By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Apparently, Clinton is doing the Nae Nae just in time for the primaries in more ways than one; she’s now appropriating the concept of “intersectionality,” defined (as we have seen) by Kimberlé Crenshaw here (PDF):
If, as this analysis asserts, history and context determine the utility of identity politics, how, then, do we understand identity politics today, especially in light of our recognition of multiple dimensions of identity? More specifically, what does it mean to argue that gendered identities have been obscured in antiracist discourses, just as race identities have been obscured in feminist discourses? Does that mean we cannot talk about identity? Or instead, that any discourse about identity has to acknowledge how our identities are constructed through the intersection of multiple dimensions? A beginning response to these questions requires that we first recognize that the organized identity groups in which we find ourselves are in fact coalitions, or at least potential coalitions waiting to be formed.
(Note that Crenshaw’s concept of coalition is fascinatingly different — or not! — from Madison’s, discussed here.) Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality is intuitive: My identity, for example, has dimensions of [gender], [race], [class], [ownership], [workerhood], various skills that are very important to me, family history, and so on. Yours (supposing you to agree with Crenshaw’s views) will have multiple dimensions too, some overlapping with mine, others not. The key point is that all these intersections happen to a person, an actual physical being located in a body at a point in time.
Now let’s compare Crenshaw’s view of intersectionality with Clinton’s appropriation of them, expressed just today via the Twitter. I’ll just leave this here:
Figure 1: Yet Another Clinton Hairball
We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges. We need solutions and real plans for all of them. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/WfObFAmsHl
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 7, 2016
I’ll return (in Figure 2) to the upper of these two diagrams, and explain why it is the hairball it is, hopefully not in mind-numbing detail. Before I do that, however, I’d like to give some contemporary usage examples of “intersectionality” from the current campaign, to contextualize Clinton’s peculiar usage. Then, after discussing Clinton’s usage in Figure 2, and what I’ve labeled vulgar intersectionality, I’ll conclude with some personal reflections. A caveat: In discussing concepts like this, I often feel like an untrained clown juggling flaming power tools. There’s a whole discourse of first, second, and third wave feminism, for example, that I’m simply not equipped to parse out, though I do my best at a high level. So, readers, if you have clarifications or corrections to add, and especially sources to recommend, please comment! For example, a reader just turned me on to this by bell hooks.
Contemporary Usages of “Intersectionality”
First, by “intersectionality” we don’t mean examples like this from FOX:
EXCLUSIVE: The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record told Fox News.
This usage is simply generic; it isn’t about identity (unless we want to figure out an intersectional take on corruption, which admittedly sounds intriguing, but is a topic for another day). Here is a better example, from An Open Letter To Gloria Steinem On Intersectional Feminism:
But, Gloria, the movement you made, as amazing as it was, had some serious flaws when it comes to intersectionality (as you know, that’s the idea that fighting for gender equality alone, without also standing shoulder to shoulder on issues of race, class, and other kinds of oppression, isn’t enough—in fact, it’s not necessarily even progressive). I know you know that, because you’ve talked about how #BlackLivesMatter has affected your thinking.
Your “joke” [young women are with Sanders because “that’s where the boys are”] came as young women are constantly being told we have to support Clinton because she’s a woman, as though having women in leadership equals an automatic feminist paradise. (You know, like Thatcher’s Britain!) “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” Madeleine Albright said—yes, the same Madeleine Albright who, as Secretary of State, famously claimed that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it.” When critics suggested someone should tell Albright there are women in Iraq, Clinton all but rolled her eyes: “Good grief, we’re getting offended by everything these days!” she said. “People can’t say anything without offending somebody.”
(Fascinating that Clinton adopts a right-wing trope — political correctness — in response to an intersectional critique.) At this point, I should note that the Albright/Steinem flap could not have helped Clinton in New Hampshire: Sanders took all age categories of women, but especially young women. Note also that intersectionality is a property of persons; corporate entities, for example, are not oppressed (unless, perhaps, you’re the late Antonin Scalia).
Here’s a second example from the Los Angeles Times, from an interview with a voter:
Erica Brandt, 27, dismissed Clinton’s feminism as “almost first-wave” and tediously similar to Sheryl Sandberg’s privileged “Lean In” manifesto.
“It’s fine for middle-class white people, but it completely ignores intersectionality,” Brandt, who grew up in Boston and works in education policy, told The Daily Beast. She worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign, and considers herself a left-leaning Democrat.
“Feminism that doesn’t include rights for the poor, for minorities, the non-cis is just not feminism to me,” she added. “Rich white women don’t get to make the rules for everyone, or at least they shouldn’t.”
