This episode unpacks "intersectionality" and looks at how race has played a role in the lives of different peoples.
Transcript: Intersectionality and Structural Bias
Joe: One of the ways that I've talked about intersectionality with students is that intersectionality, I think, is an attempt to make something that was one dimensional, more three dimensional. Right, to recognize that identities cannot be reduced to singular categories without losing a lot of their essence.
Penny: Welcome to the Diversity & Inclusion for All project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Welcome to another episode in the diversity and Inclusion for All Project. This is the fourth podcast that focuses on unpacking some key terms to understand in diversity and inclusion work. In this episode, I'm joined again by Calvin University colleagues Joe Kuilema, Alisa Tigchelaar, Eric Washington and Micah Watson.
Race and racism is just one of the categories that we construct to organize people in our minds for good or for ill. But there are often other categories as well. And then currently there's this term out there that's getting used that I want to explore a little bit. And that term is intersectionality. So, I know this has a history. And I'm wondering if you can explain to me where the term came from originally, how it was used, and then how it has evolved or changed and how it's getting used today in different ways.
Eric: Well, the term comes out in 1989. It was published in 1989 by the legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw, who was interested and studied court cases in which African-American women as plaintiffs were disallowed from making a claim that they were discriminated against because of both their race and their gender. So, Crenshaw's argument in that in terms of intersectionality is that African-American women have been discriminated historically because of both their race as African-Americans and their gender and as as women. And so she was criticized in both second wave and, yes, definitely second wave feminism and its exclusion of the experiences of African-American women, and also the broader civil rights movement and also affirmative action programs that tended to exclude black women as well.
Penny: So, if I remember correctly, that case that you're referring to was a group of African-American women who were not getting promoted and not getting all the benefits that their peers were getting at work. And then the court said, well, no, you can't claim discrimination, because, look, there's women in this organization that have been promoted and gotten, you know, the bennie's and there's African-Americans, but they were African-American men that have gotten promoted and get in the bennies. And the women who have been promoted have been white women. And then the African-American women were saying, no, this is this is unique here. We're still getting discriminated against. But it's like the double whammy. It's because we're both African-American and women. And this particular group, this intersectional group is is getting discriminated against so that that's where that intersectionality where kind of comes from. But today, it gets used in a couple of different ways. And I'm wondering if we can unpack that a little bit.
Eric: Social sciences and others have used the term to talk about different identities that that that people may share. Intersectionality could could also include language and race, language, gender, it can include identity in terms of sexual identity and race, a whole host of things that that you can think about. And that's that's now becoming vogue and part of the discourse.
Micah: Part of what's going on in that legal case that Professor Crenshaw was talking about is you're trying to find ways that can trigger a court case relying on judicial categories such as race or gender, such that you can talk about the denial of equal protection laws going back to the Constitution. And the court has determined these different categories based on an earlier case, talking about discrete evidence for minorities, such that if there's a policy, discriminates against one of these groups, that triggers heightened scrutiny and puts the burden on the government to show that the policy is justified. Otherwise, it's kind of one …[ ] protection clause. So Crenshaw's observation, I think, was the GM plant or an auto plant that clearly neither of those categories by themselves was sufficient for these women to have their case heard and adjudicated in a correct way. So, there's a very specific judicial constitutional origin to this. And today it's it's transformed into in some of its online forms, an extensive list of various identities that can be put together. And that can have a descriptive component. You're just trying to understand where someone's coming from. But it also can have a normative component, such that various collections or combinations of different identities are seen as as more or less privileged or underprivileged, depending on how those groups have historically been treated or understood in this sense. So, I think that explosion in terms of what our students will hear about it today online or social media, is that latter part: It’s that social interactions. And it's important to distinguish that from the specific legal context that Crenshaw was talking about. They're connected too. Both important but conflating them both, I think, has lead to a lot of confusion about talking about why it's important.
