"Here's what intersectionality is not: It's not about all the different identities you have. It's not what makes you special!" So say Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith in their book, Stay Woke: A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (2019). The authors call this truncated rendition of intersectionality "superficial." Intersectionality is not a hip new way to talk about how unique we all are. It is not about appreciating diversity or myriad experiences. Indeed, diversity itself, Bunyasi and Smith tell us, has been "co-opted by racial conservatives" such that it has been stunted, rendered incapable of realizing its "full potential to eradicate disparities faced by historically marginalized groups."
Rather, intersectionality is an "analytical strategy," or “sensibility,” to analyze power (more on that in a bit). Put another way, intersectionality is not individualism, despite what sympathetic commentators at the Cato Institute suggest.
This demonstrably false myth about intersectionality has proven strangely persistent, at least amongst critical race theory (CRT) apologists and sympathizers—though never within CRT literature itself. As we will see, neither is intersectionality about accumulating victimhood points or a “race to the bottom.” Those concomitant myths (i.e., misreading) coincide with the individualism myth.
The softening of intersectionality in popular discourse arises either from intentional obfuscation or, more likely, misunderstanding. As I have argued elsewhere, intersectionality might be, in the long run, the most important and powerful idea that has emerged from CRT—and is immensely intricate to the longevity and disciplinary integrity of CRT itself. It rarely receives this credit, and even rarer still is it rightly understood. What follows is a brief primer on intersectionality, an attempt to correct the record, vis a vis the improper, colloquial “intersectionality as individualism” narrative. The bottom line is, intersectionality is about discerning and critiquing power, and dismantling what it perceives to be oppressive power structures.
I. Correction: “Countering the Discourse”
At the outset, any suggestion that any concept arising from contemporary critical social theories (CST) is friendly to a “neoliberal” (or “liberal humanist”) value like individualism is per se suspect. Along with meritocracy and equal opportunity, individualism is cast by CST’s as “ideology,” or an “ideological discourse.”
Briefly, to CST, discourses are not descriptive or neutral. They are institutionalized ways of speaking—words, symbols, metaphors, narratives—that are shaped by relations of power and engrained (intentionally or otherwise) with ideology.
The dominant discourses in society are, in fact, dominant because they benefit those in power, their predominant authors (though they are unwittingly perpetuated by all of us who engage uncritically therewith). They are part of the hegemonic apparatus—the ways of knowing and speaking (the two being nigh inseparable) prop this up. Even discourses that initially challenge or subvert established ways of communicating and knowing can (and probably will) be coopted by the powerful for their own self-serving ends. (Martin Luther King's reference to a "colorblind" society first derived from Justice John Marshall Harlan’s justly famous, but now much derided, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) dissent, is an oft cited example of this phenomenon.)
On this view, then, analysis of power relations is the most effective way of unlocking the meaning of a given discourse.
Accordingly, critical race theorists, in particular, believe that several intertwined ideologies are prevalent in western society which serve to justify and preserve the hegemony of the white, heteronormative, cis-gendered patriarchy. Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy posit in their 2012 book, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, "Ideology is a powerful way to support the dominant group’s position. There are several key interrelated ideologies that rationalize the concentration of dominant group members at the top of society and their right to rule."1
Individualism is one of these "interrelated ideologies." Per DiAngelo and Sensoy, individualism, which is intricately related to "meritocracy" within a capitalist regime, is
"[T]he belief that we are each unique and outside the forces of socialization. Under individualism, group memberships are irrelevant and the social groups to which we belong don’t provide us with any more or fewer benefits. The ideology of individualism explains measurable gaps between dominant and minoritized groups (such as in education, health, income, and net worth) as the result of individual strengths or weaknesses. Therefore, those at the top are there because they are the best, brightest, and hardest working."
Individualism is a cover for the societal position and power of the dominant group to maintain the status quo such that it appears acceptable to all parties involved. It is an insidious and false mechanism of liberalism employed, per DiAngelo and Sensoy, "for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality. In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow."
Individualism is an allusion, a racist myth, and a particularly capitalist, western one at that. The whiteness chart from the Smithsonian NMAAHC (which went viral but has since been taken down) made this much clear.
Hence, DiAngelo has referred to "the Discourse of Individualism" as "one of the primary barriers" to white people grasping the dynamics of racism in America and, therefore, to becoming antiracist. Considering people as individuals, far from ameliorating racism, says DiAngelo, "actually functions to obscure and maintain racism's manifestation in our lives." It does this by, inter alia, denying the significance of white privilege, hiding the accumulation of generational wealth, and obscures the power of collective socialization and the dominant culture. Worse still, it reproduces the twin myths of colorblindness and meritocracy.
