On Intersectionality
In the spirit of trying to find ideas small enough to write about, I'm going to write about intersectionality, even though I want somewhere nearby the bottom of my heart to move away from shitting on well intentioned people.
Intersectionality is a brilliant legal argument. You can hear the chief proponent (that I can find) of Intersectionality explain the origin of the term in a legal argument in this video. In the spirit of deference she's the champion of the concept.
The example starts at about the 6 minute mark of the talk and the relevant part, in the bare bones of the example: you had a black woman apply for a job at an automotive firm. She felt her application was rejected on a discriminatory basis and pursued it to court. The court could find an example of the employer, employing black people, and also employing women and rejected the claim.
Then the legal argument came in that the employer employed white women to do front-office, front-of-house type tasks, and black men to work the menial, physical jobs. So at the intersection of being black and a woman then, she was discriminated against by the employers policy.
That's as succinct as I can make the same argument, and I am admittedly not known for being succinct. I'm no Blaise Pascal, no George Orwell, no Abe Lincoln.
Intersectionality deals with multiple conditional logical if statements. These are not easy to write out in mathematical notation, though if you've ever had to use excel to do analysis on data in a workplace you probably have.
So in the example, the logic statement would probably be:
if (black>0) AND (woman>0) then Discrimination = 1
which when I say 'probable' I have no idea what the typographical notation is outside of excel for writing out logic statements. So if I find it hard to articulate mathematically, and you possibly, find my notation hard to decipher... you'll love when I try to encrypt the ideas of intersectionality into the multi-variable all inclusive concept of intersectionality.
Then you are talking about multiple nested and/or logic statements (I assume):
if (woman>0) and ((ethnic minority>0) or (disability>0) or (religion>0) or (queer>0)) or (ethnic minority>0) and ((disability>0) ... then discrimination = 1.
And from what I've voyeuristically spied from the sidelines, large catch all terms like 'person of color' or 'queer' etc. are not nuanced enough to properly capture the issues that intersectionality is designed to address.
For example, in LGBTIQA et al. issues, there is internal debate as to discrimination within the movement like gay men getting far more representation and winning far more recognition etc. than other groups like Bisexuals and Trans groups.
Different ethnicity are discriminated against in very different ways and also enjoy very different socio-economic status, such that 'people of color' is too broad when you have 'model minorities' like Asian and Sub-continental people being exploited by asset owning classes and African descent minorities being abused by law enforcement. There can even be nested discrimination within the same ethnic groups based on lightness of the skin, or caste status.
Disability can be sub-categorized into mental health issues, acquired brain injuries and other cognitive impairment and physical disabilities affecting mobility or sensory inputs. In turn disabilities can be experienced differently based on their visibility to outside observers.
...
At one point in her talk, Crenshaw says 'it's like discrimination squared' and that's interesting. Because it suggests that Intersectionality deals in power laws. Which is to say if you experience 3 points of discrimination for membership to an oppressed group, if you belong to two oppressed groups simultaneously you do not experience 6 points of discrimination, but 9. And three groups is not 9 points of discrimination but 27.
But Crenshaw also argues for the diminishing attention given to issues as they stack up. So if a black man is killed by police, that's making national headlines and dominating late night host monologues (in recent times), if a black woman is killed by police or in police custody, it gets written up and forgotten. That's a huge fucking drop off in attention.
And here is where, Intersectionality is a brilliant legal argument... but a terrible marketing strategy.
In their book 'Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind' which was mentioned no less than 4 times in 4 different subjects of my marketing degree and is basically better value to read than to do a whole marketing degree, the Authors ask you what a Cadillac is.
The answer is a Cadillac is a large luxury saloon American Car.
Then they ask you what a Ford is.
The answer is that a Ford is a small cheap economical efficient medium large luxury saloon sedan limousine truck hot rod sports car... or something.
In marketing this has come to be known as product line extension which most often ends in 'Cannibalization'. The point being that in consumer minds a brand can only stand for so much, and it certainly can't stand for everything.
Hence Ries and Trout presented General Motors who created a brand per product line (cadillac for large luxury, Buick for medium economy etc) as a superior strategy to Ford's universal branding conceit, and why at the time of writing (the 80s) GM outsold Ford in every single category.
