BaCCC/Video Summaries/The Urgency of Intersectionality

Video Summary

The Urgency of Intersectionality (18:49, but it starts at 5:12)

https://youtu.be/akOe5-UsQ2o?t=313

• Kimberlé Crenshaw met a woman named Emma DeGraffenreid, an African-American woman whose case of race and gender discrimination against a local car manufacturing plant was dismissed by a judge.
• Emma was not hired for a job, which she believes was because she was a black woman.
• The African-Americans who were hired, usually for industrial jobs or maintenance jobs, were all men, while the women who were hired, usually for secretarial or front-office work, were all white, begging the question of race and gender discrimination.
• Emma was actually facing a framing problem: the frame the court was using to see gender or race discrimination was partial and distorting.
• Creating an analogy of an intersection, the roads to the intersection would be the way the workforce was structured by race and gender, and the traffic would be the hiring policies and practices that ran through those roads.
• Because Emma was both black and female, she was right at the intersection of those roads, experiencing the simultaneous impact of the company’s gender and race traffic.
• The law is like the ambulance that is ready to treat Emma only if it can be shown that she was harmed on the race road or gender road but not where those roads intersected.
• African-American women, like other women of colour and marginalised people, were facing challenges as a consequence of intersectionality – intersections of race and gender.
• In the same way that intersectionality has raised awareness of the way black women live their lives, it also exposes the tragic circumstances under which African-American women die, especially due to police violence.
• We must be willing to bear witness to the often-painful realities that we would rather just not confront – the everyday violence and humiliation that many black women have had to face due to their colour, age, gender expression, sexuality and ability.