Overt Overlooking

Intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, tends to creep its way into conversations where it really does not belong. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty conversational homes for the term and hopefully we can expand the conversations around the topics involving intersectionality.

Just as cars approach intersections at a point where two roads meet, people may find themselves at a metaphorical meeting point. When they do, the intersection isn’t created by the crossing of roads, but the simultaneous experience of oppression from two or more groups that the person identifies with.

This gets murky when the term intersectionality is applied to instances when an individual happens to have multiple experiences at the same time without any real sense of oppression.

In 2016 Hilary Clinton ran for President of the United States and misused the term on her campaign trail when she tweeted about an “intersectional set of challenges.” Though she did mention sexism as one challenge, the intersection she described deals with her womanhood and the broken economy.

Yes, both of these are issues that Clinton will experience struggle when dealing with, but the economy -as an issue- does not affect a particular group of people that are already oppressed. Without pretending to know anything about economics, being a white woman with the woes of the economy doesn’t fit the bill for expressing the hardship that intersectionality presents.

When “intersectionality” is used as a broad term to discuss the point where two things meet, yes, we understand the application of the word: roads intersect, lines intersect, and even our lives intersect. Only because two things intersect, (or meet an at intersection) doesn’t mean those things experience intersectionality.

What I’m trying to convey is that, if people easily collapse the usage of the word intersectionality with the act of intersecting, it’s highly possible they never understood the intended meaning of intersectionality in the first place. Once more proving its existence and giving weight to its nature.

Crenshaw is a black woman. The nation has a history of overlooking and undervaluing her demographic. There is a liberty people feel to use the term she had originally created to express the dual-action discrimination that women of color often face being subjected to both the sexism and the racism embedded in the American ideology, and apply it to other situations.

This liberty was validated by men and women alike who could not understand why a term would be used solely to discuss oppression from two camps of identification. Having not experienced it, it’s easy to question; but that’s just the point. To use the term to discuss issues that are not rooted in oppression, sends the message that the actual intended meaning of “intersectionality” was either not important enough to reserve usage of the word, or that the people using the term didn’t truly understand its meaning, and rather than getting clarification from the black woman who’d created it, they figured “eh.”

Simplification? Yes. However, what there is to see here is that a term coined by a black woman used to describe her unique experience as a black woman, is picked up by the masses and watered down to a “one size fits all” kind of term. It is hard to believe that if she had the respect and support of whiteness or the dominance and persuasion of masculinity, the intended meaning would have been so disregarded.

This is why it is important to keep the term narrowly tailored to its original intended use.  When we expand, we overlook the focus.