Significance of Social Activist Movements to Deal with Intersectional Issues Faced by Black Women

University of Saskatchewan

Intersectionality

Significance of Social Activist movements to deal with intersectional issues faced by Black Women

Raza Khan

24th November 2015

Women and Gender Studies 210-W01

Student number 11152003

Prof. Carrie Prefontaine

“All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave” (Hull, Scot, Smit 1982).

This being my first Women and Gender Studies class, I must admit I had never come across the term of intersectionality. So when I was asked to write an essay on this topic, I did not realize the significance of it and coming from a minority how much I would relate myself with it.

What is Intersectionality?

Leslie McCall in her paper “The Complexity of Intersectionality” writes “intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies has made so far” (McCall 2005).

Now There is no one way to define Intersectionality. According to my understanding, every kind of oppression is connected in some way. Which is the basic idea that lies at the core of intersectionality. In its simplest form, intersectionality refers to the intersections within and between forms of societal oppression and the study of these intersections between different mechanisms of oppressions. For example, a woman of color might experience both racism and sexism together, same is the case with the treatment of black people by police or for example treatment of the mentally handicapped by the police. We can do an intersectional analysis to see the reason behind the contrasting treatment. Also Intersectionality can be seen as a sociological theory about how an individual can face multiple forms of discrimination if his identity overlap number of minority classes such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, health and other characteristics. In Article “The intersectional Fifth Black Woman” both the authors suggest that:

“intersectionality suggests that when courts adjudicate discrimination claims, they should utilize the plaintiff’s intersectional identity to determine whether the person was subject to discrimination in relation to their identity as a whole, as compared to utilizing one part of an identity e.g., race, separate and apart from another e.g., gender”(Devon Mitu 529)

Termed by Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989, the concept of intersectionality has been important for the advocacy of feminist theory. Intersectionality allows for feminist theorists to account for the differences among women themselves as well as it has an important implication for feminist theory and practice because as a result of the diverse applicability of intersectionality, it has been embraced by various strands of feminist theory. According to Hankivsky “Intersectionality is transforming gender studies, cultural studies, and migration studies and has started to influence the disciplines of economics, political science, psychology, geography, criminology, history, sociology, and anthropology” (Hankivsky 3).

 Racism, Sexism and other Discrimination faced by Black Women

Going a bit into detail of what Crenshaw really meant with the term of intersectionality. She argues that Black women are discriminated against in ways that often hard to categorize as racism or sexism, in fact she sees it as a combination of both racism and sexism. In her work, Crenshaw discussed Black feminism, which argues that the experience of being a black woman cannot be understood in terms of being black, and of being a woman, considered independently, but must include the interactions, which frequently reinforce each other. Crenshaw mentioned that the intersectionality experience within black women is more powerful than the sum of their race and sex, yet according to laws, the system has generally defined sexism as based upon an unspoken reference to the injustices confronted by all women, not just black, while defining racism to refer to those faced by all Black people and other people of color. What they fail to understand is the combination of both which these black women face. The overall cultural attitude towards Black women is stated “But Some of Us Are Brave”.:

‘The codification of Blackness and femaleness by whites and males is seen in terms of “thinking like a woman” and “acting like a nigger” which are based on the premise that there are typically Black and female ways of acting and thinking. Therefore, the most pejorative concept in the white/male world view would be that of thinking and acting like a “nigger woman” (Hull, Scot, Smith 178).

In this paper I am going to focus on one of the major Feminist Activist movement dealing with intersectional issues faced by Black women.

Activist movements such as “Black Lives Matter” and “Say Her Name” have become a strong platform to raise voice against violence and discrimination faced by Black women in light of evidence that the criminal justice system was failing to uphold this basic truth. According to data gathered by authors of report named (Black Lives Matter: Eliminating racial inequity in the criminal justice system) it shows that over half of those killed by police in recent years have been black or Latino plus the officers involved in those killings are rarely brought to justice.  Kimberly Crenshaw in the report “Say her name” has discussed the importance of these social movements and how they can be used to combat state violence.

“Although Black women are routinely killed, raped, and beaten by the police, their experiences are rarely foregrounded in popular understandings of police brutality, yet inclusion of Black women’s experiences in social movements, media narratives, and policy demands around policing and police brutality is critical to effectively combatting racialized state violence for Black communities and other communities of color” (Kimberlee 5).

Origination and intersectional concerns of the movement.

“Say her name” s a gender-inclusive racial justice movement that advocates against police instigated violence and brutality.  Coined by AAPF(African American Policy Forum) in February 2015, the movement highlights the problems faced by Black women especially black queer and trans-woman. According to the Report published in AAPF, the reason behind creating the movement was because of “The failure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless Black women killed by police over the past two decades, including Eleanor Bumpurs, Tyisha Miller, LaTanya Haggerty, Margaret Mitchell, Kayla Moore, and Tarika Wilson, to name just a few among scores, leaves Black women unnamed and thus under protected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence”. (Kimberle 3)