Additionally, and most damningly, individualism, by perpetuating the aforementioned myths and obscuring relative power dynamics of society, is an anti-emancipatory ideology. Along with meritocracy and equal opportunity, individualism serves to dilute the utopian imaginations of dominated, marginalized persons such that they cannot imagine a better future. In this way, individualism is a textbook hegemonic tool and, therefore, a dangerous white lie from which we all must be disabused if an equitable future is to be realized. It fools people into believing that the present state of affairs is both just and inevitable (or at least necessary). This is why Bunyasi and Smith refer to it as a "tool of oppression."
All of this is almost immediately and explicitly made clear in any contemporary critical theory primer, which leads one to doubt whether those (predominately libertarian) commentators peddling the "intersectionality is just individualism 2.0" stance have, in fact, engaged with critical theory at all. Even Jordan Peterson has employed this kind of misguided rhetoric.
That being said, a deeper dive into the development, purpose, and function of intersectionality will reveal why, even if individualism was not derided as a matter of course by critical race theorists, intersectionality could never be accurately described as synonymous with, or conducive to, individualism.
Examining the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the mother of intersectionality, will illuminate the true nature of intersectionality contra outside observers who especially neuter its political significance, intradisciplinary function, and purpose.
Crenshaw, working within CRT and drawing on Black feminist “multiplicitious conceptions of power and identity,” developed intersectionality as heuristic and disposition to approach (and critique and dismantle) hegemonic, hierarchical, and established knowledge production paradigms, and expose the inadequacy of a single-axis framework in doing so.
As later described by Crenshaw, intersectionality is “a counter-hegemonic and transformative intervention in knowledge production, activism, pedagogy, and non-oppressive coalitions.” It is “an analytic tool [or “analytic sensibility”] to capture and engage contextual dynamics of power,” she wrote elsewhere. Stated differently, it is a way of thinking about “the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power.”
However, the goal was never “simply to understand social relations of power” but to transform them. Intersectionality is a “concept animated by the imperative of social change.” It is about mapping social hierarchies, relative power relations. It is, above all, a praxis.
II. Development: The Expansionist Project of Kimberlé Crenshaw
Since her debut on the academic scene, Crenshaw's project has been one of expansion. This is clear from the beginning of her scholarship. A trio of articles from Crenshaw are key to grasping her vision: First, her article in the Harvard Law Review in 1988, "Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law."
Second, an article from the following year called, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” which appeared in the University of Chicago Legal Forum.
And finally, perhaps her most well-known article, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991. Though the latter features the fullest development of intersectionality, the precursors contain the germ of the idea and lay indispensable groundwork necessary to understanding and applying intersectionality in the way intended by Crenshaw. Indeed, the first article from 1988 is arguably the most significant piece of scholarship from Crenshaw's life-long project, but also the most neglected. I will briskly sketch each article, in turn.
1988: Race, Reform, and Retrenchment
In 1988, the breakaway of CRT from Critical Legal Studies (CLS) was not yet complete. As Crenshaw and her co-editors of the Key Writings clarified, however, said break was not a repudiation, rather a correction and expansion—CRT still maintains the “indeterminacy thesis,” for example. (The introduction of Key Writings is well worth the read and will be cited here in leu of recounting the CLS-CRT divide.) Crenshaw’s first article reflects this.
The goal, in part, of Crenshaw's first article is to broaden the horizons of her CLS/CRT fellow travelers. That is, to improve their conception of ideological hegemony. In short, Crenshaw sought to make said conception more thoroughly Gramscian, and she says as much.
“The key flaw in CLS writing on legal ideology and hegemony, however, is that it overlooks the relationship of racism to hegemony. Critical literature focuses primarily on legal consciousness and on consensual domination, leaving coercion and popular consciousness unexamined. Because racism is intimately connected to both coercion and popular consciousness, the Critics’ failure to examine them undermines the utility of heir critique in analyzing the oppression of Black people and in explaining domination and legitimation in society as a whole.”
Hence, Crenshaw’s “expanded critique” emphasized “race consciousness as a central ideological and political pillar upholding existing social conditions.” Crenshaw is offering a corrective and post-mortem: the oversight of CLS is what killed it.
