I wrote this primarily as a way to sort my ideas out. Feel free to skip. However do take a look below at the painter of the featured intersection: Wilfred Rembert. What a life! And what extraordinary works of art.

A Defense of Intersectionality

The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 although the concept had been knocking around in (especially black and lesbian) feminist circles since the 1970s and has roots going back to the 19th century. Until we all acquired an obsession with identity, it was an obscure and useful term used to describe how race and sex can connect and overlap in matters of discrimination and inequality.  Crenshaw has spent decades studying civil rights and the law, and her concern was how embedded discrimination and inequality get in the way of progress in racial justice. 

She presented her theory in a 1989 paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, writing about three legal cases that dealt with both race and sex discrimination. Crenshaw argued that the court’s view of discrimination was an example of the “conceptual limitations of…single-issue analyses”. 

Her metaphor of the crossroads of a traffic intersection shows how people (for example: a black woman) can get hit with discrimination from different directions (race and sex) at the same time.

“Intersectionality,” she explained, “was a prism to bring to light dynamics within discrimination law that weren’t being appreciated by the courts.” It’s a common sense idea that things are complicated and that justice needs to take a more comprehensive perspective.

Crenshaw defined it like this: “Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking.”

Intersectionality as an intellectual tool allows for the analysis of various forms of inequality and discrimination. It also supports the significance of distinct identities and life experiences as sources of strength and community. This stands in contrast to liberal universalism, which advocates for a color-blind society where individuals are treated equally irrespective of their diverse identities, an approach exemplified in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that “… my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Then what happened?

In the decades since 1989, intersectionality has taken on a life of its own. It is now commonly used to explain the dynamics of privilege, power, and the sometimes bewildering interplay of multiple social identities. It has bloomed into a framework to understand and address discrimination, inequality, and oppression across a whole complex of individuals and groups.  Oppression doesn’t function in isolation but is layered in complicated ways creating personalized and unique experiences for individuals depending on their oppressed characteristics. (There’s a long list.)

Intersectionality is the means through which to identify these structural issues of discrimination and attempt to remedy them by making them visible. A white man has skin and sex privilege, but a gay white working-class man with a physical disability not so much. And is that man more or less privileged and oppressed than an immigrant, brown-skinned, professional heterosexual woman wearing a hijab? (It’s complicated.) 

Once it was mainstream, the meaning morphed. Intended as a way to show systemic issues and try and fix them, it became the buzzword for a whole set of competing identities of oppression. Now the word functions most usefully as a cliche in the mouths of social justice warring activists – a handy shorthand signal that someone is about to spout ideology and start banging on about the marginalized amongst whom they count themselves. Now – even if they do need to “check their privilege” as a member of one or more demographic groups – surely they can find some claim to oppression. Everyone is a victim. It is all just a matter of degree and how many victimhoods you can claim. By performing support for other groups in allyship, you can signal your righteousness to the world.

The focus shifted from structure and system into the realm of individual identities and causes that could be connected by concepts of oppression and colonization. In some circles, it started a competitive hierarchy of grievances.  Who is the biggest victim? Which groups are the most marginalized?  Whose voices should be heard and amplified? Which should be muted and silenced?

Intersectionality now often means a whole constellation of causes. It serves as a unifying concept connecting oppressed groups. It acts as the connective tissue, creating common ground, forging alliances, and binding the oppressed in shared struggle.

To care about one cause means to care about them all. It means taking a side and making a stand. This, of course, is fraught with inherent contradictions that help explain the incoherent and knee-jerk activism we have seen in recent campus and street protest dramas. (“Gays for Gaza”, for example, which makes about as much sense as “Steers for Steak”.)

As interpreted by some activists, the focus on intersectionality began to overshadow some of the communities it was originally intended to support. The competing and conflicting interests between women as a distinct class and trans activists is but one glaring example. 

In Is Anti-Racist Allyship Color-Blind to Anti-Semitism? Sanje Ratnevale named intersectionality as one of three anti-racist frames now prevalent in liberal America and on college campuses. It’s a lens that puts Jews at a seeming disadvantage. He asks where it leaves Jews “…when combatting one form of prejudice should typically enjoin other forms of oppression, typically offering a form of supportive allyship?” 

