely situated WITHIN “queer”, “woman” and “of color”, with a unique set of ADDITIONAL oppressions as a “queer woman”, a “woman of color”, a “queer person of color”, and so on.
Ignoring the impacts of those intersections of oppressed class membership belies the unique experiences that come from being within those classes. A “gay man” is just a faggot — somewhat situated as a garden variety pervert. But a “gay woman” is more than a misguided pervert because women owe their services, including sexual service, to men. A “lesbian” isn’t just a pervert, she’s a man-hater because somehow the fact of being a pervert doesn’t seem to register as “… and so she doesn’t have sex with men” the same way a gay man’s supposed perversion more naturally seems to register as “… and so he doesn’t have sex with women.” Men don’t OWE sexual gratification to women, women OWE sexual gratification to men.
Rather than creating new and more complex factions, intersectionality helps understand helps better understand WHY things happen the way they do. WHY the response “I don’t hate men” doesn’t work with lesbians, because it doesn’t address the patriarchal notion that women owe sexual services to men. Having lots of male friends is great, but unless one or more of those male friends are getting some, the male sense of entitlement to women’s bodies is still not being satisfied, and never will be satisfied even by protests that “I have a lot of male friends.”
Erm. I don’t know if you’re aware of the historical issues on this blog, shah, but this reads like a pointed snark. I’m totally willing to believe it was just unintentional. But if you really want to rehash the blog’s prior conflicts, then, well as far as I know, no one’s up for that in this space. But taking it to your own blog would be just fine.
I agree with FCH that I’m dubious about your unilateral decision on whether intersectionality is an appropriate term.
Mandolin, it was a kind of general snark. I was remembering a bunch of blog wars and Bill O’Reilly. General rent activity from owning your own loudspeaker. Aside from following a trackback from Feministe involving an abusive pro Israel debater, and reading a couple of odd threads, I’ve only recently just started checking this out on a semiregular basis. Unilateral decision on whether intersectionality is an appropriate term? I didn’t really buy FCH’s objection, since she was talking about what the definition was, when I was talking about how people strip down the meaning/what the overall purpose of thinking about intersectionality was. I mean, I agree with the definitional aspects of her post.
Furrycatherder, I was saying that I see people on the internet use it as a stripped down term, and I thought we needed to get more of the fullness of the definition into people’s heads. Which is sometimes hard to wrap your minds around not least because it forces people to think beyond simple lessons of victims and oppressors.
I lurv this editing ability.
Aside from following a trackback from Feministe involving an abusive pro Israel debater
?
THANK YOU!! This has been driving me crazy for years when trying to get activists (of whatever stripe[s]) to understand that there are many linguistic/ethnic minorities that are white-majority but nevertheless still face bigotry and oppression. There seems to be a pervasive attitude that goes something like, “If *I* personally haven’t heard about this/don’t consider this important, it must not matter.”
Crys T @ 8:
I doubt people are saying anything close to what you put in quotes. What I suspect is that people have made choices to scope their activism.
Racism — totally down with that. My relatives are polyracial, my relationships are polyracial, my son is mixed, very important to me. Big negative impact on the American economy and social structure — #1 Priority for me.
Affordable Housing — again, totally down with that. All G-d’s Chillin’ gotta have a place to sleep. Don’t care what race one is, if they don’t have a home, life in all spheres is just plain hard.
Environmentalism — very significant. We either get off our fossil fuel addiction or life is going to be pretty rough in the years to come. I =want= to be able to drive a nice car when I’m older.
Queer Rights — I’m a big queer. Say no more.
But in other areas, to be honest, just not as important. Disability rights? Sure, just don’t ask me for time. Bilingual education? Nope, don’t have a well-formed opinion, might be a nice idea, might be a bad idea, too busy, sorry. Autism? Not sure what I can do about that with the limited time I have. Anti-Sikh discrimination? Sorry — too busy being a Jew and dealing with that.
And I could keep going. Doesn’t mean these aren’t significant issues, just means I’ve chosen to spend my time someplace else. And guess what? I get to make that choice. My life, my time, my decision where I focus my energies. AND trying to guilt me into changing my priorities is really pretty shitty behavior.
Damn, I knew a day after I’d written that comment that I should have provided more context: I was NOT trying to make a “what about the white peepulz??!!!1!” statement. The oppressed groups I was thinking of are all without exception being oppressed by other whites, and the people who reject this are white progressives who take a very patronising view towards what “oppression” means. They see “ethnic” as synonymous with “of colour” and tend to be especially hostile to the idea that white ethnic minorities have any legitimate grounds for complaint.
