Kind of a followup to Friday’s megathread…
There’s a genuine tension between erasing the origins of important sociological and theoretical work… and building on the universality of insights that emerge from specific peoples’ and groups’ experience.
Patricia Hill Collins tackled that directly and acknowledged that it’s an unresolved question in her latest book https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07V2MCV2K — which is a great read for anyone who’s trying to decipher to ping-pong conversations on Critical Race Theory & Intersectionality ATM
I know that when I first started reading about intersectionality and some lights lit, the temptation to stamp it on everything was immense. Because on the one hand it’s a set of analytical tools that are really powerful for systems thinkers who care about complicated problems
But the flip side: treating it like a New Sauce To Put On Things was a betrayal of the tools themselves; separating the analytical approach (and the label) from the fact that it was forged from the lived experience of black women whose perspectives were erased in other models?
It eventually clicked for me that separating those from each other is how we reproduce the very problems the tools are meant to untangle.
And when I say “clicked” I mean I had to hear it from a lot of people and stare blankly at statements I didn’t understand for a long time.
For a while I put “Intersectional” in my profile — I was super super stoked and it was eye-opening. But eventually I removed it. I didn’t know how to do the complexity justice if it was just a noun on my twitter profile. A tag I claimed rather than a lens I try to use.
No takeaway here, or advice, other than this: be skeptical and dig deeper when you hear someone slapping the label on things, pro or con. dig deeper. sometimes it’s mind-expanding. other times it’s blockchain. and other times it’s erasing the women whose experience birthed it.