(Cf. Matthew 19:24.) And here’s a third example, wrap-up from the Atlantic that summarizes the history of the term and its utilty as a method today:
In 1989, a term emerged for a feminist philosophy that would include women of color and other marginalized groups: “intersectionality.” To the uninitiated, the word might sound like unwieldy academic jargon. But without my bringing it up, many of the women I spoke to said intersectionality was the foundation of their feminism—and of their skepticism about Clinton. First coined by legal scholar and professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the word refers to the connections (the “intersections”) between different systems of oppression—not just sexism, but also racism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism. It’s a recognition that a black woman, for instance, is not affected independently by racism and sexism—those forms of discrimination are inextricably linked, which makes her experience sexism differently from a white woman and racism differently from a black man.
As young women’s notions of feminism evolved and broadened, so did their idea of what constitutes “women’s issues” in the political arena. “If you’re taking intersectionality as the foundation of this kind of feminism, you wouldn’t just be concerned with how any particular policy issue is affecting women,” says Gwendolyn Beetham, director of the Global Village at Douglass Residential College, the women’s residential college affiliated with Rutgers University. “But you would be asking, ‘Which women, and how?’ And you would be asking this whether or not you are a member of one of those groups.”
To foreshadow the conclusion: Which women (or identity), and how is the formal part; and You would be asking… is the empathy part. And if you want to build coaltions on Crenshaw’s model, them I would urge both are essential.
The bottom line, then, is that intersectionality is a powerful and useful conceptual tool, especially among the younger women voters to whom Clinton must appeal. To quote a Clinton organizer from North Carolina:
UNC sophomore Emily Hagstrom, who helped organize the group’s venture to Raleigh, said one of the most important aspects of Clinton’s campaign is her commitment to a diverse group of people. “Hillary is an intersectional feminist, and we are supporting her because of that,” she said.
So a Clinton organizer says Clinton is an “intersectional feminist,” eh? Saying it doesn’t make it so. Let’s turn to Clinton’s appropriation of intersectionality, as expressed in her Twitter posts.[1]
Clinton’s Usage of “Intersectionality”
I’ve helpfully annotated the top diagram of Clinton’s intersectionality presented in Figure 1. (The bottom diagram has all the same problems, but I didn’t want to overwhelm the reader with artwork.) Here it is:
Figure 2: Clinton’s Hairball Intersectionality Deconstructed
This diagram shows Clinton’s concept of intersectionality vividly. Let’s go through it in detail, looking at each of the numbered points.
(1) Dehumanizing. As we have seen, intersectionality is a property of persons. Here, however, Clinton presents intersectionality as a property of… Well, nothing more precise than boxes on a diagram; see point 4 below. I mean, does “Crumbling Infrastructure” sound like a person to you?[2]
(2) Not Relational. You see a line between “Decline in Manufacturing Jobs” and “Unemployment.” But the nature of the relation is never defined. Cause and effect? Class and instance? Mutually reinforcing trends? No narrative of power relations can be created, not only because there are no persons to exercise power, but because the relations themselves are vague.
(3) Complex and Poorly Drafted. Clearly, the diagram is complex; no doubt as complex as whatever diagram Ira Magaziner scrawled on his whiteboard during the Clinton administration’s health care debacle. Is it too cynical to suggest that the complexity is designed to promote the idea that only a policy wonk with a self-proclaimed mastery of detail can express an opinion? Moreover, the diagram is poorly drafted. If you look closely, you’ll see that many of the lines that one might expect to be connected to “Systemic Racism” in fact run under it. So maybe somebody though that “Systemic Racism” simply ought to occupy a central position — and deservedly so — didn’t think through what else it should be connected to, and simply dumped the label there.
(4) Full of Category Errors. Finally, the diagram is fully of category errors. For example, “Systemic racism” is connected to “Unemployment.” Informally, that’s fine, but “Systemic racism” is just that: Systemic. Unemployment is a number the BLS puts out. Two categories that are different in kind! So how exactly does that connection work? Since the diagram isn’t relational, we can’t figure out. Who does it affect? Since there are no persons, we can’t know.
This diagram resembles nothing so much as a Gish Gallop of policy-making converted to diagram form. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to list the problems and stick a Post-it Note on them saying “It’s complicated?
And, say: Private equity was responsible for deindustrializing the Rust Belt and selling it for parts. So how come there’s a box for “Decline in Manufacturing Jobs,” but no box for “Private Equity,” maybe with a big screw connecting the latter to the former, instead of a line, to make clear the kind of job that was done?
Vulgar Intersectionality
Let me take a quick detour into “vulgar intersectionality,” which Clinton (as far as I know) does not knowingly espouse, but which many supporters and commentators do. The, er, venerable Mark Penn provides a fine example in an internal strategy memo for the 2008 Clinton campaign:
1) Start with a base of women.a. For these women, you represent a breaking of barriers.b. The winnowing out of the most competent and qualified in an unfair, male-dominated world.c. The infusion of a woman and a mother’s sensibilities into a world of war and neglect.
2) Add on a base of lower- and middle-class voters.a. You see them; you care about them.b. You were one of them, it is your history.c. You are all about their concerns (health care, education, energy, child care, college, etc.).