Similarly if Coke release Diet Coke, and Coke Zero, and Vanilla Coke, and Cherry Coke and so forth they may enjoy with each product launch a short-term uptick in sales but very quickly your products start competing with themselves (hence 'cannibalization') rather than taking market share away from Pepsi, and it costs far more to run and stock and forecast supply for 8 product lines than 1, so weaker companies than the Coca Cola brand can bury themselves doing this.
Because Intersectionality as a concept is unwieldy, Crenshaw actually needed to come up with a metaphor of the intersection to the concept across to a judge. But a law court has people that are both experts at making arguments and experts at listening to arguments, figure out unwieldy complicated concepts and cases like this while poring over legal precedents and arguing the facts of the case and combing through documents in discovery and bound by legal standards and practices and burdens of proof and council can retreat to the judges chambers or approach the bench to slow the pace or make appeals as to how to proceed in the case, recesses can be declared and injunctions can be filed etc.
The courts and para-legal institutions (like a binding mediation) are the rare environments where arguments that require brilliance to implement properly can fly. It is a legal process conducted in front of a judicial authority - it is not public discourse where basically any one can believe what they want and the only thing that can hold them to any standard at all is external reality, which many members of the public don't believe in.
So let's look at intersectionality in practice. Here's an example I spotted that made me feel chagrin.
So some group has had enough of how women are treated, and they decided to set up a twitter account and promote their cause by pasting up excerpts from their twitter in fairly forward thinking and progressively aspirational Fitzroy. Then while fighting the 'good fight' and attacking the patriarchy, someone who has had enough of how transwomen and sex workers are treated decided to scrawl their disapproval of the narrow scope of the authors/distributors of these posters. All witnessed with aforementioned chagrin by myself, a white straight man.
And spotting this felt like standing on the ramparts looking at an army charging my gates with a battering ram, only to see another army, or another unit of the same army come and attack the troops carrying the battering ram.
It is here that I feel I need to point out to anyone invested in Intersectionality a logic puzzle as analogy. It's called 'the Pirate Game' which you can click the link for a very succinct and coherent description and explanation of the game.
What is important is that you have this hierarchy and at the top of the hierarchy is the Pirate captain. The captain gets to propose the division of the loot, however he must get a majority vote or a tie from the crew to save his own neck.
Intuition gives you one answer, if the captain wants the crew to vote for his proposal then he has to propose something fair, like 100 gold coins divided by 5 crew members = 20 each will save his skin.
That's actually the wrong answer and it is wrong for the same reason intersectionality is problematic in practice.
Wikipedia, describes the solution better, but basically pirate number 2 is fucked because of pirate number 3 who is fucked because of pirate number 4 who is fucked over by pirate number 5 so the captain gets just about all of the loot and pirates 5 and 3 give him the votes he needs for a pittance.
It's important to know that Pirate ships didn't work like this in real life and were some of the first functionally democratic organisations in recorded history (bearing more resemblance to post-enlightenment democracy than Athenian democracy).
There are few cases in history however where the oppressed population is also more numerous than the privileged classes. Apartheid South Africa was in part so overtly racist in stratifying South African society because the clear democratic majority where black and 'colored' South Africans. But in Australia the indigenous are a tiny fraction of the population, the same goes for every oppressed group bar women who possibly outnumber men which I think they do based on the last released census.
In which case intersectionality deals with multiplying fractions by fractions, so consider then the picture of the most marginalized member of society petitioning the patriarch for fair treatment and justice. 'Mr Man, what do you propose to do about how Queer Indigenous Muslim Women with Mental Health Issues and Physical Disability are treated under your laws?' To which the patriarch says 'What are you referring to?'
And here is where I depart from most critics of institutional power, in believing (and I don't have any real solid research to back this assertion) most oppression is simply a biproduct of institutions self-organizing to achieve their main goals. Overt, malicious oppression (like a politician scapegoating Mexicans or Muslims) are more the exceptions than the rule, and most oppression experienced daily by most people is the result of flawed design of the ordinary operation of a power structure.
Thus intersectionality is a poor marketing strategy because there's so much education required to explain how the very worst treated members of society exist at the intersection of all these design flaws in systems that were designed without them in mind. It is, in other words, the kind of really poor marketing strategy that engineers at automotive companies come up with all the time wanting to sell their own brilliance without considering that nobody else understands what anti-lock braking systems or diesel injection systems are or mean for them.