Joe: One of the ways that I've talked about intersectionality with students is that intersectionality, I think, is an attempt to make something that was one dimensional, more three dimensional. Right. To recognize that identities cannot be reduced to singular categories without losing a lot of their essence. So when I think about intersectionality, when I think about status within a society which Micah was alluding to here. Right. I often think or have students picture a galaxy. Right. And a galaxy has a dense center of clustered stars. And then it has …it sort of thins out towards the edges and has some far flung stars. And throughout our lives, we are moving in our status and identity. So intersectionality captures a three dimensionality, and I think it captures in its newer formulations a degree of dynamism that it is dynamic. In any society there is going to be a person who has …we've used the word privilege to talk about this. We could talk about it in terms of power, which is just the ability to act, which, you know, I'm sure that makes sense. And certain identities do tend to confer more privilege than others. So, I as a straight white Christian male who is able-bodied and in middle age and very close to the power center of our society as it has been socially constructed. As I get older, I will move further from that. When I was young, I was not at the center of our society. I didn't have all sorts of powers like the ability to vote or these sorts of things. Right. My father, when he was in middle age, suddenly lost the ability to walk. Right. And started using a wheelchair. And that very quickly shifted where he was positioned in that that three-dimensional intersectional galaxy of privileges and statuses. This is three dimensional. It is a richer way to think about it. But I would also emphasize that some of the newer work on intersectionality is also emphasizing a degree of dynamism, that identities can be dynamic and shifting as opposed to a fixed set of “this is a privileged identity” and “this is a inherently and always marginalized identity.” So I think there are some really interesting work going on here.
Alisa: As I listen to you, Eric and Micah, speak, I think what I'm understanding in terms of intersectionality is that there's a dynamism to it that that you find favorable and that you might talk about intersectionality in terms of a person who deals with disability and Hispanic ethnicity, for example. But that you’d encourage us to not lose sight of of the roots of of the term intersectionality, how it was originally defined. Am I understanding that correctly, that it might be beneficial for us to explore those historical roots and groundings in an African-American female identity, for example?
Eric: Yeah, without a doubt. Now, I would I would suggest just. Yeah, just just a brief mention of this is what the term comes from. This was the source of it. And it's it is progressing. It's expanding, and allows us to understand different experiences of different people. So that's that that would be my suggestion. I wouldn't necessarily encourage people to go and read a bunch of Kimberly Crenshaw and other and other legal scholars who’re working on that in the early 90s. But do I think it's good to have that bit of information in your pocket so that you contextualize the term.
Penny: We can also see the effects of being members in more than one marginalized group in historical figures such as Sojourner Truth.
Joe: So, Sojourner Truth is buried not far from where we are at Calvin. She's in Battle Creek, Michigan. You can go visit her grave. Sojourner Truth, obviously anti-slavery advocate, born into slavery, escaped, but also a women's rights activist. And she explored the tension in shifting that identity. Right, in saying, look, I'm an abolitionist, but I'm also sort of a proto-feminist. Right. I want women to be able to vote. I want women to exercise freedom and self-determination. And she found that when she approached women's rights groups, she was not accepted or welcomed. And so there's always been particularly black women pointing out that their identities are being bifurcated in ways that don't allow them to live into the things that they're passionate about.
Micah: I get a little more hesitant or at least take more care when we use the term that has normative power to it. And I appreciated what Penny said earlier about this is not about sort of a guilt trip in terms of talking about. But we can't deny that some of our students will have encountered elements of that or instances of that in different social media places where it can be more of a guilt trip. And so you'll have a … think about it poor Appalachian family and a first generation college student who's white. That's a different sort of introduction to what this means, at least that they want and want them to understand that because they're from they're coming from they're not going to have that same sort of “Aha,” that an upper class East Grand Rapids kid can hopefully have their these issues.
Penny: So, I think that another piece of the puzzle that kind of just helps people be in the sort of headspace to have good conversations is to to not do the guilt trip thing and also to realize that if we talk about racism or how black and brown people and Native Americans have been disadvantaged historically, and that the counterbalance to that really is that whites or the people who were at that time categorized as white received advantages. But I think the whole idea of that and of privilege is not to say that a successful white person didn't work hard to get where they're at. That's that's not it at all. It's just that the color of their skin was not a hurdle that they had. That's not one of the hurdles that they had to face or get over to achieve their success. And to recognize that the color of people's skin, how they're perceived, is a hurdle for other people in our society.
Another term that we hear a lot about is this idea about structural racism, structural bias and prejudice. And I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit for our listeners.
