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An illustration including law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, and legal text on intersectionality-related cases.

The intersectionality wars

When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 30 years ago, it was a relatively obscure legal concept. Then it went viral.

By Updated May 28, 2019, 9:09am EDT

There may not be a word in American conservatism more hated right now than "intersectionality." On the right, intersectionality is seen as "the new caste system" placing nonwhite, non-heterosexual people on elevation.

To many conservatives, intersectionality means "because you're a minority, you go special standards, special treatment in the optics of some." It "promotes solipsism at the personal level and partition at the social level." It represents a class of feminism that "puts a label on you. It tells you lot how oppressed yous are. Information technology tells yous what you're allowed to say, what you're immune to retrieve." Intersectionality is thus "actually dangerous" or a "conspiracy theory of victimization."

This is a highly unusual level of disdain for a give-and-take that until several years ago was a legal term in relative obscurity outside academic circles. Information technology was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other private characteristics "intersect" with 1 another and overlap. "Intersectionality" has, in a sense, gone viral over the past one-half-decade, resulting in a backfire from the right.

In my conversations with correct-wing critics of intersectionality, I've constitute that what upsets them isn't the theory itself. Indeed, they largely concord that it accurately describes the way people from different backgrounds run into the world. The lived experiences — and experiences of discrimination — of a black woman will exist unlike from those of a white adult female, or a black man, for case. They object to its implications, uses, and, most chiefly, its consequences, what some conservatives view as the upending of racial and cultural hierarchies to create a new one.

But Crenshaw isn't seeking to build a racial hierarchy with black women at the pinnacle. Through her work, she's attempting to demolish racial hierarchies altogether.

Meet Kimberlé Crenshaw

I met Kimberlé Crenshaw in her office at Columbia Law Schoolhouse on Manhattan's Upper West Side on a rainy day in January. Crenshaw, who is a professor at both Columbia and the University of California Los Angeles, had merely returned from an overseas trip to speak at the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.

Crenshaw is a 60-year-former Ohio native who has spent more than 30 years studying civil rights, race, and racism. In her mildly overheated part, the professor was affable and friendly every bit she answered questions while police force students entered her role intermittently every bit they prepared for a panel discussion coincidentally titled "Mythbusting Intersectionality" scheduled for that evening.

Simply it'south not just academic panels where the fight over what intersectionality is — or isn't — plays out. Intersectionality has become a dividing line between the left and the right. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) tweets that "the future is female [and] intersectional." The Daily Wire'southward Ben Shapiro, meanwhile, posts videos with headlines similar "Is intersectionality the biggest problem in America?"

The current debate over intersectionality is actually three debates: 1 based on what academics like Crenshaw actually mean past the term, one based on how activists seeking to eliminate disparities between groups take interpreted the term, and a third on how some conservatives are responding to its utilise past those activists.

Crenshaw has watched all this with no minor measure of surprise. "This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content," she said.

But those who have worked with her accept seen how she can ask tough questions and demand difficult answers, particularly on the subject of race, even of her closest allies. Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the Academy of Hawaii who has worked with Crenshaw on issues relating to race and racism for years, told me, "She is not one to back abroad from making people uncomfortable."

I also spoke with Kevin Minofu, a former pupil of Crenshaw's who is now a postdoctoral research scholar at the African American Policy Forum, a recollect tank co-founded by Crenshaw in 1996 with a focus on eliminating structural inequality. In Crenshaw's civil rights law grade, he said, "what she did in the course was really imbue a very deep understanding of American gild, American legal culture, and American power systems."

Minofu described Crenshaw'southward agreement of intersectionality every bit "not really concerned with shallow questions of identity and representation only ... more interested in the deep structural and systemic questions about bigotry and inequality."

The origins of "intersectionality"

To understand what intersectionality is, and what information technology has become, you take to expect at Crenshaw's body of work over the past 30 years on race and ceremonious rights. A graduate of Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of Wisconsin, Crenshaw has focused in much of her inquiry on the concept of critical race theory.

As she detailed in an article written for the Baffler in 2017, critical race theory emerged in the 1980s and '90s amidst a group of legal scholars in response to what seemed to Crenshaw and her colleagues like a false consensus: that bigotry and racism in the police were irrational, and "that one time the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the underlying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign country of impersonally apportioned justice."

This was, she argued, a delusion as comforting every bit it was unsafe. Crenshaw didn't believe racism ceased to exist in 1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, nor that racism was a mere multi-century aberration that, once corrected through legislative action, would no longer impact the police or the people who rely upon it.

There was no "rational" explanation for the racial wealth gap that existed in 1982 and persists today, or for minority underrepresentation in spaces that were purportedly based on "colorblind" standards. Rather, as Crenshaw wrote, discrimination remains considering of the "stubborn endurance of the structures of white dominance" — in other words, the American legal and socioeconomic lodge was largely built on racism.