Of course if you've been to a rally recently, apart from maybe noticing the ever increasing initials of the LGBTIQA+ movement (itself probably a product of intersectionality) you'll really just hear the broad easy to digest themes like marriage equality, which really address the 'L' and the 'G' and to a lesser extent 'B' and 'T' and by the time you move past them for somebody outside the movement such as myself, the issues surrounding Intersex peoples, those identifying with Queer that don't fit LGBT and Asexuals are fading into to full obscurity.
What I imagine happens and only see occasionally in passing on social media or morbidly fascinating articles is that Intersectionality nests itself in movements in a logically recursive way.
If that last sentence was impenetrable, keep in mind I'm actually not that coherent, while I try and spell it out for you.
Women are 51% of the population of a majority white place (let's assume) and oppressed. At a meeting of oppressed women who are fed up, you will have some part of the that population be queer (let's assume 20%) these queer women form a subcommittee and of those queer women 10% are people of color. Picking arbitrarily easy numbers you have a 100 strong group of activists, within which 20 are queer and 2 are both queer and people of color.
If the 2 queer women of color want to take their issues direct to the streets that's 2 people and not a very intimidating protest (though individuals can often outperform groups but this is off topic). So what you get instead is nesting, where somehow those 2 women need to get all 100 activists to adequately represent them.
Now the actual nesting is going to be far less neat, like that massive AND/OR nested logic statement I didn't even bother to write out earlier. The important thing is that this works like the pirate game, and the pirate game is logical.
The designated chairperson gets up on the dais and yells into a microphone 'we are 100 strong, tomorrow we SMASH the patriarchy viva la matriarchy!!!' or something and the 20 queer women say 'hang on, hang on, hang on... say we help you smash the patriarchy straight women, what assurances do we have that once you are in charge you are going to affect changes to issues that affect us as queer women?' and the room descends into a charged and heated debate about representation and what not in the groups leadership committees and obtaining written assurances and collateral and identifying recourse and then 'hang on hang on hang on... queer women, when you are negotiating these deals are you negotiating for us? Us queer women of color? and what assurances do we have that in helping you secure your assurances on queer rights that you will continue to help us secure the rights we need as people of color?' and the negotiating power of the queer committee breaks down while they handle internal crisis.
Meanwhile the patriarchy, abstract concept that it is nevertheless can sleep soundly knowing it probably wont have to deal with 100 angry women at all tomorrow.
So Intersectionality is a really logical concept that in practice I am willing to bet: basically cripples social progress. Because it boils down in practice to introducing wedge issues, and/or wedge politics to socially progressive movements.
There's two 'solutions' one could approach, which is to figure out as previously illustrated, who in a movement is the singularly most oppressed (who stands at the most intersections) which is not easy in itself, and then solve all their problems and work your way back up from there, 'popping up' from the lowest nested level.
Which may in practice be no different from the other solution: basically requiring pirate number 2 to figure out a functioning utopia in order to have the Pirate captain ousted and everyone's situation to improve, which is the second approach.
And the second approach is kind of sensible, but consider how asymmetric it is. So without bothering with definitions (largely because the specifics don't matter) assume this abstract concept of the patriarchy is what needs overthrowing - it doesn't have to be perfect, it is an oppressive regime and all it has to do is be powerful (retain power). Like the pirate captain it has to pay out the bare minimum to keep its power on top. The next pirate along though, doesn't have to pay the minimum to win, instead it has to deliver everything to everybody in order to displace the tyrant. Thus any alternative to the status quo is incredibly costly to implement, while the status quo is incredibly cheap to maintain.
It should be noticed that just as technology makes everything more efficient, it has made ruling more efficient as well, and thus people who enjoy actual power have likely never been such a small proportion of the most privileged class as they are right now. Thus the vast majority of white straight men don't get to participate in societal power in any meaningful way at any stage of their lives. (They may however enjoy some power in microcosms like a family unit, over non-class members and they may enjoy the Pirate's game pittance in the form of authorities and customer service reps being friendlier and more accommodating to them right up until work makes them redundant and banks evict them from their homes.)
But that's a side note. The patriarchy doesn't have to be perfect, any contender group to overthrowing it does - it is sidelined until it can solve all the problems the patriarchy hasn't.