Penn’s intersectionality is vulgar because it’s either/or. Crenshaw’s intersectionality is both/and. (One cannot but wonder whether the tendency of Democratic apparatchiks to vulgar intersectionality is a result of their institutional structure: There is one desk that speaks “for women,” another desk “for blacks,” another desk “for youth,” but no desk for “black young women.)
And here’s an example of vulgar intersectionality from the discourse on Flint:
It’s not a question of pitting race against class. It’s a matter of asking what political work gets accomplished by framing the crisis in Flint, Michigan, a city that is both racially diverse and almost universally poor, as mostly a problem of racism. Political scientist Adolph Reed writes about New Orleans, where Mayor Ray Nagin leveraged the status of black homeowners after Katrina so as to embrace a “chocolate” city that excluded poor renters (not too mention public housing residents). Housing and school segregation patterns and incarceration rates demonstrate that class cannot, without race, explain inequality. But race politics, in the hands of oligarchs, narrows the scope of what’s politically possible by justifying class-based inequities that impact poor people of all races as a reflection of fair market value.
Finally, two examples of vulgar intersectionality from Clinton herself, in her campaign practice. The first:
There have been at least a couple of moments where Clinton’s presumably been making an effort to show she’s relatable, that end up coming off as disingenuous. “I don’t want someone who is doing the nae nae, I don’t care if you can dance,” says Poe, referring to Clinton’s appearance on The Ellen Degeneres Show. “Don’t try to fit in. We just want to know who you are and what you’re about but we see so clearly that you’re trying to be with it.”
And the second:
Her campaign portraying her as “abuela” also left many with a bad taste. “That moment of ‘Hispandering,’ when paired with her pretty intense support of stronger border patrol and physical barriers against Mexico, is a seriously transparent instance of playing politician instead of offering genuine support,” says Michelle Funk, 25, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri’s Department of Communication.
These examples are vulgar intersectionalism because they, too, are either/or. First, Clinton’s your abuela. Then, Clinton’s doing the nae nae. But identity — which, again, is what intersectionality is all about — isn’t sequential. It’s simultaneous. An intersectional appeal can’t be made with a series of costume changes.
Conclusion
I’m just going to quote the story of the good Samaritan from Luke 10:
29 But [the lawyer], desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. 34 He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 And the next day he took out two denariic and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ 36Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” 37He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”
Elsewhere, the Pharisees are said to have prayed: “I thank God that I am not like other men!” (and in particular, the Samaritans). That’s either/or thinking. I believe that intersectionality promotes compassion; the Good Samaritan teaches us both/and thinking: The Samaritan saw the man who fell among robbers as having, among his multiple dimensions, the important dimension of common humanity. Unfortunately, Clinton’s dehumanized version doesn’t teach us that.
NOTES
[1] My sources for Clinton’s views on intersectionality are her Twitter account, a speech, Google searches, and her campaign website:
The first hit is the only relevant one:
black men like Mikey, who live at the intersection of being both African American and formerly incarcerated, are at a steep disadvantage when seeking employment.
This example is from February 17, superseded by the tweets given in the post. As you can see, if Clinton is indeed an intersectional feminist, she has adopted the term itself quite recently.
[2] Clinton also dehumanized intersectionality in her speech at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem on February 16, for which we have the transcript (and a YouTube):
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/speeches/remarks-breaking-down-barriers-african-americans/
But Flint reminds us there’s a lot more going on in our country that we should be concerned about. The truth is we aren’t a single-issue country. We face a complex set of economic, social, and political challenges.
They are intersectional, they are reinforcing, and we have got to take them all on.
So now it’s challenges that intersection. But, again, intersectionality is a property of persons.
Appendix I: The Sanders Campaign
As we’ve seen, cumbersome though the word “intersectionality” is, it comes up spontaneously from voters. Here, from a voter question during the Las Vegas debate:
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good evening.
Thank you, Senator Bernie Sanders.
My question is, do you consider yourself a feminist?
If so, how do you, as a white male, understand the intersectional identities that people of color face, especially when entering high positions of power within business or government?
SANDERS: I consider myself a strong feminist. And, in fact, Gloria Steinem — everybody knows Gloria is one of the leading feminists in America — made me an honorary woman many, many years ago.
(LAUGHTER)
SANDERS: I don’t know exactly what that meant, but I accepted it when she came to campaign for me.
Look, right now in this country, women are making 79 cents on the dollar compared to men. Minority women, women of color, are making substantially less. African-American women are making 54 cents on the dollar.
This is absurd. This has nothing to do with economics and it’s everything to do with sexism. I will fight as hard as I can. And I’ve worked with Harry Reid. We have tried desperately to pass pay equity for women. I will continue that fight.