For schools, these are not abstractions but active issues and decision points. As Ratnevale points out elsewhere, schools need to manage dogma and ideology rather than accept them without question. Many independent schools, he writes “are in the throes of embracing a number of controversial newer ideologies offered by NAIS and widely discussed in its People of Color Conference. Topics have included gender ideology, critical race theory, intersectionality, and social justice”. These ideologies have practical implications. They need to be examined rather than adopted uncritically.  

In some ways and circumstances, intersectionality becomes a tool for oppression, exclusion, and stifling debate rather than a means for advancing social justice. Rather than an invaluable way to recognize and understand the complexities of discrimination, it promotes simplistic thinking and becomes a distraction by creating hierarchies of the oppressed. 

As currently defined, intersectionality shares a basic assumption with Critical Race Theory that racism is permanent and present in every interaction. The question is not whether it is present but how and in what ways. This becomes a reason – an obligation – for identifying it and calling it out all the time. It leads to a hyper-vigilant mindset always on the lookout for racial dynamics and potential discrimination. Every interaction has to be examined for signs of bias and/or phobia.

At its worst, this paranoid state of perpetual alert introduces a divisive hostility into every interaction. Some will go out of their way to avoid that kind of negativity and they disengage altogether. It also undermines and devalues the real racial progress – however incremental and incomplete – that has been made in the last sixty years.

Feminists who focus on the interests of women as a distinct class in a struggle against a system of male power that has forever exploited and dehumanized them, now face a new challenge: misogynist gender identity ideology and its intersectional supporters. It’s called inclusion. In this new way of thinking, women are supported in becoming men and men make better women than women. ( For example: Admiral Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health, was named one of USA Today’s Women of the Year in 2022 and hailed by the White House during Lesbian Visibility Week). 

For certain political activists, “feminism” – sometimes called “third wave” –  centers on global social justice rather than focusing on women as a distinct oppressed class.

A Constellation of Causes

To be an intersectional activist these days means to embrace a whole raft of causes where it is possible to identify an oppressor and the oppressed. This is where it becomes “problematic” and you begin to see the off-the-shelf, multipurpose, omni-cause activism. 

Here’s a good description from what was once the Women’s Studies at Yale University. It’s now The Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A statement from 2021 explains their intersectional causes worldwide: 

“We stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine. … We do not subscribe to a ‘both sides’ rhetoric that erases the military, economic, media, and global power that Israel has over Palestine. This is not a  ‘conflict’ that is too ‘controversial and complex’ to assess…

As gender studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline….our work is  ‘committed to an inclusive feminist vision that is in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and sovereignty rights globally, that challenges settler colonial practices, and that contests violations of civil rights and international human rights law, military occupation and militarization, including the criminalization of the U.S. borders, and myriad forms of dispossession.

 We center global social justice in our intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing.  …  justice is indivisible; we learn this lesson time and again from Black, Indigenous, Arab, …As residents, educators, and feminists who are also against the settler colonialism of the U.S., we refuse to normalize or accept the United States’ financial, military, diplomatic and political role in Palestinian dispossession.’ …”

From: Gender Studies Departments In Solidarity With Palestinian Feminist Collective May 18, 2021

That’s current intersectionality for you. 

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The featured intersection is by Winfred Rembert. His memory paintings on carved and tooled leather show the world in which he grew up. That world included witnessing a lynching when he was a small child, barely escaping being lynched himself, and time on a prison chain gang. There was a great exhibit of his work in NYC this spring.  

Winfred Rembert (1945 – 2021) was born in Americus, Georgia and grew up in nearby Cuthbert, a rural railroad town located in the southwest region of the state, once at the center of the Deep South’s plantation economy. Living in Cuthbert during the era of Jim Crow, Rembert was exposed at a young age to the exploitative practices of the sharecropping system. Spending much of his childhood alongside family members working in the fields, Rembert received a limited education. Despite the infrequency of his attendance, a dedicated teacher by the name of Miss Prather recognized Rembert’s artistic talent and encouraged him to express his creativity through drawing.

Hauser and Wirth Gallery Exhibit: Winfred Rembert “All of Me”