I was doing a bit of research into intersectionality theory for today’s blog post, thinking I know kind of how I want to explain it, but if someone has done it better then I can quote and link to them — you know, standard blogger stuff — and Google throws out a link to a YouTube video titled “What is Intersectionality?” So I click it, thinking maybe I can link to it if it’s well done… and it’s Ben Shapiro.
Unexpected Ben Shapiro spouting bad alt-right logic about “leftist fads” and how “white identities are valued less” is a nasty fucking thing to stumble into while hungover and before I’ve had any coffee. No warning at all. Plus he’s got the world’s smuggest, most annoying voice and about forty seconds in it set up this sort of post-bourbon reverb inside my skull that I could taste in my teeth. Brutal.
So for the record: Ben Shapiro, the exact opposite of a hangover cure. Add that to his Wikipedia page.
Fortunately, the next video down the search results was a clip by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw also titled “What is Intersectionality?” and thankfully it was an actual good-faith attempt to explain this complex topic to a conference of independent schools in 2017. (Crenshaw is an excellent person to quote on intersectionality theory, since she was the person who coined the term.) One statement she makes in the video really stuck with me — “Intersectionality isn’t so much a grand theory, it’s a prism for understanding certain kinds of problems.”
Essentially, intersectionality states that people — especially people of colour, women, LGBTQ people, and other traditionally oppressed groups — can be impacted by multiple inequalities at once and that the interaction between various vectors of inequality can amplify the entire problem.
I, for example, am an LGBTQ person, specifically a bisexual man. But I’m a bisexual cis-man, I’m white, I’m (relatively) able-bodied, I’m financially secure, and so on. While I do face challenges relating to my sexual identity, I have many privileges regarding my racial identity, my gender identity, my physical ability, my financial situation, and so on. By and large, if I’m facing inequality at all, it’s usually as a single-vector threat related to my sexuality.
Now, contrast that with, let’s say, a transgendered woman of colour. She’s facing challenges because of her race, her gender identity and so on. But those challenges aren’t happening in isolation from each other. They’re interacting with each other, amplifying each other. Is she trying for a job? Will that job pay her less because she’s a woman? Will the employer balk at hiring a transgendered person? Or a person of colour? Any one of these things would be a challenge — put them together and it’s very easy to imagine that this young lady might not be getting that job… which will compound her financial problems, and so forth.
(This is not, as a caveat, to say that white people don’t have problems: everyone has problems; it’s just that white people’s problems rarely include the colour of their skin. See my post on privilege.)
Understanding this deceptively simple concept — that multiple inequalities amplify each other — is a huge factor in understanding how social justice works. If you take this prism (I’m really liking that metaphor, Professor Crenshaw) and use it to examine institutionalized and structural inequalities in systems of power, you can gain a fuller understanding of how these inequalities interact with each other to reinforce unjust and unequal power structures.
As a specific example: Indigenous Canadians. Last week the Commission for The National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls announced the “inescapable conclusion” that Canada’s Native peoples have suffered (and continue to suffer) a policy of genocide which “from its pre-colonial past to today, has aimed to destroy Indigenous peoples.”
As the report itself states, Canada was founded on colonial genocidal policies that are inextricably linked to Canada’s contemporary relationship with Indigenous peoples. Modern Canadian policies perpetuate these colonial legacies and have resulted in “clear patterns of violence and marginalization of Indigenous peoples, particularly women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual).”
The seizure of land for colonial development led to the reservation system. The reservation system led to long-term poverty and marginalization. Deliberate government policies of starvation reduced Native populations. Generations of Native children were forcibly removed from their homes to attend residential schools, where they suffered violence, repression, deliberate cultural erasure and emotional and sexual abuse. Many Native children died in these schools, or trying to escape from them. Native women in particular are victims of violence and murder far above the statistical average in Canada and their suffering has historically been ignored or minimized by law enforcement. Many Native survivors turned to alcohol or drug use to deal with the traumas they endured with all its attendant problems. The repercussions of these deliberate policies of genocide are long-term and continuing today… and are themselves amplified by the neocolonialist policies of the current Canadian government and the deeply ingrained anti-native racism of white Canadians themselves.
When we look at the challenges that Native people face in this country through the prism of intersectionality they are almost overwhelming. Every aspect of their identity, of their lives, is impacted by a system which tried — and continues to try — to erase Native people. And once we understand these challenges in an intersectional manner, we are forced to acknowledge that there’s no single, simple solution which will address the plight of Native people in Canada.
Problems are complex. Inequalities are complex. Their solutions are also going to have to be complex. Yes, Canada has to acknowledge it’s complicity in the historical and ongoing genocide of its Native population, and not just through a grudging admission by the Prime Minister (immediately undermined by a refusal to acknowledge it from the leader of the Opposition) but by real changes in Canadian education and attitudes towards Native people… and especially by concrete and radical changes in how Native issues are handled in this country. There are no easy answers, my friends, but change must occur. The challenge that we white Canadians now have to bear is shouldering the duty to acknowledge the injustices of the past, recognize the ongoing injustices in the present and change the future into a just and equitable one for all Canadians both white and Native.
And that seems like a massive, intractable, unsolvable problem. The sheer weight of addressing Native inequality can feel mind-boggling. Most Canadians, in my experience, are so intimidated by the epic task of indigenous justice and reconciliation that they simply ignore the problem, unconsciously hoping it’ll somehow go away. Others, especially on the political right, prefer to actively deny the problems exist (Looking at you, Mr. Scheer) rather than admit that the hard, heavy work of finding solutions needs to happen.
But while intersectionality is a useful tool for understanding the complexity of inequality, I hope it might also be a tool for understanding and amplifying solutions to inequality. There is no one simple grand solution to the problems Natives face in this country… but there are a myriad of small solutions that, when added together, should amplify their impact. Better infrastructure combined with access to clean water combined with better education combined with self-governance combined with employment opportunities combined with safety initiatives combined with better education for white Canadians and anti-oppression training for the police and so on and on could create a wave of small improvements to the lives of Native people that would work on each other for an exponential increase in the quality of life for the people of the First Nations.
It might be easy to dismiss a specific solution, for example several hours of training for police and other first responders on how to deal with Natives in a fair and equitable manner, as useless or tokenism or too small a step… but it’s a step. It’s an easily achievable step. It doesn’t cost too much and it doesn’t take too long. And if it doesn’t seem like it’ll do much in the short term, just think about the effect when combined with dozens or hundreds of other small initiatives… that’s a real impact in the long run, once the momentum is achieved.
And this understanding can be applied to any number of societal and structural problems. To understand intersectionality is to understanding that multiple inequalities amplify each other; once we understand that, we can flip the theory of intersectional inequality into one of intersectional justice and state that multiple acts of equity amplify each other as well. Where problems seem so self-reinforcing as to become unsolvable, we need to recognize that we can work on multiple small aspects of the whole until the bigger problem is solved.
This turned into a surprisingly optimistic post, especially considering where it started, but I’ve always (despite accusations to the contrary) been an optimist. Acknowledging that problems exist — even complex problems — is the first step towards coming up with solutions. And if the big problem is made up of many smaller simultaneous problems, then why shouldn’t we start unravelling the big problem with many smaller simultaneous solutions?