It’s clear Sanders didn’t focus on “intersectionality”; he seems to have filed it mentally under “women’s issues,” which is exactly what it isn’t. The irony here is that the Sanders Racial Justice page is highly intersectional (I’d love to diagram it).
71 comments
Comments are closed.
A friend re-Tweeted a Hillary tweet last week, and I thought, “Wow, this is a campaign leveraging identity politics HARD CORE!”
The tweet minus the photo…
Happy #WomensHistoryMonth! We’re celebrating Dr. Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to travel in space.
Well played, HRC, well played.
Very nice post.
1.I think even the term “vulgar intersectionality” is too generous, and incorrect, in that it’s not intersectionality at all. As I said the other day, the Clintonian view of identity is additive, not intersectional.
2. The point of the two diagrams is surely simply to a) list a very large number of focus-group tested “concepts” and b) connect them ambiguously so that people can read into them whatever they want. That explains the inclusion of incommensurate concepts and the absence of arrows or other logical connectors. And it would be consistent with her intentionally muddled view of intersectionality.
3. For better and worse, Sanders seems to hold views of class, racism, and sexism not much changed from the 1960s. Worse: not very sophisticated and often tone deaf. Better: improving the economic well-being of most Americans would do more to improve racial and gender injustice than anything else (though possibly not the gender injustice most familiar to Joan Walsh or Madeline Albright). But it’s nice to see he has some competent campaign helpers.
4. Clinton is playing with fire. I think she thinks she is just campaigning as normal, saying anything to anyone that will help her get a vote, just like Slick Willy did, when she criticizes Sanders by saying, “not being poor didn’t keep Sandra Bland from dying.” But If she becomes president, when the next Sandra Bland is killed on her watch, people will want to know why she wasn’t able to prevent it. One could imagine a very long hot summer of 2017.
#2 every day of the week and twice on Sunday!
Also, by turning them into focus group tested domains, it makes what are fundamentally questions of choice and societal priorities about how human lives work with one another into a matter of expertise concerning what are regarded as natural phenomena. They appear as if from thin air, and so no one ever has to bother thinking genealogically about how it is we got to a point where these things are a concern.
No neoliberal is ever going to frame any of these things as a matter of choice, because then they would have to admit that someone or a conspiracy of someones was responsible for bringing them into being. If the Obama presidency has taught us anything, we don’t get to finger point, and we definitely don’t get to strip the guilty parties of there power to do the crappy things they have already inflicted on us. Also, it inculcates in those people who genuinely wish to change things a feeling of helplessness, because if TINA, then nothing anyone can do will make it better.
#2… Ha ha, I wasn’t cynical enough!
“additive, not intersectional” is what I mean by either/or. Are we using different words for the same thing, or is the categorization process different?
I admit to being over “sociology-ized” in my understanding of intersectionality, but I learned it and always thought it was easiest to think about in terms of your classic sociology 2×2 (or 3×3 or XxX) table. With gender on one axis and race on the other, you get 4 boxes (yes, I know this is oversimplifying race to black/white and gender to male/female): white male, black male, white female, black female. There are two points: 1) the main point is that each box represents a different lived experience, so that gender needs to be understood to affect white women and black women differently, just as race affects black men and black women differently; but also 2) that racial and gender oppression are real things so that there are also connections across boxes along axes (the walls of the boxes are not impermeable).
Where life and sociology get muddy is that there are more than 2 axes and more than 2 categories for each axis, so any effort to depict real life leads to very many boxes (at the margin, one for each of us), and very quickly turns a power/oppression analysis into one centered on identity.
But Clinton doesn’t even do this. She just makes a(n analytically) non-sensical list and calls it intersectionality.
Wow. The intersection of mathematical set theory and Hillary Clinton. My head is spinning!
Set theory is extremely powrrful!
So maybe the New Math was good for something after all ….
New Math certainly is good for getting subversive tools for critical analysis into elementary education. I think an intuitive grasp of counting is worth trading off in favor of an intuitive grasp of magnitudes. The former is useful for obeying one’s “betters”; the latter is useful for critiquing them.
Intersectionality,
That’s why I periodically urge people to think in terms of Venn Diagrams. For me at least, this is a great tool that works for sorting relationships.
Diagram this: All Primary Candidates, Neocon, Compulsive Liar, Unindicted Felon, Completely Bought By Special Interest and see who’s mug is at the bulls eye like Jack Nickelson peering through the fire-axed door!
Important quibble (okay, for pedantic sorts like me): Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality was about race and gender only, which is why the concept stayed within neoliberal circles for many years. It let privileged white and black feminists discuss feminism and Critical Race Theory in ways that did not challenge their class privilege.
