Decompiling Oppression #11
Sam McVeety
I've been wanting to write something about Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, but haven't found the words so far. I'm hoping that I will be able to remedy that next time, but in the meantime, I encourage all of us to stand in solidarity against racist violence. Beyond the nationwide protests, think about what actions you can take to result in real, lasting change. My heart goes out to the communities that are terrorized by this unconscionable violence.
Last time, we took a closer look at intersectionality, and Kimberlé Crenshaw's foundational work on that topic, through both structural and political intersectionality. This week, we'll expand that work by looking at some related concepts, and further explore what applying intersectionality looks like in practice. Content warning: we will be talking about histories of racial and sexual violence.
Historically, one of the frameworks that preceded intersectionality was the idea of essentialism, which treats groups (and group experiences) as uniform and homogeneous. While that might seem like an obviously flawed idea, it creeps into modern thinking in a number of ways. As we'll see, essentialism often implies that someone has a "first" identity that supersedes all others (for example, that a woman should always advocate for "women's causes" above all else), whereas intersectionality holds that a person’s overlapping identities creates unique combined identities and perspectives.
In order to understand why intersectionality was such an important theory, it's important to look at the historical effects of essentialism, and the women's movement provides a number of powerful examples. (The "advanced" reading for this week is Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory by Angela Harris, which does a spectacular job of identifying and dismantling essentialist thinking within the feminist movement.) Harris looks at the historical course of "dominance theory", which held that women had a common experience of being in a male-dominated society, and were thus defined in terms of this dominance. In dominance theory, there was no space for a distinct experience for black women (and other non-male people of color), because everything was defined in terms of a degree of dominance.
When it came to black women, the best that dominance theory could come up with is that "black women are white women, only more so" (via Harris). This erases a number of important points when comparing the experiences of different women. First, it obscures the complex position that many white women can occupy, as both the oppressor, and the oppressed. Historically, there are many instances where white women have held the power of life and death (Emmett Till being perhaps the best known), through the gender dynamics that exist between white women and black men. For black women, racist stereotypes of being "lustful" and temptresses of white men served to erase a horrific pattern of sexual violence.
One important act of anti-essentialism is to simply name the stories that are often left out of typical histories and narratives. When we say that women (citizens) got the vote from the Nineteenth Amendment, it's important to recognize that many black women (and men) were still disenfranchised for decades by voter intimidation and poll taxes (and arguably, modern voter suppression still prevents "universal suffrage"). When we talk about immigration, it's important to note that the average Scandinavian immigrant had a very different experience than the average Chinese immigrant. By telling these counterstories, we disrupt the idea of essentialist narratives.
In our day-to-day lives, a close cousin of essentialism is the practice and impact of tokenism, where someone is reduced to a single identity. Think about the tokenism that can exist in many integrated (but not equitable) spaces, where one person is asked to represent the opinions of his/her/their race, gender, class, or other identity. Particularly in places where gender and racial representation is wildly imbalanced (like the tech or financial industry), tokenism can further discourage participation in shared spaces. It creates an impossible burden of trying to represent an entire identity at once, while simultaneously erasing the unique experiences of the individual and their agency.
Race and gender are only two dimensions of identity, and beyond them, overlapping identities can create an infinite spectrum of experiences. In rejecting essentialism, we need to strike a careful balance to notice that there are still patterns of treatment and experience that correspond to different groups, without treating these groups as monolithic. I'm particularly fond of the way that Harris puts it when she suggests that "we make our categories tentative, relational, and unstable". With that in mind, here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Reflect on a time when you felt tokenized, or might have caused someone else to feel tokenized. If it was someone else, think about what you could change about the situation if you encountered it again.
Communal: Think about your friends and the communities you are part of, and how the composition of each of these might affect how different people perceive those spaces. Have a group discussion about how to ensure that those spaces are inclusive and free of tokenism.
Solidarity: Support organizations like /dev/color and Ada, which explicitly center inclusion and equity in the tech field.
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