Before the arguments raised by the originators of critical race theory, there wasn't much criticism describing the way structures of constabulary and guild could exist intrinsically racist, rather than simply distorted by racism while otherwise untainted with its stain. And then at that place weren't many tools for understanding how race worked in those institutions.

That brings us to the concept of intersectionality, which emerged from the ideas debated in critical race theory. Crenshaw first publicly laid out her theory of intersectionality in 1989, when she published a paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum titled "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex." You can read that paper here.

The paper centers on three legal cases that dealt with the issues of both racial bigotry and sex activity discrimination: DeGraffenreid 5. Full general Motors, Moore v. Hughes Helicopter, Inc., and Payne v. Travenol. In each example, Crenshaw argued that the court's narrow view of discrimination was a prime number example of the "conceptual limitations of ... single-event analyses" regarding how the law considers both racism and sexism. In other words, the law seemed to forget that blackness women are both black and female, and thus subject to discrimination on the basis of both race, gender, and often, a combination of the two.

For example, DeGraffenreid v. Full general Motors was a 1976 example in which v blackness women sued General Motors for a seniority policy that they argued targeted black women exclusively. Basically, the company simply did not hire black women before 1964, meaning that when seniority-based layoffs arrived during an early 1970s recession, all the black women hired after 1964 were subsequently laid off. A policy like that didn't fall nether just gender or just race discrimination. Simply the courtroom decided that efforts to bind together both racial bigotry and sexual practice discrimination claims — rather than sue on the ground of each separately — would be unworkable.

As Crenshaw details, in May 1976, Judge Harris Wangelin ruled against the plaintiffs, writing in role that "blackness women" could not be considered a carve up, protected class within the law, or else it would risk opening a "Pandora's box" of minorities who would demand to be heard in the police force:

"The legislative history surrounding Title VII does not betoken that the goal of the statute was to create a new classification of 'black women' who would have greater continuing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the cosmos of new classes of protected minorities, governed but by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, conspicuously raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box."

Crenshaw argues in her paper that by treating black women as purely women or purely black, the courts, as they did in 1976, have repeatedly ignored specific challenges that face blackness women every bit a group.

"Intersectionality was a prism to bring to lite dynamics within discrimination police force that weren't being appreciated by the courts," Crenshaw said. "In item, courts seem to think that race discrimination was what happened to all black people across gender and sexual activity discrimination was what happened to all women, and if that is your framework, of class, what happens to black women and other women of color is going to be hard to come across."

Simply then something unexpected happened. Crenshaw'south theory went mainstream, arriving in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015 and gaining widespread attention during the 2017 Women's March, an outcome whose organizers noted how women's "intersecting identities" meant that they were "impacted past a multitude of social justice and human being rights bug." As Crenshaw told me, laughing, "the thing that's kind of ironic near intersectionality is that it had to leave town" — the world of the police force — "in gild to get famous."

She compared the experience of seeing other people talking about intersectionality to an "out-of-body experience," telling me, "Sometimes I've read things that say, 'Intersectionality, blah, apathetic, blah,' so I'd wonder, 'Oh, I wonder whose intersectionality that is,' and then I'd see me cited, and I was like, 'I've never written that. I've never said that. That is simply not how I think about intersectionality.'"

She added, "What was puzzling is that normally with ideas that people accept seriously, they actually try to chief them, or at to the lowest degree try to read the sources that they are citing for the proposition. Often, that doesn't happen with intersectionality, and there are whatever number of theories as to why that'south the case, merely what many people accept heard or know about intersectionality comes more than from what people say than what they've actually encountered themselves."

How the right started worrying and learned to fear intersectionality

Kickoff in 2015 and escalating ever since, the conservative response to intersectionality has ranged from balmy amusement to outright horror. In 2017, writer Andrew Sullivan argued that intersectionality was a religion of sorts: In his view, intersectionality "posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human feel is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the ability of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.due east., 'check your privilege,' and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a fashion that keeps this sin at bay."

When you talk to conservatives about the term itself, all the same, they're more measured. They say the concept of intersectionality — the idea that people experience discrimination differently depending on their overlapping identities — isn't the problem. Because, as David French, a writer for National Review who described intersectionality as "the dangerous faith" in 2018, told me, the thought is more than or less indisputable.

"An African American human being is going to experience the globe differently than an African American woman," French told me. "Somebody who is LGBT is going to experience the world differently than somebody who's directly. Somebody who's LGBT and African American is going to experience the globe differently than somebody who's LGBT and Latina. It'due south sort of this commonsense notion that different categories of people have dissimilar kinds of experience."

What many conservatives object to is not the term merely its awarding on college campuses and beyond. Conservatives believe that it could be (or is existence) used against them, making them the victims, in a sense, of a new form of overlapping oppression. To them, intersectionality isn't just describing a hierarchy of oppression but, in do, an inversion of it, such that being a white straight cisgender human is made abomination.