Crenshaw notes at the outset that critical scholars have always adopts Antonio Gramsci’s view of law, over and against the one-dimensional view of traditional Marxist accounts wherein law is merely a tool for domination, thereby overlooking the extent to which the acquiescence of dominated classes to a given legal regime affords it legitimacy. The two-fold nature of domination, consensus and coercion, are key to a critical approach to law. “[A] more complete explanation of domination requires that coercion and consent be considered together.” This CLS was not sufficiently doing; it flattened the two into one, thereby regressing into a more traditional Marxist paradigm. (They were also obsessed with class analysis to the detriment of race consciousness.)
Crenshaw quotes R.W. Gordon on this point. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony recognizes that “the most effective kind of domination takes place when both the dominant and dominated classes believe that the existing order… is satisfactory, or at least represents the most that anyone could expect.” This limits the utopian imaginations of the oppressed. Not realizing the contingency of the status quo, the dominated classes reify and then legitimate it (i.e., an illusion of consensus). Law is both a result and reinforcement of this. Law is “ideology.”
Crenshaw (channeling Alan Freeman) concludes: “If law functions to reinforce a world view that things should be the way they are, then law cannot provide an effective means to challenge the present order.”
Obviously, Crenshaw does not abandon this Gramscian outlook of CLS. Rather, she seeks to further it. CLS scholars claimed to expose ideology and critique domination but it failed to realize the intricacies of racial domination to the prevailing hegemony. This failure rendered the critique incomplete and, therefore, insufficiently Gramscian and critical. Contra CLS, the true “ideological source” of coercion in America was not “liberal legal consciousness, but racism.” This shift by Crenshaw and her fellow CRT’ers allowed them to salvage some potentially transformative tools and ideas of liberalism, whilst discarding the mystified elements in the same.
Having expanded CLS's (or, really, CRT’s) view of hegemony to not only remember the two-fold nature of domination (consensus and coercion) but to acknowledge that racism is an essential tool—perhaps the preeminent tool in the American context—of coercion, a pillar upholding the hegemonic status quo, Crenshaw then went further. By her lights, not only had CLS scholars neglected the coercive element of Gramsci's hegemony, but they had also considered oppression in America one dimensionally, to the detriment of their analysis and most especially their solutions—to the extent that any viable solutions had been offered, and here Crenshaw is frank in her criticism of the monotonous, incessant "trashing" of legal institutions which had been the favored pastime of CLS practitioners at the time.
Crenshaw was suggesting nothing less than a “realignment of the Critical project” by incorporating “race consciousness” thereto—the kerfuffle over which, in part, led to the CLS-CRT break. “Exposing the centrality of race consciousness is crucial to identifying and delegitimating beliefs that present hierarchy as inevitable and fair.” This because “Racism serves a consensus-building hegemonic role… perpetuating a mythology… reinforcing an illusion of a white community that cuts across ethnic, gender, and class lines,” whereby the “white norm” is “submerged in popular consciousness.”
Any bifurcated of race, gender, or class, then would be insufficient. You can probably see where this is going. Before jumping to intersectionality proper, however, another thoroughly Gramscian element of Crenshaw’s first article should be highlighted—if only just for fun.
The reason that Crenshaw justifies the continued use of “rights rhetoric” and other tools of liberalism, in the face of CLS’s apathetic protest of the same, is purely pragmatic. “[O]ppressed people sometimes advance by creating ideological and political crisis, but that form of the crisis-producing challenge must reflect the institutional logic of the system.” This, she says, is what the Civil Rights movement was all about. The struggle to produce a new status quo must, inevitably, make use of available tools.
This is the Gramscian “War of Position,” Crenshaw informs us. “[T]he challenge in [western societies] is to create a counter-hegemony by maneuvering within and expanding he dominant ideology ot embrace the potential for change.” (Crenshaw makes the connection between Gramsci’s strategy and Roberto Unger’s “deviationist doctrine” too.) The point is that Crenshaw and her cohort self-consciously adopted this subversive Gramscian strategy—”change depends on skillful use of the liberating potential of dominant ideology”—and this accounts for the tension with CLS.
Crenshaw’s first article leaves no doubt as to this Gramscian connect; the whole point of it is to make the critique more radical and effective by returning thereto. (Don’t let anyone ever deny this connect, as D.A. Horton recently attempted to do. The neo-Marxist strand of thought, at bare minimum, is immensely inspiring to CRT’s founders.) Of course, there is some argument that CRT’ers use Gramsci wrongly, but that does not concern us here.