Thus the alternative strategy to Intersectionality I'd be inclined to recommend was articulated by former President Barrack Obama who said (somewhere) 'I have to keep reminding my people that better is good.' and by 'my people' I believe he was referring to his Whitehouse administrators.
He's re-wording the more widespread conventional wisdom that 'Perfect is the enemy of the good' and 'The good is the enemy of done.'
But it's a conundrum that offers me no answers, because with that power law-nesting problem, I believe probability basically says that as you multiply fractions they get smaller and smaller quite rapidly. So you start with everyone, then halve it, then multiply that by 10% (5%) and that by 10% (.5%) and then that by 3% (.015%) and by the time you are standing on the corner of a 4 road intersection you are dealing with populations so small that you need to nest your activism in a system of democracy where numbers = political will, while a big city may be able to contain half a city of women and then a village of queer women, it may have less than a handful of black lesbian paraplegics. Can you muster the numbers to protest the general population? I doubt it. Can you make a ruckus within a subsection of the general population? Probably. Just as a broad category like Women can get a voice for the broad issues of feminism in modern society, the population differences may mean you can get a voice in feminist circles but not in general society.
Of course, it should be said that life is not as neat as the Pirate game. Women in general can and have made progress despite all the internal political wedges that are debated... as far as I can gather...constantly. I also hear from the lived experiences of others, that the 'trickle-down' forms of activism work about as well as trickle-down economics. Where if one large group manage to secure their property rights, they disappear no longer turning out for the remaining downtrodden.
That said, in Crenshaw's own talk about death of black women by police and in police custody, we can't know if the #blacklivesmatter movement wouldn't address the problem regardless of gender, largely because it hasn't addressed the problem yet so much as give it widespread publicity. If indeed the stats hold out and more black women are killed by police than black men, then there is some unfairness to it that the people are only mobilized by the deaths of men - however this is true of most of history, and so I guess my inclination would be to eat the elephant one bite at a time.
A post-racial society may still be sexist, and a Gender-egalitarian society might still be racist, but both societies are better than the one a black woman lives in now. Of course the society I live in now is just peachy to me.
I don't have any answers but intersectionality isn't one of them.
Intersectionality is a brilliant legal argument. You can hear the chief proponent (that I can find) of Intersectionality explain the origin of the term in a legal argument in this video. In the spirit of deference she's the champion of the concept.
The example starts at about the 6 minute mark of the talk and the relevant part, in the bare bones of the example: you had a black woman apply for a job at an automotive firm. She felt her application was rejected on a discriminatory basis and pursued it to court. The court could find an example of the employer, employing black people, and also employing women and rejected the claim.
Then the legal argument came in that the employer employed white women to do front-office, front-of-house type tasks, and black men to work the menial, physical jobs. So at the intersection of being black and a woman then, she was discriminated against by the employers policy.
That's as succinct as I can make the same argument, and I am admittedly not known for being succinct. I'm no Blaise Pascal, no George Orwell, no Abe Lincoln.
Intersectionality deals with multiple conditional logical if statements. These are not easy to write out in mathematical notation, though if you've ever had to use excel to do analysis on data in a workplace you probably have.
So in the example, the logic statement would probably be:
if (black>0) AND (woman>0) then Discrimination = 1
which when I say 'probable' I have no idea what the typographical notation is outside of excel for writing out logic statements. So if I find it hard to articulate mathematically, and you possibly, find my notation hard to decipher... you'll love when I try to encrypt the ideas of intersectionality into the multi-variable all inclusive concept of intersectionality.
Then you are talking about multiple nested and/or logic statements (I assume):
if (woman>0) and ((ethnic minority>0) or (disability>0) or (religion>0) or (queer>0)) or (ethnic minority>0) and ((disability>0) ... then discrimination = 1.
And from what I've voyeuristically spied from the sidelines, large catch all terms like 'person of color' or 'queer' etc. are not nuanced enough to properly capture the issues that intersectionality is designed to address.
For example, in LGBTIQA et al. issues, there is internal debate as to discrimination within the movement like gay men getting far more representation and winning far more recognition etc. than other groups like Bisexuals and Trans groups.
Different ethnicity are discriminated against in very different ways and also enjoy very different socio-economic status, such that 'people of color' is too broad when you have 'model minorities' like Asian and Sub-continental people being exploited by asset owning classes and African descent minorities being abused by law enforcement. There can even be nested discrimination within the same ethnic groups based on lightness of the skin, or caste status.