Yes, but while Crenshaw may have coined the term, the idea as developed among (unfortunately, mostly academic) feminists and critical race theorists has extended well beyond that. I suggested the bell hooks reading, from Outlaw Culture, to Lambert precisely because it’s more indicative of where intellectual arguments now stand with regard to the politics of intersection and because it seeks to think of intersection as the foundation for an ethic or practice rather than just a mode of analysis or critique. In fact, she’s often critical of movements that seek to limit themselves to modes of resistance, of merely speaking truth to power when, following Marx, the point is to change it, which would mean actively investing in other people’s lives and other people’s struggles, rather than sticking with issue advocacy. Not that such advocacy is unimportant, but, as we have seen, it’s easily co-opted by those who seek to paper over other sins.
Her writing also has the added benefit of being far more accessible than your average academic’s.
Thanks Uahsenaa, emphatic yes to all that. Also, hard to recommend highly enough for accessibility and sophistication way beyond the present-day academic style are the essays of Selma James, as collected in the recentish anthology ‘Sex, Race and Class’ (PM Press and some other co-publishers I think). The shorter tract of the same title is available for free at the Libcom.org online library, and I recommend with similar enthusiasm the brief but insightful review of the book by Mme Tlank at Metamute.org. (Sorry for the lack of links. If someone explains that I’ve missed the point about links and moderation queues I’ll add them. And again, no criticism at all of NC moderation practices intended.)
I agree the term has evolved, but I share Adolph Reed’s opinion of bell hooks. I don’t mean you shouldn’t find her helpful, but not everyone who reads her comes to share her identitarian understanding of power.
And I happen not to share Reed’s opinion of her for the very reason that she talks about class ALL THE TIME, and in her professional life, she puts her money where her mouth is. She is someone who gave up a very prestigious position at Yale, precisely because she wanted to teach somewhere the students came from a more diverse range of class backgrounds. When women of color were swooning over Beyonce’s newfound feminism, she went to a public forum and called her a terrorist. When pressed on the issue, she noted that the public’s fascination with Bey’s politics stemmed largely from the fact that she’s rich and in a position of powerful influence.
With regards to your initial point, I admire her so much, because when she was put in a position of being criticized by other black feminists concerning a subject about which she was clearly in the minority, the very first thing she mentioned was class, the same blind spot you rightly identify as rampant within feminist and critical race discourses.
bell hooks is no Melissa Harris-Perry, that’s for sure.
Hmm. Not certain there’s a dichotomy between critique and ethics.
Crenshaw writes great prose. That she’s immersed in the lived experience or matrix of two (intersecting) groups lends force to the theory, which is, however, separable from the groups. The prose makes this very clear.
The connections in both diagrams seem rather arbitrary, several of the items seem to overlap conceptually with others or even be outright redundant, and the layout makes it almost impossible to tell which line ends where.
Nothing about them obviously serves to improve on an ordinary common-sense understanding of the situations depicted at all. They appear to be little more than visual double-talk.
“Nothing about them obviously serves to improve on an ordinary common-sense understanding of the situations……”
I thought I was the only one left with my head spinning?
How does all this effect the common voter and their choices….
Is this a tool that should be largely disseminated so that they make the “right choice” election day?????
My God!
I’m going to portray my simplistic mindset. I think it is supposed to make people think “oh Sanders is too one issue to begin to understand and help this.” Yet I look at this and still see that the majority of her intersectional factors have to do with Economic issues: “unemployment”, “poverty”, “budget and resource cuts”, “underfunded school systems”, “decline in manufacturing jobs”, etc.
Which to me says that the neoliberal policies of the last thirty some years, including the Clinton administration, have worked hard to create this problem. If Flint hadn’t been failing there would have been no emergency manager to override the elected officials of this city. And why was Flint failing? Hmmm, couldn’t possibly have been treaties and tax policies that allow companies to take their jobs elsewhere.
Now I’m not saying that the fact that this community is black was not a huge factor in how Snyder and his minions treated them, or even in choosing Flint for this in the first place. There is obviously systemic racism, hell if nothing else it is obvious that there was no concern for the citizens even after the failure of the decision to change the water source was discovered. Nor that there wouldn’t have been some of the same problems facing Flint even if the jobs had stayed- schools, food and health care being the obvious choices – because not everyone would have a decent living wage job even if the manufacturing jobs had remained. My larger point is that Clinton is saying we need to have a huge multifaceted plan to solve all this without actually presenting one, meanwhile ignoring that policies she has supported her entire political career, including as First Lady, are the direct reason for this being able to happen.
I have a hangnail today. Making me type is a micro-aggression.
Two points. One, this is not Clinton’s theory. I remember being introduced to these concepts in DFA night school several years ago. It’s all part of a broader theory. So no doubt Clinton is having this fed to her by some of her advisors. Point two has to do with intersections. The relevance has to do with demographics rather than the subject themselves. For example; how many voters are concerned with both infrastructure and job losses. The idea is to mathematically calculate which issues will play to which demographics. Still nonsense mind you.
DFA night school? Do tell!