1989: Demarginalizing the Intersection
Crenshaw’s second article of note is, perhaps, the least significant, a sort of weigh station between the seeds of 1988 and the full flower of 1991. Nevertheless, it marks the emergence of intersectionality in recognizable form.
In “Demarginalizing,” Crenshaw began critiquing how “dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage along a single category axis,” wherein gender and race, in particular, are treated separately in anti-discrimination law. Precedent in that area failed to recognize the alleged compounded discrimination experienced by black women, forcing discrimination claims by black women to conform to either the experiences of black men or white women as the exemplars.
I recently analyzed the contours of this idea at New Discourses which I will reproduce, in part, here.
Crenshaw (in “Demarginalizing”) explained the alleged conundrum that intersectionality was intended to address,
“dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis…this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting the inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group. In other words, in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women.”
In other words, black women suffer a unique form of discrimination. A single-axis framework obscures this and implicitly sets up black men as the exemplar for anti-black discrimination, and white women as the representative of misogyny. Black men, insofar as they are men in a male dominant society, are privileged; white women, insofar as they are white, are likewise privileged in a white dominant society. So long as conceptions of discrimination in the law are dominated by single axis thinking, black women, who stand at the intersection of two forms of oppression and enjoy neither relative privilege, slip through the cracks.
“[t]his focus [in antidiscrimination law] on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who are multiply burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination.”
But neither is discrimination experienced by black women “additive,” or a simple combination of racism and sexism, says Crenshaw. Black women are not merely black and women, but black women, who exist at the bottom of both the racial and gender hierarchies that reinforce one another. Conversely, it is not merely whites and males that sit atop the hierarchy, but white men. Simply fitting black women into a preexisting analytical structure would not do. “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.” In the individual black woman, her race and gender are inextricably linked, inseparable—and this dictates her experience and social location.
The solution, per Crenshaw, is to adopt a multi-axes framework that recognizes the interlocking, mutually reinforcing and cumulative nature of both anti-black racism and misogyny.
The point is that Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination or both.
(Crenshaw then conducts extended analysis of various Title VII cases to illustrate her position. See my article mentioned above for discussion of said analysis.)
As Carbado later aptly discerned,
“Intersectionality reflects a commitment neither to subjects nor to identities per se but, rather, to marking and mapping the production and contingency of both. Nor is the theory an effort to identify, in the abstract, an exhaustive list of intersectional social categories and to add them up to determine—one and for all—the different intersectional configurations those categories can form. Part of what Crenshaw sought o do in ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection’ was to illustrate the constitutive and ideologically contingent role law plays in creating legible and illegible juridical subjects and identities. Her effort in this respect is part of a broader intellectual tradition in critical race theory to demonstrate how the law constructs (and describes preexisting) social categories.”
Understanding this is key to grasping what Crenshaw was attempting (and ultimately accomplished) in her second article.
1991: Mapping the Margins
By 1991, Crenshaw had more or less perfected her theory (and we will not belabor the point here). Maintaining focus on black women, she argued for critical confrontation of “the multilayered and routinized forms of domination” in black women’s lives, so that the intersection of “class dimensions” and “diverse structures” could be revealed— “race, gender, and class are implicated together.”
Again, “Mapping” shows that Crenshaw’s emphasis is not on individual identity but upon the intersecting “patterns of subordination” (i.e., “intersectional subordination”). So too is the background work of the expanded, thoroughly Gramscian hegemony present, underlying Crenshaw’s articulation of her now mature theory.
To summarize thus far via Carbado,
“In both ‘Demarginalizing’ and ‘Mapping,’ Crenshaw staged a two-pronged intervention. She exposed and sought to dismantle the instantiations of marginalization that operated within institutionalized discourses that legitimized existing power relations (e.g. law); and at the same time, she placed into sharp relief how discourses of resistance (e.g. feminism and antiracism) could themselves function as sites that produced and legitimized marginalization…[which is to say] limited the scope of institutional transformation.”2
III. Design: Power Not Identity
Since Crenshaw introduced intersectionality over thirty years ago, much ink has been spilled on the subject. As Crenshaw herself recently noted, intersectionality has taken on a life of its own, maturing into a discrete area of scholarship that has, in turn, spawned its own subdisciplines. Three decades on, intersectional theorists now have occasion to hone intersectionality's application, better define its essence, and critique past treatment of the subject.