Disability can be sub-categorized into mental health issues, acquired brain injuries and other cognitive impairment and physical disabilities affecting mobility or sensory inputs. In turn disabilities can be experienced differently based on their visibility to outside observers.
...
At one point in her talk, Crenshaw says 'it's like discrimination squared' and that's interesting. Because it suggests that Intersectionality deals in power laws. Which is to say if you experience 3 points of discrimination for membership to an oppressed group, if you belong to two oppressed groups simultaneously you do not experience 6 points of discrimination, but 9. And three groups is not 9 points of discrimination but 27.
But Crenshaw also argues for the diminishing attention given to issues as they stack up. So if a black man is killed by police, that's making national headlines and dominating late night host monologues (in recent times), if a black woman is killed by police or in police custody, it gets written up and forgotten. That's a huge fucking drop off in attention.
And here is where, Intersectionality is a brilliant legal argument... but a terrible marketing strategy.
In their book 'Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind' which was mentioned no less than 4 times in 4 different subjects of my marketing degree and is basically better value to read than to do a whole marketing degree, the Authors ask you what a Cadillac is.
The answer is a Cadillac is a large luxury saloon American Car.
Then they ask you what a Ford is.
The answer is that a Ford is a small cheap economical efficient medium large luxury saloon sedan limousine truck hot rod sports car... or something.
In marketing this has come to be known as product line extension which most often ends in 'Cannibalization'. The point being that in consumer minds a brand can only stand for so much, and it certainly can't stand for everything.
Hence Ries and Trout presented General Motors who created a brand per product line (cadillac for large luxury, Buick for medium economy etc) as a superior strategy to Ford's universal branding conceit, and why at the time of writing (the 80s) GM outsold Ford in every single category.
Similarly if Coke release Diet Coke, and Coke Zero, and Vanilla Coke, and Cherry Coke and so forth they may enjoy with each product launch a short-term uptick in sales but very quickly your products start competing with themselves (hence 'cannibalization') rather than taking market share away from Pepsi, and it costs far more to run and stock and forecast supply for 8 product lines than 1, so weaker companies than the Coca Cola brand can bury themselves doing this.
Because Intersectionality as a concept is unwieldy, Crenshaw actually needed to come up with a metaphor of the intersection to the concept across to a judge. But a law court has people that are both experts at making arguments and experts at listening to arguments, figure out unwieldy complicated concepts and cases like this while poring over legal precedents and arguing the facts of the case and combing through documents in discovery and bound by legal standards and practices and burdens of proof and council can retreat to the judges chambers or approach the bench to slow the pace or make appeals as to how to proceed in the case, recesses can be declared and injunctions can be filed etc.
The courts and para-legal institutions (like a binding mediation) are the rare environments where arguments that require brilliance to implement properly can fly. It is a legal process conducted in front of a judicial authority - it is not public discourse where basically any one can believe what they want and the only thing that can hold them to any standard at all is external reality, which many members of the public don't believe in.
So let's look at intersectionality in practice. Here's an example I spotted that made me feel chagrin.
So some group has had enough of how women are treated, and they decided to set up a twitter account and promote their cause by pasting up excerpts from their twitter in fairly forward thinking and progressively aspirational Fitzroy. Then while fighting the 'good fight' and attacking the patriarchy, someone who has had enough of how transwomen and sex workers are treated decided to scrawl their disapproval of the narrow scope of the authors/distributors of these posters. All witnessed with aforementioned chagrin by myself, a white straight man.
And spotting this felt like standing on the ramparts looking at an army charging my gates with a battering ram, only to see another army, or another unit of the same army come and attack the troops carrying the battering ram.
It is here that I feel I need to point out to anyone invested in Intersectionality a logic puzzle as analogy. It's called 'the Pirate Game' which you can click the link for a very succinct and coherent description and explanation of the game.
What is important is that you have this hierarchy and at the top of the hierarchy is the Pirate captain. The captain gets to propose the division of the loot, however he must get a majority vote or a tie from the crew to save his own neck.
Intuition gives you one answer, if the captain wants the crew to vote for his proposal then he has to propose something fair, like 100 gold coins divided by 5 crew members = 20 each will save his skin.