DFA = Democracy for America. This was Howard Dean’s organization and part of his 50 state strategies. During non-campaign seasons, he sent campaign organizers touring the country giving short classes on how to organize and manage a political campaign. They came to Wichita and it was something to see, a lot of local Democratic office holders, some even in the State House had signed up. One guy had held his house seat for 8 years and much of the information they were bringing was completely new to him. Yes, a state level Democrat had won 4 election cycles without even knowing the basics. This was the state of the Democratic Party back then – and is largely that way now.
Now I am going from memory here, but Clinton’s “intersectional” was covered in these classes, with at least the basic idea. The idea was to consider how different elements within your campaign plank are connected. And where those connections are poor, to build up a rhetorical foundation on how to address the contradictions. As I said, the idea is not to build conections between different parts of the planks, but how to present separate planks to the voter as being relevant.
It’s a good exercise, a way of organizing your issues and thinking how they all might fit together.
Now Clintion’s hairball – good word by the way – likely takes it to the absurd degree. With polling data being quantized and plugged into sophisticated computer models allowing Clinton to tailor her message for each region and for each venue. –KACHING- As I said before, this is likely something that is being fed to her by her no doubt well paid consultants.
Still, I have made an interesting observation that I wonder if you noticed. You presented two charts, one with holding corporations accountable placed at the top, and the other placing decline in manufacturing jobs at the top in the same position.
They are the same network; point by point. I even compared them using paint and found them to be a perfect match. The only difference is that one is negative and the other is positive.
ZOMG, they just switched the labels for the two diagrams.
I don’t know if anybody remembers the British sitcom Yes, Minister? — I’m thinking of the episode “Jobs for the Bois” (and, these days, girls).
Meaning, every single one of those labels — in the Democrat hive mind — provides an opportunity for some Credentialled/Client/Corrupt skimming to be done.
This completely misunderstand Clinton’s approach to the Vulgar people of the United States, which is:
Insectionality, not intersectionality, that is the Vulgar People are treated as Insects.
The only Intersection understood by Hilarity Clinton is the one between herself, money and power. All else is irrelevant.
Hillary is an intersectional feminist?
As another untrained clown in intersectional feminism, I’m skeptical about Clinton, especially reading Thomas Frank’s description of the International Women’s Day event at the Clinton Foundation one year ago:
“What this lineup suggested is that there is a kind of naturally occurring solidarity between the millions of women at the bottom of the world’s pyramid and the tiny handful of women at its very top …The mystic bond between high-achieving American professionals and the planet’s most victimized people … is a recurring theme in [Hillary Clinton’s] life and work … What the spectacle had to offer ordinary working American women was another story.
She enshrined a version of feminism in which liberation is, in part, a matter of taking out loans from banks in order to become an entrepreneur … the theology of microfinance … Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself … What was most attractive about microlending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming together in governments or unions …The key to development was not doing something to limit the grasp of Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking methods to encompass every last individual on earth.
Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, since it brings together wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking, posturing, and profit taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power relations—the ultimate win-win.”
https://harpers.org/blog/2016/02/nor-a-lender-be/
I should have thought of quoting Frank. Thanks!
(Note that power relations, as Frank explains them, would be represented “Relationally” as in the discussion at Figure 2. Oddly, or not, Clinton leaves them out.)
youtu.be/fhUXu7x66BA?t=70
Why I’m posting happens at 2:01.
I’m too confused with all of this, but it sounds to me like a concept called “interlocking systems of oppression” and your figure two seems to provide useful diagrammatic example.
The diagram offers no understanding of the intersectional dynamics of oppression, carefully cropping out the oppressors — most of whom are Hillary backers — along with the oppressed, who are all affected differently in their lived experiences by their particular relationship to oppressive conditions.
Lumping these focus-tested ill conditions together with a rat’s nest of undistinguished connections misleadingly equates the interests of persons with their set of group memberships (Fascism is Italian for bundle-ism) and sets the stage for those conditions to be traded off and weighed against each other on net in the future. I believe this is the essence of what is called “triangulation”.
I wasn’t cynical enough!
(I think a diehard Clintonist would say “And your point?” Meaning that’s the nature of politics. A big problem dealing with Democrat regulars is their concept that they’re the good guys.)
Theoretically, understanding intersectionality should help us understand where our interests coincide, and thus aid in coalition building.
Clinton is standing that notion on its head by attempting to reduce “intersectionality” to a rhetorical gimmic, supposedly indicating she’s the “intersectional” cadidate, the one who represents everybody!
Intersectionality if properly understood would offer us an important tool, a key if you will for freeing us from the isolation and powerlessness inherent in the siloed environment of identity politics.
The politicians on the other hand have a much easier job if we ignore, or misunderstand intersectionality, and stay in our silos.
The people, working together because they understand where their interests intersect is the last thing that our ‘rulers’ want to see happening, considering how much work they’ve devoted to divide and conquer.
^^^ this ^^^
+1
Wouldn’t it be easier if people just understood what it means to have a decent and equitable society for everyone?