In her book, Undermining Intersectionality: The Perils of Powerblind Feminism (2018), Barbara Tomlinson employs "critical and poststructuralist discourse analysis" to unveil how white feminist critiques of intersectionality are fueled by "powerblind discursive practices that reinforce racial hierarchies and undermine feminism's state commitment to social justice."
Indeed, by Tomlinson lights, the decidedly political, power-focused enterprise of intersectionality has too frequently been watered down by white feminist into an exercise in "ruminating about overlapping aspects of individual identity." This misguided, traditional feminist emphasis on individual identity (rather than identity vis a vis interlocking vectors of domination) "works to occlude the workings of power." That is, it erodes intersectionality’s purpose.
Tomlinson notes early on the rapid rise in popularity of intersectionality, and draws on the burgeoning area of scholarship, but also the multitude of misinterpretation and misapplication thereof. "Critics routinely misrepresent the history and arguments of intersectional thinking," writes Tomlinson. The fault lies in treating intersectionality as "a unitary entity rather than an analytic tool used across a range of disciplines." This misconception yields a distortion of its arguments and, most egregiously, "reduce[s] its radical critique of power to desires for 'identity' and 'inclusion,' and offer[s] a 'de-politicized' or 'de-radicalized' intersectionality as an asset for dominant disciplinary discourses."
To review, intersectionality argues that the assumption that social categories or identities are fixed, isolated, and static serves only to reproduce social dominance, the status quo. Gender, race, and class are not isolated but rather, "variable and changing constellations that are relational, interconnected, mutually constituted, and simultaneous." Intersectionality combats single-axis theories of domination (especially in law) by highlighting how all identities are multidimensional and mutually informing, thereby exposing multiple axes of power—how all oppressions are interlocking and mutually reinforcing, not single-issue vectors.
Crenshaw challenged white feminism's (in her mind) inordinate emphasis on gender as the primary axis of oppression, as well as the singular focus of male-dominated antiracism on race as the main site of oppression. Crenshaw also problematized the law's (and antiracist politics') single-axis thinking (specifically in antidiscrimination law) wherein the experience of black males were held up as the prototypical victims of racism and white women were presented as the exemplar of lived sexism. Black women, who exist at an intersection of racism and sexism, were, according to Crenshaw, lost in the shuffle. Intersectionality was a means of strengthening feminism and antiracism as discourses of resistance by showing how said discourses themselves had produced marginalization.
The point is that intersectionality was always meant to, to borrow from Devon Carbado, theorize power and empower theory (i.e., critical theory). This was Crenshaw’s vision, well recognized by Tomlinson who chastised her fellow feminists for regressively morphing intersectionality back into an appreciation of individualism, thereby stripping it of its radical, transformative potential.3 That Tomlinson’s corrective of those in her own camp is congruent with Crenshaw’s own thought is clear. Its not about identity, its about power. Anything less stunts the radicalism of the theory. Perhaps, this seems strange when discussing theoretical underpinnings of so-called identity politics. An extend quote from Crenshaw, Sumi Cho, and Leslie McCall will clarify, and confirm Tomlinson:
“[W]e emphasize an understanding of intersectionality that is not exclusively or even primarily preoccupied with categories, identities, and subjectivities… The recasting of intersectionality as a theory primarily fascinated with the infinite combinations and implications of overlapping identities from an analytic initially concerned with structures of power and exclusion is curious given the explicit references to structures that appear in much of the early work… [They refer to this original vision as “structural intersectionality” noting that it focused on] ‘multilayered and routinized forms of domination.”
The authors continue,
“Attentiveness to identity, if simultaneously confronting power, need not be interpreted so narrowly… intersectionality helps reveal how power works in diffuse and differentiated ways through the creation and deployment of overlapping identity categories.”
They then add for effect, “[Intersectionality] primarily concerns the way things work rather than who people are.” To quote Tomlinson again:
“If critics think intersectionality is a matter of identity rather than power, they cannot see which differences make a difference. Yet it is exactly our analyses of power that reveal which differences carry significance.”
IV. Role: A Mid-Level Theory
A quick note on intersectionality’s function or role within CRT, alluded to already: It was stated earlier that intersectionality is not a grand but a mid-level theory. In many ways, it makes CRT more actionable and applicable by bringing down to the ground level the high-level insights of the theory. Intersectionality permits CRT to more easily be applied to specific situations, to "concrete struggles over power and social structures." Tomlinson likens intersectionality to Antonio Gramsci's theory of a middle-range, protracted "war of position"—that must necessarily precede the political maneuver warfare— that was to be waged across all sites of cultural and intellectual conflict (legal, literary, sociological, etc.). To that end, intersectionality, within the CRT project, is essential to developing critical consciousness. (This is why I have called it the “linchpin” of CRT.)