That's actually the wrong answer and it is wrong for the same reason intersectionality is problematic in practice.
Wikipedia, describes the solution better, but basically pirate number 2 is fucked because of pirate number 3 who is fucked because of pirate number 4 who is fucked over by pirate number 5 so the captain gets just about all of the loot and pirates 5 and 3 give him the votes he needs for a pittance.
It's important to know that Pirate ships didn't work like this in real life and were some of the first functionally democratic organisations in recorded history (bearing more resemblance to post-enlightenment democracy than Athenian democracy).
There are few cases in history however where the oppressed population is also more numerous than the privileged classes. Apartheid South Africa was in part so overtly racist in stratifying South African society because the clear democratic majority where black and 'colored' South Africans. But in Australia the indigenous are a tiny fraction of the population, the same goes for every oppressed group bar women who possibly outnumber men which I think they do based on the last released census.
In which case intersectionality deals with multiplying fractions by fractions, so consider then the picture of the most marginalized member of society petitioning the patriarch for fair treatment and justice. 'Mr Man, what do you propose to do about how Queer Indigenous Muslim Women with Mental Health Issues and Physical Disability are treated under your laws?' To which the patriarch says 'What are you referring to?'
And here is where I depart from most critics of institutional power, in believing (and I don't have any real solid research to back this assertion) most oppression is simply a biproduct of institutions self-organizing to achieve their main goals. Overt, malicious oppression (like a politician scapegoating Mexicans or Muslims) are more the exceptions than the rule, and most oppression experienced daily by most people is the result of flawed design of the ordinary operation of a power structure.
Thus intersectionality is a poor marketing strategy because there's so much education required to explain how the very worst treated members of society exist at the intersection of all these design flaws in systems that were designed without them in mind. It is, in other words, the kind of really poor marketing strategy that engineers at automotive companies come up with all the time wanting to sell their own brilliance without considering that nobody else understands what anti-lock braking systems or diesel injection systems are or mean for them.
Of course if you've been to a rally recently, apart from maybe noticing the ever increasing initials of the LGBTIQA+ movement (itself probably a product of intersectionality) you'll really just hear the broad easy to digest themes like marriage equality, which really address the 'L' and the 'G' and to a lesser extent 'B' and 'T' and by the time you move past them for somebody outside the movement such as myself, the issues surrounding Intersex peoples, those identifying with Queer that don't fit LGBT and Asexuals are fading into to full obscurity.
What I imagine happens and only see occasionally in passing on social media or morbidly fascinating articles is that Intersectionality nests itself in movements in a logically recursive way.
If that last sentence was impenetrable, keep in mind I'm actually not that coherent, while I try and spell it out for you.
Women are 51% of the population of a majority white place (let's assume) and oppressed. At a meeting of oppressed women who are fed up, you will have some part of the that population be queer (let's assume 20%) these queer women form a subcommittee and of those queer women 10% are people of color. Picking arbitrarily easy numbers you have a 100 strong group of activists, within which 20 are queer and 2 are both queer and people of color.
If the 2 queer women of color want to take their issues direct to the streets that's 2 people and not a very intimidating protest (though individuals can often outperform groups but this is off topic). So what you get instead is nesting, where somehow those 2 women need to get all 100 activists to adequately represent them.
Now the actual nesting is going to be far less neat, like that massive AND/OR nested logic statement I didn't even bother to write out earlier. The important thing is that this works like the pirate game, and the pirate game is logical.
The designated chairperson gets up on the dais and yells into a microphone 'we are 100 strong, tomorrow we SMASH the patriarchy viva la matriarchy!!!' or something and the 20 queer women say 'hang on, hang on, hang on... say we help you smash the patriarchy straight women, what assurances do we have that once you are in charge you are going to affect changes to issues that affect us as queer women?' and the room descends into a charged and heated debate about representation and what not in the groups leadership committees and obtaining written assurances and collateral and identifying recourse and then 'hang on hang on hang on... queer women, when you are negotiating these deals are you negotiating for us? Us queer women of color? and what assurances do we have that in helping you secure your assurances on queer rights that you will continue to help us secure the rights we need as people of color?' and the negotiating power of the queer committee breaks down while they handle internal crisis.
Meanwhile the patriarchy, abstract concept that it is nevertheless can sleep soundly knowing it probably wont have to deal with 100 angry women at all tomorrow.
