(Here’s the presentation draft of my paper on Intersectionality for the Kentucky Political Science Association. It’s still pretty rough but the argument has a shape to it)
Originally developed within black feminism, the concept of intersectionality addressed the issue of black women being discriminated against for both being black and being women. Intersectional ideas begin appearing in black feminism as early as the 19th century, but a black feminist literature featuring concepts of intersectionality coalesced in the 1980’s awith the writing of Angela Davis, the late bell hooks, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Patricia Hill Collins. This paper examines intersectionality in relation to the work of John Locke, argues that the original black feminist literature entailed an imperative to recognize the full humanity of traditionally marginalized populations, and discusses Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility as an example of radical self-reflection.
In Locke, “men” were obligated to recognize other men both as having the same original freedom in the state of nature and as also being created equal to them, “there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank … should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.” Locke expresses the strongest version of this obligation through a lengthy quote from theologian Richard Hooker:
“my desire therefore to be loved of my equals in nature as much as possible may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to them-ward fully the like affection; from which relation of equality between ourselves and them that are as ourselves, what several rules and canons natural reason hath drawn, for direction of life, no man is ignorant.” (Locke, Vol. 1, section 11)
The power of Locke’s concept of obligation should not be underestimated. Those who fail in that obligation can be seenas a kind of ontological failure, analogized to predators like lions, tigers, and wolves, and thus as legitimately punished up to the penalty of death. The combination of men’s obligation to recognize others as equal beings and the right to punish those who refuse animates the rest of Locke’s analysis and is one of the cornerstones of the Second Treatise. The idea of humanity being anchored in freedom and equality was taken up by the Declaration of Independence, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, and others with black writers framing their advocacy for those principles in relation to the racial tyranny exercised by whites. King wrote in particular that civil rights demonstrators were “bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
Of course, there are stark differences between Locke and concepts of intersectionality. Black feminists assume that society exists before individuals and portray people in terms of social positions and structures. For any category of people, their “position” is defined in terms of the “intersections” created by a confluence of structures. In the example from Crenshaw, black women are subject both to a racial hierarchy in which they are subordinate to whites as black people and a gender hierarchy in which black women are subordinate to black men as women. The situation of black women is analogous to a traffic intersection in which white supremacy intersects with patriarchy to doubly disadvantage black women. In this simplified model, black women would have a position at the intersection of race and gender hierarchies.
Where Locke’s theory attributes a universality to individuality, the universality would be about “positions” in intersectionality. According to Collins:
”Intersections draw attention to both the position and the positioning of individuals – position refers to the multiple categories with which one is identified and positioning refers to drawing on multiple identities to construct oneself and engage with others. This construction occurs in the context of the matrix of domination which has few “pure” victims or oppressors (Collins, 2000).”
The early writing on intersectionality was motivated by the concerns for social justice that came out of the black Civil Rights movement and Second Wave Feminism. In relation to a Civil Rights Movement and antiracist politics that had prioritized black men over black women, Crenshaw’s ideal was for black women to be fully recognized by black men as black people.
In the context of antiracism, recognizing the ways in which the intersectional experiences of women of color are marginalized in prevailing conceptions of identity politics does not require that we give up attempts to organize as communities of color. Rather, intersectionality provides a basis for reconceptualizing race as a coalition between men and women of color.
In advocating that race being reconceptualized as a “coalition between men and women of color,” Crenshaw’s idea is for the position of black women to be recognized equally with black men. Within the black feminist literature, patriarchy and gender hierarchy are addressed more broadly by bell hooks who viewed patriarchy as a powerful mode of domination within the overall system of “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy.”
Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.
hooks relates a story of her father beating her severely to put her in her place after she insisted on competing with her brother against her father’s orders. In patriarchy, men are defined as having authority, power, and rights, and women are seen as subordinate and not fully human. In Beauvoir’s Second Sex, (patriarchal) concepts of sex were portrayed in terms of identifying men as the human and women as the “other” against which men are defined. if women are assumed to be equal, the logic of Locke’s argument would define all this abusive conduct not only as a crime against individual women but also an attack on humanity as a whole that would obligate the rest of humanity to intervene. But intersectionality implies more than just stopping the abuse. Indeed, men would be obligated to give up the orientation toward domination cited by hooks and internalize values of equality instead. Indeed, men would need to give up the sense of male identity based on opposing masculinity as the self, the normal, or the human to women as “the other,” and articulate a sense of masculine selfhood oriented toward equality. In other words, men would be under an obligation to dramatically recast male identity if they were to treat women as naturally free and equal beings.