V. Application: (Non)Sense and Sensibility
In light of this, intersectionality is best understood as an anti-subordination mechanism, "an analytic to challenge structural inequality and call for institutional transformation." But, as I have shown elsewhere, it is much more than a neutral, purely analytical tool. Intersectionality is decidedly political ("politics defines identities rather than identities defining politics"). It is a sensibility or disposition that pervades and instructs all other analytical tools. Tomlinson further describes it as "a heuristic for thinking in supple and strategic ways about social categories, relations of power, and the complexities of sameness/difference in terms of conceptions of both/and rather than either/or." Intersectionality refuses to accept piecemeal justice, that is, racial justice that is not gender justice, and so on.
Most importantly, the description of intersectionality as a sensibility conforms to its design and purpose within CRT, apart from which it cannot be rightly considered. As delineated above, intersectionality is not an overarching grand theory but rather "a politically grounded mid-level theory for anti-subordination and social change." Accordingly, intersectionality "complexifies" existing theories, frameworks, problems, analytics, and discourses (most directly, CRT).
It is like a booster shot, or a parasite, depending on how you look at it. It requires a host to function. Even the burgeoning field of intersectionality studies is dedicated to studying the application of intersectionality to other topics via the delivery mechanism of various CST’s. Speaking of intersectionality as a stand-alone theory is, in my opinion, inaccurate and somewhat incoherent. Crenshaw’s product was meant to plug holes in CRT, as it were; to strengthen and expand power analysis.
Though other CST’s have easily converted the mechanism to their own disciplines, it was never intended to operate outside of CRT and adjacent critical movements. This is not to downplay the significance of intersectionality as articulated and popularized by Crenshaw. It very well may have saved CRT from going the way of CLS and other “law in context” trends; it saved CRT from the one-dimensional trap it accused others of.
VI. Conclusion
That being said, whilst the essence of intersectionality has repeatedly been revisited by its adherents in order to preserve it, this does not rule out an appropriate expansion into new sites of power and conflict, as they say, new applications. “[T]he theory is never done, nor exhausted by its prior articulations or movements; it is always already an analysis-in-progress,” wrote Crenshaw in 2013. And this necessarily so given that power dynamics and related identities are socially contingent and perpetually in flux.
What intersectionality is decidedly not, however, is the transportation of individualism—which is roundly derided by critical social theorists—to new heights and applications. That was never the purpose, goal, or function of Crenshaw’s brainchild. It has always been about power, not the person.
The insistence by some that DiAngelo, in particular, stands outside of the CRT tradition is laughable. Of course, as a self-professed anti-racist educator and practitioner of critical white studies her work is formally distinct from that of CRT’ers. But there is no question that critical white studies is within the CRT stream. We don’t want to be sloppy, but roping DiAngelo in with her CRT counterparts requires no sleight of hand. Consider, for example, the first noteworthy book on the subject, Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (1997). It was edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (authors of the most popular CRT primer) and was described (by the publisher, no less) as follows: “Delgado and Stefancic expressly offer critical white studies as the next step in critical race theory.” If one actually reads the book the veracity of this description becomes clear.
Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, & Tomlinson, “Intersectionality: Mapping the Movements of a Theory,” Du Bois Review 10(2) (2013), pp. 303-312, 304.
Carbado also warns against conflating intersectionality with “double jeopardy,” the idea that “the greater number of marginal categories to which one belongs, the greater the number of disadvantages one will experience.” Carbado explains that,
“The theory does not posit, for example, that Black lesbians… will in every context be more disadvantaged than, for example, Black heterosexual men… Mapping fixed hierarchies onto particular identities obscures that both power and social categories are contextually constituted. In this respect… we need to ‘move beyond the question of whose group is worse off to specify the distinctive forms of oppression experienced by those with intersecting subordinate identities… Because people with multiple subordinate identities… do not usually fit the prototypes of their respective subordinate groups… Intersectionality applies even where there is no double jeopardy. Indeed, the theory applies where there is no jeopardy at all. Thus, it is a mistake to conceptualize intersectionality as a ‘race to the bottom.’ The theory seeks to map the top of social hierarchies as well.” [internal citations omitted]