So Intersectionality is a really logical concept that in practice I am willing to bet: basically cripples social progress. Because it boils down in practice to introducing wedge issues, and/or wedge politics to socially progressive movements.
There's two 'solutions' one could approach, which is to figure out as previously illustrated, who in a movement is the singularly most oppressed (who stands at the most intersections) which is not easy in itself, and then solve all their problems and work your way back up from there, 'popping up' from the lowest nested level.
Which may in practice be no different from the other solution: basically requiring pirate number 2 to figure out a functioning utopia in order to have the Pirate captain ousted and everyone's situation to improve, which is the second approach.
And the second approach is kind of sensible, but consider how asymmetric it is. So without bothering with definitions (largely because the specifics don't matter) assume this abstract concept of the patriarchy is what needs overthrowing - it doesn't have to be perfect, it is an oppressive regime and all it has to do is be powerful (retain power). Like the pirate captain it has to pay out the bare minimum to keep its power on top. The next pirate along though, doesn't have to pay the minimum to win, instead it has to deliver everything to everybody in order to displace the tyrant. Thus any alternative to the status quo is incredibly costly to implement, while the status quo is incredibly cheap to maintain.
It should be noticed that just as technology makes everything more efficient, it has made ruling more efficient as well, and thus people who enjoy actual power have likely never been such a small proportion of the most privileged class as they are right now. Thus the vast majority of white straight men don't get to participate in societal power in any meaningful way at any stage of their lives. (They may however enjoy some power in microcosms like a family unit, over non-class members and they may enjoy the Pirate's game pittance in the form of authorities and customer service reps being friendlier and more accommodating to them right up until work makes them redundant and banks evict them from their homes.)
But that's a side note. The patriarchy doesn't have to be perfect, any contender group to overthrowing it does - it is sidelined until it can solve all the problems the patriarchy hasn't.
Thus the alternative strategy to Intersectionality I'd be inclined to recommend was articulated by former President Barrack Obama who said (somewhere) 'I have to keep reminding my people that better is good.' and by 'my people' I believe he was referring to his Whitehouse administrators.
He's re-wording the more widespread conventional wisdom that 'Perfect is the enemy of the good' and 'The good is the enemy of done.'
But it's a conundrum that offers me no answers, because with that power law-nesting problem, I believe probability basically says that as you multiply fractions they get smaller and smaller quite rapidly. So you start with everyone, then halve it, then multiply that by 10% (5%) and that by 10% (.5%) and then that by 3% (.015%) and by the time you are standing on the corner of a 4 road intersection you are dealing with populations so small that you need to nest your activism in a system of democracy where numbers = political will, while a big city may be able to contain half a city of women and then a village of queer women, it may have less than a handful of black lesbian paraplegics. Can you muster the numbers to protest the general population? I doubt it. Can you make a ruckus within a subsection of the general population? Probably. Just as a broad category like Women can get a voice for the broad issues of feminism in modern society, the population differences may mean you can get a voice in feminist circles but not in general society.
Of course, it should be said that life is not as neat as the Pirate game. Women in general can and have made progress despite all the internal political wedges that are debated... as far as I can gather...constantly. I also hear from the lived experiences of others, that the 'trickle-down' forms of activism work about as well as trickle-down economics. Where if one large group manage to secure their property rights, they disappear no longer turning out for the remaining downtrodden.
That said, in Crenshaw's own talk about death of black women by police and in police custody, we can't know if the #blacklivesmatter movement wouldn't address the problem regardless of gender, largely because it hasn't addressed the problem yet so much as give it widespread publicity. If indeed the stats hold out and more black women are killed by police than black men, then there is some unfairness to it that the people are only mobilized by the deaths of men - however this is true of most of history, and so I guess my inclination would be to eat the elephant one bite at a time.
A post-racial society may still be sexist, and a Gender-egalitarian society might still be racist, but both societies are better than the one a black woman lives in now. Of course the society I live in now is just peachy to me.
I don't have any answers but intersectionality isn't one of them.
1 comment:
tl;dr: it's too hard, so don't bother
Exactly what the patriarchy would say!
(Also, if you wanted to see an example of a seemingly powerless straight white man meaningfully participating in the wielding of societal power, follow this link: http://ohminoust.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/on-intersectionality.html)
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