Eric: When people, let’s say scholars and other folks, talk about structural racism, institutional racism, and so and just the structural institutional oppressions, we were referring to policies and again, policies, laws that are baked into societal structures that are against, have been against, still are against certain people. So this this this move beyond the individual culpability, although some individuals may be culpable. But it goes beyond the mere individual culpability to that this is a societal issue. This is historic. And some people benefit still from from it and others don't.
Joe: When I think about structural racism, I think about the rules of the game. Right. So if you think of life as a game, I grew up in the 80s, so we played a lot of Life, the board game.
Eric: Hey, me too.
Joe: Put the little pins in the car. If you think about life as a game and you look around the United States, it is impossible not to notice that certain people, white people tend to be winning the game at much higher rates. They are not the only people winning the game, but they are much more likely to. The median wealth of the white household in the United States is about 10 times-- at least 10 times --the median wealth of the average black family. Right now, we're playing the game of life. White families are doing 10 times as well. You're left with two basic ideas about how to explain that. Right. Either white people are better at the game or the game is rigged. I tend to believe that structural racism captures the idea that the game is rigged and it doesn't need to be played by mean spirited people. The players of the game don't have to hate the other team if the rules systematically advantage them. Right. If every time we'll switch to Monopoly, if every time you pass go, every time you pass go, the average white family collects way more money. You don't have to be a bad white person to quickly have more money. Right. The game is rigged.
Now, if you don't believe that, if you don't believe in structural racism, you are left saying there is something about black people that makes them not as good at the game. And that could be genetic, although that that has been widely disproved or more common today you could say there's something culturally inferior about black people. Right. This “culture of poverty” or a “culture of violence” or something like this. I tend to believe the game is rigged. The classic example here is housing. The history of redlining when the United States government made it very, very easy for white families to get 30-year mortgages starting in the 1930’s as a response to the Great Depression. The New Deal. So this was the Democratic president. FDR wants to respond to the Depression, make it easier to build homes and to finance homes for longer. Unfortunately, all that is for white people. Black people are systematically denied the opportunity to benefit from those programs and those loans and to live in those neighborhoods. And so you get a massive wealth transfer at White America from the 30s to the 60s until we pass the Fair Housing Act.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, if you start the race a couple laps ahead, you can still be each running well and you're never going to catch up. Right. So the game the game is rigged. That's what structural racism is trying to capture.
Eric: So, somebody of our students or anybody listen to this and say, well, you know, that that that professor Washington, he's got a Ph.D. He teaches at Calvin University. So, all the stuff about structural racism, that doesn't apply to him because he's made it. Maybe the game was …he he he got he knew how to play the rules of the game. And I would say that is patently false in terms of me knowing how to play the rules of the game. I've benefited from affirmative action policies in terms of admissions in graduate school. So, does that make me less deserving of my degree? Am I less than a scholar, a historian? Of course not, Not well…. I don't want to my own horn, but. No, no. But it means that those those were policies meant to correct historic discrimination and racism. And I think that's that's the other side of the story. And that's that's that's the anti-racist piece.
I definitely fit into, well, what Joe was referring to regarding, you know, wealth and housing and everything. My my family fits right into that. I often tell sometimes I tell people often do this, but sometimes I tell people that on both sides of my family --we went from the plantation as enslaved people, stayed on the plantation as sharecroppers, and from the plantation went to the projects. When when my my grandparents moved from rural Louisiana and moved into New Orleans, we all stayed in public housing at some at some point of our lives. So that experience is is unique to African-American experiences. So it doesn't matter where I am professionally, I have experienced the venom of institutional racism. I don’t want people to think I'm an exception.
Penny: Eric's family experiences is an example of how one family followed a common structured path from living as and in the situation of slaves to that of sharecroppers, and then to living in the projects of New Orleans, and of how the laws and practices of slavery and what came after that really set his family on that trajectory. Joe also sees how laws and practices that benefited white European settlers really set up his white ancestors for success, property ownership and generational wealth.