"Where the fight begins," French said, "is when intersectionality moves from descriptive to prescriptive." It is as if intersectionality were a language with which conservatives had no real problem, until it was spoken.

In a 2018 clip for Prager Academy, an online platform for bourgeois educational videos, pundit Ben Shapiro described intersectionality as "a course of identity politics in which the value of your opinion depends on how many victim groups you vest to. At the lesser of the totem pole is the person everybody loves to hate: the straight white male." At the stop of the video, Shapiro concludes, "Just what practice I know? I'm just a straight white male."

In an interview, Shapiro gave me a definition of intersectionality that seemed far afield from Crenshaw'south understanding of her ain theory. "I would ascertain intersectionality as, at least the way that I've seen it manifest on college campuses, and in a lot of the political left, as a hierarchy of victimhood in which people are considered members of a victim class by virtue of membership in a particular grouping, and at the intersection of various groups lies the ascent on the hierarchy."

And in that new "bureaucracy of victimhood," Shapiro told me, white men would be at the lesser. "In other words, if you are a woman, then yous are more victimized than a homo, and if you are black, then yous're more than victimized than if y'all were white. If y'all're a black woman, you lot are more victimized than if you are a blackness human being."

I had sent Shapiro Crenshaw'southward 1989 newspaper prior to our conversation. The paper, Shapiro said, "seems relatively unobjectionable." He merely didn't think information technology was peculiarly relevant. "I first started hearing well-nigh this theory in the context of a lot of the discussions on campus, the 'bank check your privilege' discussions. That was the first place that I came beyond it, and that's honestly the place that most people first came across information technology in the public eye."

"I phone call that the anti-intersectionality intersectionality"

Crenshaw said conservative criticisms of intersectionality weren't actually aimed at the theory. If they were, and not largely focused on whom intersectionality would do good or brunt, conservatives wouldn't utilise their own identities as part of their critiques. (Shapiro'southward tongue-in-cheek disclaimer of "I'one thousand just a directly white male person," for instance.) Identities simply wouldn't matter — unless, of course, they really do, and the people at the top of our current identity hierarchy are more concerned about losing their spot than they are with eliminating those hierarchies birthday.

"When you're going to sign on to a particular critique past rolling out your identity, exactly how was your identity politics different from what yous're trying to critique?" Crenshaw said. "Information technology'due south merely a matter of who it is, that's what you lot seem to be most concerned most."

There'south cypher new most this, she connected. "There have always been people, from the very beginning of the ceremonious rights movement, who had denounced the creation of equality rights on the grounds that it takes something away from them."

To Crenshaw, the most common critiques of intersectionality — that the theory represents a "new caste system" — are really affirmations of the theory'south fundamental truth: that individuals take individual identities that intersect in ways that bear on how they are viewed, understood, and treated. Blackness women are both black and women, only because they are blackness women, they endure specific forms of discrimination that blackness men, or white women, might non.

Only Crenshaw said that contrary to her critics' objections, intersectionality isn't "an effort to create the world in an inverted prototype of what it is now." Rather, she said, the point of intersectionality is to brand room "for more advancement and remedial practices" to create a more egalitarian system.

"Intersectionality was a prism to bring to low-cal dynamics within discrimination police force that weren't being appreciated by the courts," Crenshaw said.

In brusk, Crenshaw doesn't want to replicate existing power dynamics and cultural structures just to give people of color ability over white people, for example. She wants to get rid of those existing ability dynamics altogether — changing the very structures that undergird our politics, law, and culture in order to level the playing field.

Still, as Crenshaw told me, "enough of people cull not to assume that the prism [of intersectionality] necessarily demands annihilation in particular of them."

The conservatives I spoke to understood quite well what intersectionality is. What's more, they didn't seem bothered by intersectionality as legal concept, or intersectionality as an thought. (I asked Shapiro this question directly, and he said, "the original articulation of the idea by Crenshaw is accurate and not a trouble.") Rather, they're deeply concerned by the practise of intersectionality, and moreover, what they concluded intersectionality would ask, or demand, of them and of club.

Indeed, intersectionality is intended to inquire a lot of individuals and movements alike, requiring that efforts to address one grade of oppression take others into account. Efforts to fight racism would crave examining other forms of prejudice (like anti-Semitism, for example); efforts to eliminate gender disparities would require examining how women of color experience gender bias differently from white women (and how nonwhite men practice too, compared to white men).

This raises big, difficult questions, ones that many people (even those who purport to bide past "intersectionalist" values) are unprepared, or unwilling, to answer. One time nosotros admit the office of race and racism, what do we practise most it? And who should exist responsible for addressing racism, anyway?

Intersectionality operates equally both the observance and analysis of power imbalances, and the tool by which those ability imbalances could exist eliminated altogether. And the observance of power imbalances, as is so frequently true, is far less controversial than the tool that could eliminate them.