Intersectionality doesn’t a priori exclude socioeconomic class as a valid axis of identity, which allows its contributions to oppression to be discovered over the course of lived experience. Plus, consistent usage helps undermine Oppression Olympics competitions as the first resort in resolving identity conflicts.
Well said on “Oppression Olympics.”
It would. Unfortunately, definitions of what’s “decent” and “equitable” are not universally agreed. Hence politics.
Thanks Lambert. What a yeoman’s job!
The solution for Flint is a three step process:
1. Switch the water supply back to Detroit.
2. Run the taps for 24 to 48 hours.
and maybe
3. Replace a lot of pipes.
I do not see a lot of intersections here, aside from those which make a simple solution so complex that it cannot be started.
What about next time, then? Surely you’d rather stop Tom and Daisy from peeing in the pool rather than cleaning it up afterward? That is where intersectionality is a useful tool: identifying and locating the perps.
Kind of the difference between an emergency response and thinking long term to prevent the same emergency from arising again in the future. I get the impression the Clinton campaign doesn’t really care about either though except to use them to gain votes during campaign season.
Having lived in that part of Michigan, there’s much more at issue in Flint than the pipes. Lead in the water is simply the reason why national news media are paying attention now, but the city has been subject to a number of forms of neglect stemming from, in no particular order, the outsourcing of jobs, shitting on the environment, the imposition of an emergency manager who contravened the will of a democratically elected local government and was the one responsible for the changes in Flint’s water supply in the first place, the cutting off of revenue sharing by the state legislature so as to make up a budget shortfall, general (mostly racist) indifference to the places in the state where black people live by a Lansing government mostly composed of conservative/neoliberal whites–the list goes on. It was just last year that there was the kerfuffle in Detroit over unpaid water bills and the attempt by local officials to sell off public assets like the DIA collections. All of these things are interconnected. Lead in the water only scratches the surface, and fixing that problem leaves all the others unattended to.
These issues are long-standing. Michael Moore even rose to fame making a movie about it: Roger and Me.
Are you sure it was the local officials who wanted to sell off the DIA art collection?
I thought it was the Snyder-appointed Emergency Manager and his banker sponsors. Is my memory wrong?
That’s my recollection, too. No doubt the bankers wanted to sell Detroit’s public art to their buddies. Pure looting.
Reading it now I realize that comes off as making a connection between the water bill thing and the DIA thing. I meant for them to be two separate examples of willful indifference in a place that wasn’t Flint.
You’re right, of course, and by “local officials” I meant the goons sent into Detroit to try, at least in theory, to right the ship, though in practice simply to crapify and benefit themselves in the process.
There was a discussion of the “low information voter trope” in another thread today (the Oregon Occupier thread). I started to reply there but I think it fits better here.
I tend to agree with Lambert that “low info voter” (and similar “voting against their own interests”) can be insulting and likely to backfire on the user. But the ideas come up again and again (in every election cycle). Maybe there is a better, less offensive term for the idea.
What about … hmm… information source intersectionality?
Where do you get your news? TV? (Fox? MSNBC? …) radio? (local?, satellite?, podcasts? …) print? (MSM? blogosphere?) aggeregators? (NC!) friends? neighbors? clergy? co-workers? Each of us has a tremendous number of informational inputs which seem to lead to differences in understanding and definitions of basic terms even.
Information source intersectionality is not the same thing as identity intersectionality discussed in the post, but they seem to me like topics of roughly equal complexity. And lest you say I am muddying the notion of intersectionality here just like Clinton, don’t forget that group of radicals known as mathematicians were on this story way before even the feminists!
Watt4Bob — In Intersectionality, the things which intersect seem to be terms of oppression as applied to persons (as opposed to corporations, organizations, states, etc.) A person is the focus of one or more of racism, sexism, ageism, class prejudice, religion, national origin, homophobia, and so on. Most of the categorizations through which these forms of oppression are implemented are irrational and some have no real, physical definition whatever. That is, the deprecation of such persons has no real value. No doubt most persons oppressed in these ways have an interest in escaping from their oppression. However, they have other, positive interests as well, independent of or orthagonal to the ways in which they are oppressed. For me, this makes the idea that Intersectionality alone can automatically provide a kind of framework for positive collective action rather dubious. We already have anarchism and egalitarianism; now what?
I think that intersectionality and anarchism/egalitarianim/_____-ism are at different levels of abstraction.
Compassion as a value aside, intersectionality is about building coalitions, as Crenshaw said.
Intersectionality along the vectors proposed by Clinton is, in essence, 50% + 1 voter politics.
Intersectionality along wage worker lines is, in essence, 80% – a clientelist fraction.
Wait a minute… that tangle of buzz phrases connected helter-skelter by lines is a REAL post from the Clinton campaign? Until I read the whole piece I thought it was well done satire. I guess The Onion being bought out doesn’t really matter much. In modern American politics satire now seems roughly as difficult a task as exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum or measuring the position and velocity of an electron simultaneously.