These kinds of imperatives require thinking about male identity in a way that’s quite different from Locke. Where Locke viewed freedom, equality, and the rational capacity to recognize those qualities in others, the ability of males to routinely think and treat women as equal would require a process of reflection in which patriarchal ideas of gender and their derivatives are identified and rejected and egalitarian ideas adapted and internalized. Given the historical depth of patriarchy, the obligation to be egalitarian would involve a radical change in masculine identity.
Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility
Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility illustrates the demands for self-recognition implicit in concepts of intersectionality. Though not necessarily an intersectional work, White Fragility’s encompassing approach to whiteness illustrates what intersectionality requires in the way of recognizing one’s own position and the implications of that recognition. Thus, White Fragility is a searching example of what such reflection would be, in her own words an example of “challenging the work that is uniquely ours, challenging our complicity with and investment in racism.” (33)
Like black feminists, DiAngelo implicitly adapts Lockian “freedom” and “equality” as her standard for racial attitudes and behavior of the white progressives encountered. As the title indicates, DiAngelo’s issue is the racial fragility of whites. White progressives are consistently resistant to diversity training, engage in predictable patterns of denial and excuses, and routinely become get upset over the idea that they might need the training. White progressives view racism in terms of a moral opposition between “good people” and “bad people” where good people like themselves would not think of being racist and the open racists engage in racist behavior because they are bad or evil. (2-3) Because office progressives think of racism in these kinds of terms, they are also obsessively worried about being perceived as racist “bad people. Such worries also create a toxic environment for black colleagues. This brings DiAngelo to her first attempt to prod white self-recognition and reflection. She views white fragility as so toxic that it’s “white progressives [who] cause the most daily damage to people of color” (emphasis in text)instead of open racists. DiAngelo wants white progressives to recognize themselves in the harm they do.
For DiAngelo, the ability of white liberals and progressives to understand their own racial fragility entails an understanding of both the social structures of American society and the dominant ideology of individualism. In her remarks about society, DiAngelo emphasizes the economic and political dominance of whites. When DiAngelo wrote White Fragility in 2018, the major institutions of government, the corporate world, and culture were all controlled by white people at a time when wealth and power were increasingly concentrated at the top levels. Within this context, the primary locus of white privilege is viewing whiteness as “the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation.” DiAngelo believes that whites can’t see black people as fully human beings as long as “we” refuse to see ourselves as white. “Thus, reflecting on our racial frames is particularly challenging for many white people, because we are taught that to have a racial viewpoint is to be biased.” (11)
With white dominance being pervasive, American institutions are characterized by what Joe Feagin calls a “white racial frame” (34) in which white dominance is taken for granted, white achievement continually communicated, and “negative stereotypes and images of racial others” constantly in circulation. DiAngelo also stresses the implication of middle-class white progressives in the everyday stereotyping of black people and highlights the extent to which office progressives live and work in in environments with a continual stream of racist jokes and stereotypes (65-66). Many white progressives thus combine a strong belief that they can’t be racist with participation in settings where open racism is routine. (58)
The other phenomenon through which progressive, middle-class whites are located is the ideology of individualism. For DiAngelo, white fragility is all about exempting the speakers as unique individuals from issues of race and racism in the workplace. However, DiAngelo viewed such responses as the farthest thing from unique individuality. As a diversity trainer, DiAngelo found white responses “so predictable that I sometimes feel as though we are all reciting lines from a shared script.” Thus, she wants office progressives to recognize that ideological individualism leads to a monotonous sameness that was sapping the distinctive individuality of the white people.
DiAngelo also presses white readers to recognize the ways in which the ideology of individualism functions to conceal racial hierarchy.
We might think of conscious racial awareness as the tip of an iceberg, our intensions (always good) and what we are supposed to acknowledge (seeing nothing). Meanwhile, under the surface is the massive depth of racist socialization, messages, beliefs, associations, internalized superiority and entitlement, perceptions and emotions. (42)
In writing on White Fragility, DiAngelo is calling on white progressives to recognize the extent of racism in their own behavior while simultaneously recognizing the ways in which their individualism provides support for racial hierarchy. While individualism has roots in the philosophy of Locke, it is employed to extend a system of racial hierarchy which is anathema within the logic of Locke’s argument as soon as black people are recognized as born free and equal with a full set of human rights.
Early Blackface, Cultural Change, Latest Politics 