Let's Meet at The Intersection

Dream Charter School in East Harlem has one of the most fitting slogans any elementary school has ever seen: "Team Work Makes the Dream Work!" It may sound cheesy, but let's just imagine a world where social activists from all different oppressive backgrounds used Dream's motto to promote intersectionality, producing an intersectionality that is not only talked about, but also acted upon. Where social activist groups who share different experiences of oppression can bound together and realize the source of the oppression is, at it's root, all in the same. It would be the most amazing and radical revolution the world has ever seen. What is preventing this almost blatantly obvious ideology geared towards the track of a new world order, one free of racism and heterosexism, and classism and every other oppressive -ism which stems from the same web of patriarchal cultural imperialism? Are social activists falling into the world's trap of hierarchies, the very traps we ourselves despise?

In Whipping Girl, Julia Serano explains her experience of being excluded from queer, lesbian and gay communities as a trans woman, as well as being looked down upon by feminists and women-only circles. "As a direct result of the exclusion of cross-gender-identified trans people from the 'gay rights' movement, public awareness and acceptance of our identities and issues are about twenty years behind those of lesbian and gays... Because of this exclusion, our cross-gender identities and perspectives are not acknowledged to nearly the same extent as lesbian and gay identities and perspectives."(The Future of Queer/Trans Activism 356). Although Serano blames most of this exclusion on a hypocritical connotation of inferiority placed on femininity, I'd like to focus more on her points about how general transphobia is also the cause for this exclusion, as well as a sort of elitism that hovers over LGBTQ communities who don't consider her "subversive" enough. This focus on hierarchies in general, I believe, will emphasize the lack of intersectionality in social activism of all sorts, as well as why it is so hard as an oppressed group, to accept people that are seemingly more so oppressed.

The transgender woman exclusion from women-only circles and feminist spaces makes me think of many other exclusions in a number of social movements. A few that have popped into my head include a lot of racial minority social activists who often try to distinguish themselves from the "ghetto" or "ratchet" minorities, as well as the gay social activists who feel their political and social progress is hindered by the "flamers." By setting people with the same roots of oppression apart based on social animosities, social activists are creating a hierarchy within oppression, making it so that the most oppressed not only feel marginalized by the norms of society but on top of that, marginalized by the people who share their same struggle. In addition, social activists are creating hierarchies among different types of oppression, forgetting that all of the different types of oppression are caused by the very existence of hierarchies in and of themselves. Even Karl Marx, advocating for the destruction of the social class system, completely failed to include an analysis of how race very obviously intersects. It wasn't because he did not think about it, it was because he didn't want to add more reason for people to critique his already radical notion. He wanted to save face, the same way feminists and LGTBQ communities like to save face when confronted with trans women, whose inclusion would add even more animosity to their social aims by virtue of the very system they want to abolish.

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Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 in her essay titled "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics." Although Crenshaw is using the term specifically to speak of minority women's experiences of being faced with multiple systems of oppression but being recognized by only one or none, the same idea can be adopted to Serano's experience of being a transgender woman who is not recognized at all, as well as many other minorities within oppressed groups whose voices are muffled based on internal hierarchies within the oppressed. In page 2 of Censhaw's essay, she offers my favorite intersectionality analogy. She says  "discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another." If there is an accident at the intersection, it is very hard to tell which street the accident came from, as it probably was the result of traffic from multiple cars from different streets colliding. But instead of coming to the aid of the people hurt at this intersection, we wonder first where they came from, and who was responsible. In the time that people are trying to figure out if it was racism or sexism or ableism which caused the accident (when it could very well be all three), the people in need of help are dying. We believe that only the LGBTQ community could aid a transgender person at an intersection, but what if feminists helped as well? And why does the label matter so much? Crenshaw puts it best when she says that this situation is analogous to "a doctor’s decision at the scene of an accident to treat an accident victim only if the injury is recognized by medical insurance."

Social activists everywhere are guilty of this same injustice. We are all guilty of not helping each other out and seeing difference among our neighbors, and being blind to the ways we could all come together for a greater cause. We are guilty of falling into the traps we ourselves are advocating against. We create a hierarchy of oppression as well as create elitism within our "safe spaces" in order to save face politically and socially, in order to appeal to those we claim to be against. We believe that one closely knit set of principles will get us far in our political identity, but doesn't it make sense that if every single mix of privileged and oppressed groups came together, we could flip this world upside down? The feminists, the LGBTQ community, racial minorities, the disabled, the poor and of course all the allies who understand this source of hierarchical oppression and don't see the difference, but rather, the connection between everything that makes our world a brutish place to be. Serano asks for solidarity, and that is exactly what we lack. We need to get ourselves down to this intersection and have a very long talk.