Joe: My great grandfather came to the United States, Willem, in 1912 from the Netherlands, right, where he was a lower class farmer. He was basically a sharecropper in the Netherlands. So working on somebody else's land. And what he heard and what other people heard at the time was in the United States, you could have your own farm, right. You wouldn't have to work somebody else's farm for meager gilders. So, he got on a boat out of Rotterdam and came to the United States. When he arrived in 1912, everything about the United States set him up for success. First of all, our immigration system, which privileged people from Northwest Europe, there was a pre-existing Dutch community here rooted in New York, going back to its time as New Amsterdam which included a religious community which you could plug in to. Hop right down the Erie Canal to Michigan and get to work owning a farm. And he could become white, right? He could change his name to Bill, which he did. From Willem and adapts to whiteness and reap all of its benefits. Now, if my great grandfather. So this is 1912, right? …my great grandfather had been Odawa, the people who owned or who were on the land that he later was on, he would have been on a death march to Oklahoma and would probably be dead. Right. And I would not exist if my great grandfather had been a black man, he would have been in the United States. He would have been sharecropping, probably, convict leasing, potentially somewhere in the south as maybe the first post slavery generation coming from absolute poverty. Right. So did he work hard? Of course he did. Right. But he came to the United States as a 17-year-old who spoke no English and his only skill was farming. Right. And he could within a couple of generations, amass a great family wealth. So, that's what we're talking about here. Right? We're not denying the differences in class. Right. He came here poor. Did he work hard? He did. Absolutely. But if his identity had been different, he could have been dead. Right. And my entire family tree doesn't even exist. So, I think that's what we need to get.
Penny: So, past laws related to slave versus free persons status and land ownership based on whether you are black or not, are both examples of structural bias. There were laws and practices that set up a common or likely trajectory or path for one set of persons, different from the likely and readily available paths in place for other sets of persons.
Another example where we can see past and present structural bias is in the area of schooling and education.
Joe: Where did you go to school and how diverse was the group of people you went to school with? Right. Because I almost guarantee you, you had a unit about Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Right. 1954, where we said no, separate but equal doesn't work and we're going to have integrated schooling. Now, that's a feel good story that America tells about itself. But it's largely a lie, right? Because schools are as segregated today as they were in the 1950s. The peak of school integration was in the 1980s. We've been going the wrong way since the 1980s. Right. But we don't like to talk about that. So what happened? And what happened is a great example of structural racism. Right. What happened is a Supreme Court case that you don't learn about because it's awkward, which is Milliken v. Bradley in 1974. Milliken v. Bradley was one of those Supreme Court decisions that took together a bunch of lower lawsuits. It was based out of Detroit, Michigan. Right. Grand Rapids actually had its own lawsuit at the time that's folded over and resolved by Milliken Bradley. But Milliken Bradley said that the United States government had no obligation to integrate schools because schools simply reflected unintegrated or segregated neighborhoods. So, the government washed its hands of responsibility for integrating schools. They had pursued policies of bussing. Kamala Harris, our current vice president, was bussed as a child. But this was deeply unpopular with white parents who didn't want integrated schools. So they stopped. Right. And Milliken v. Bradley said: hey, Detroit, you don't have to work to integrate your schools because your schools are simply a reflection of society. And that's not your fault. What that ignores, of course, is that it was the fault of the US government. The US government segregated our nation through housing policy. Detroit had a literal eight-foot concrete wall built between housing settlements to satisfy federal loan requirements. Right. But the government said we didn't have anything to do with it. People just don't like to live next to each other. And you shouldn't have to do anything about that. So here's another example, right, where the the rules of the game were rigged. And if you don't change the rules, if you don't go back and redress that situation, it will never self-correct. And so here we are 70 years later after Brown v. Board and schools again are as segregated functionally as they were before. Now, that goes against the narrative that we tell ourselves about slow and steady progress on these issues. So we got to work. We got work to do. So if you went to a school and it wasn't as integrated as you might have thought, think about why that is right. Ask yourself why that is, and start studying that history. And I think you'll learn a lot about structural racism.
Penny: I think that's one of the takeaways from looking at diversity and inclusion issues really is what can I learn by understanding our history and our present, and what then am I called to do when I'm confronted with different facts and truths and and the suffering and the injustices that have been part of our history, our nation's past, and that are still part of our nation's present. So, thank you for reminding me of that, of that purpose and challenge in all our learning, really.
If you are interested in learning more about key terms related to diversity and inclusion, I encourage you to check out the other three episodes focused on key terms. Episode 26 looks at anti-racism and white privilege. Episode 27 is a great discussion with Will Katerberg and Eric Washington on equity, the term BIPOC, and the topic of reparations. And Episode 30 explores key ways of understanding the big ideas of race and of racism.
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