The fact is that there are many ethnic groups in Europe and other white-dominated parts of the globe who are still being colonised and/or having their cultures, especially their languages, destroyed by stronger, more politically powerful groups. Just because it’s their identities being killed off and not their physical bodies doesn’t mean that all of this is ok.
And believe me, I hear almost every day from some supposedly cool & groovy lefty that the destruction of these cultures is not worthy of a senisble person’s concern and that anyone who thinks it is is pathetic, laughable or even dangerous. And I also hear many of these selfsame lefties making incredibly hateful comments that can only be described as bigotry, like when I was in a room full of English Oxfam employees and one of them said, in all seriousness, “Oh, everyone hates the Welsh.” Not one single person there but me thought there was anything wrong with that.
Crys T @ 10:
I’m not a Lefty. I’m a Righty. But that’s still beside the point because you’re projecting attitudes and reasoning onto others.
If you asked me, for example “What’s more important, urban renewal in Detroit, or in New Orleans?” Hard question, but the real answer is irrelevant — I have absolutely zero ties to Detroit, so the answer for me is “New Orleans”.
Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or Southeast Louisiana? Again — don’t care, I don’t live anywhere near Bosnia. Did grow up in Southeast Louisiana. Sorry, Bosnians — move to New Orleans and I’d be happy to help you out.
Homelessness in the West Bank territories, or East Austin? East Austin. I’m not a heartless Jew, I’m just someone who lives in … Austin.
And that’s probably why you think you’re getting attitude from Lefties — I’ll point blank tell you to bugger off and leave me alone, and you’ll chalk it up to me being a heartless Conservative bitch. But lefties have a harder time saying “My time belongs to me”, even though it does for Lefty and Progressive activists, too.
Julie — back off this line of argument, please. It’s too much into you personally and not so much about the topic of the post. Thanks.
Mandolin,
What I was trying to get across, that might have been lost in the personal examples, is that badgering people into demonstrating the badgering person’s “appropriate level of concern” is flat out rude.
And on that note, because I think my response is a perfect example of the genre, I will bow out of this line of argumentation.
Not nearly as rude as not listening to what the other person is saying, and/or twisting their words to mean something completely unrelated to their actual message.
Gotcha. So, basically, other people’s misery is beside the point to you. Should’ve known.
BTW, why do you bother even reading and commenting on these issues ON A BLOG WHERE ALL THE WRITERS ARE NOTICEABLY LEFTWING? It’s enough to make a cynical person suspect that you just get off on derailing threads and generally causing ill feeling.
Crys T writes:
Would that be an example of
because it looks like one to me.
Conservativism is a METHODOLOGY. It is not an IDEOLOGY.
Do you actually READ my posts?
Could you tell me what I’m actually FOR or AGAINST?
Gays in the Military — FOR.
Women in combat — FOR.
Same Sex Marriage — FOR.
Universal Health Care — FOR.
Safe and Legal Abortion — FOR.
Slave Reparations — FOR. (And that’s ALL slaves, not just African slaves. I don’t see “40 acres and a mule” come up that often, but I’d be happy to argue for it.)
Indian Territories — FOR. (and that’s “For respecting the full sovereignty of Indian Nations” and lots more than most fuzzy headed liberals can imagine.)
Unions — FOR. (I canvas for a CWA local and I work with IBEW peeps all the time).
Treating all Hate Crimes as “Terrorist Acts” under post 9/11 legislation — FOR. (I’ve argued with some here who don’t get why hate crimes are terrorism. Perhaps I’m further to the “left”, or maybe I just see terrorism as terrorism.)
Immigration Reform — FOR. (And very stiff penalties against companies that exploit the illegal status of workers. Could-cause-bankruptcy stiff)
Do you want me to go on?
Since you claim to know my kind so well, and don’t seem to think I belong here, name as many issues as I just listed above (should be 10), all of which are typical lefty issues, that I’m against in your mind that are also typical lefty issues.
Conservativism is a METHODOLOGY for analyzing and solving problems within an historical framework, with emphasis on limited experimentation as a means of determining if solutions are appropriate and decentralized government to prevent abuse of power and bring solutions closer to problems. There is no “Ideology” in the Liberal sense within Conservativism.
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