(Jewish Group) What They Talk About When They Talk About Intersectionality

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Is intersectionality the political ideology of our time, a mere buzzword, or a religion? Is it “an attempt to dispense, once and for all, with the cishet able-bodied white male?”Does it represent “everything that is wrong with today’s world,” or is it “the only thing that will save us”? These were the questions posed at the start of last Thursday’s Columbia Law School event titled “Mythbusting Intersectionality” by organizer Kevin Minofu, a postgraduate scholar at Columbia’s African American Policy Forum. Minofu promised that the panel, which included intersectionality’s founding mother, Columbia/UCLA law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, would “cut through the noise,” and analyze what intersectionality is and isn’t.

It was an evening with many informative moments and engaging speakers. But two important things were missing:any debate or engagement with critics of intersectional theory, and any substantive exploration of how that theory operates in the real world. The fact is that important events and institutions—from the Women’s March and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings to the academy—are increasingly shaped and influenced by ideas associated with intersectionality, and while some of those ideas are sound, its track record is decidedly mixed.

Whatever else it is, intersectionality is certainly a hot topic, as attested by the massive turnout: The 180-seat lecture hall had people standing in the back and there were more in an overflow room where the event was livestreamed. The audience was mostly college-age and female-dominated; but there were also quite a few older people from off-campus. These days, intersectionality—a theoretical framework that focuses on “intersections” between different oppressions and identities—is not just the stuff of academic debates. It’s discussed in the mainstream media and invoked by public officials. Progressive politicians claim to champion it—Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Democrat and presidential candidate, recently raised eyebrows with a tweet proclaiming that the future is “intersectional” as well as “female.” Activist movements live by it, and sometimes apparently die by it (see the recent troubles of the Women’s March). Not all the publicity has been positive. Many critics regard intersectionality as deeply divisive and toxic, or even as a breeding ground for anti-Semitism–an issue that also came up at the Columbia event.

“You’re almost talking about intersectionality on trial,” moderator Daniel HoSang, associate professor in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration program at Yale, remarked at one point to another panelist, University of California-Santa Barbara feminist studies professor Barbara Tomlinson. Intersectionality has been blamed, HoSang noted archly, for everything from “ruining the minds of impressionable college students” to “undermining the hopes and soul of progressive politics.” Crenshaw, the original intersectional feminist, spoke of her bemusement at coming across a YouTube video which claimed that intersectionality was all about making straight white men the new pariahs and telling them to “just go somewhere and sit down and shut up.”

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