They just want to use “intersectionality” as shorthand for “wow, its all really complicated. You need to rely on designated experts for all this sort of thing.”
Thank you. That’s what I was trying to say.
Shucks- I thought the article was about HRC getting struck by GM bailout vehicle while crossing a busy intersection while running away from James Comey waving a subpoena.
-sigh-
There’s much to chew on here and the hour is late so I’ll be brief. Thanks, especially for linking to the bell hooks piece. It’s no wonder the policies put forth by administrators seem always to miss the mark. It’s a very complicated sum, minus the heart.
Let me give you an idea of just how important this critical theory can be to unpack the human condition. We live our lives as individuals, undivided in the day to day experience that happens to each of us, the simultaneous aspects of the social order, the economy, the cultural ties, the relationship to the state, to the community and the immediate circle of family, friends, close associates. It is a melting pot of distinction upon distinction, but only upon thought or discourse. As it it lived, it is by us as individuals, through the hours and minutes of each passing day, in same routine places and spaces we inhabit. But the differences that arise from the distinctions of sex and gender, historic background, ethnicity, status, income levels, educational achievement, religion, height and weight, beauty or plain looking and on and on each creates a social algorithm that is instantaneously apprehended by the life time of socialization as what to expect, given all of the variables that each individual carries around as a whole person, some we are born with, some we that are learned and some that are rejected or we try to hide behind. And to other individuals unfamiliar with our particulars, who are we to them? Outside of their expectations that they learned and have not encountered much, if it all. A white farm boy, never outside of a rural area, a Black kid who never talks to whites unless it’s a teacher, never roamed more than a few blocks from home.
——————————————————————————————-
The early women’s suffrage movement provided just the clear to understand intersectionality that has exploded into many more social dimensions. Ida B Wells, one of the most prominent Black leaders of her day, upon meeting with Susan Anthony, rejected her invitation to work for women’s suffrage as a leader in the movement among women and also among African-Americans. She declined based on the need to see Black men free from more pressing political oppression, lynching and other violence and economic suppression, which of course affected the whole Black community, their mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, losing a relative to murder by persons unknown. Certainly the right to vote gives what ever little meaning democracy has at its starting point, but who cares if you can vote if you get lynched or fire bombed after the election?
——————————————————————————————
http://www.wesleyan.edu/mlk/posters/suffrage.html
“As the movement progressed, others spoke loudly, including Susan B. Anthony, who stated, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” White and Black women fought among and between themselves over the best course of action. Sojourner Truth, who had already experienced her own personal struggle toward freedom from slavery, remained unwavering in her support of women’s rights. In her unique way, Sojourner commented on the issue in 1867, when female suffrage was still very much being debated: “I feel that I have the right to have just as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and colored women not theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
——————————————————————————————-
Black women argued among themselves, and with the white women, some who were sympathetic to Black people as whole, men included, others, more focused on women’s rights and their right to vote in particular. There is again, a wide spectrum, suffrage leaders were mostly white, upper class, well educated and among Blacks, there were also the more talented, educated, professional class and everyone did not get along really well due to racism, exclusive ideas on what women should want from the world, and competing political problems and priorities. Nothing new here, but created out of differences of race, class, sex and gender roles.
Various women’s suffrage leaders were not above arguing for women’s suffrage on the grounds that the votes of the genteel white women were needed to outweigh the freedmen’s vote:
Anthony: “Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the Negro; but with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”
Stanton: “What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?”
Belle Kearney: “The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained, for upon unquestioned authority it is stated that in every southern State but one there are more educated women than all the illiterate voters, white and black, native and foreign, combined. As you probably know, of all the women in the South who can read and write, ten out of every eleven are white. When it comes to the proportion of property between the races, that of the white outweighs that of the black immeasurably.”
Carrie Chapmann Catt (founder of the League of Women Voters): “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.”
From the short-lived Zerowork, a 1976! piece on one understanding of intersectionality
http://zerowork.org/NYSAWCoxWhiteMen.html
I remember Zerowork!
Readers, if you click through to Clinton’s tweet, you will now see many other hilarious diagrams and much scoffing in the responses.
“An intersectional appeal can’t be made with a series of costume changes.”
Oh, to read that sentence was an moment of pure joy! Someone is getting it! To my mind, this is the real discussion of the campaign contortions.
THIS I have posted hither and yon:
https://shadowproof.com/2016/02/28/clinton-intersectionality-language-interview/
It is however a bit too dictomizing as its focus on economic issues as being the final arbiter on all things intersectional.
You can only build a realist model of intersectionality when you put oppression as the target of the exercise, and that’s is made up of far more factors than *just* money. It’s about the OPPRESSION – a word the costume changers avoid like that plague (sorry to be trite).
I use a graphic sent to me by an African artist as my cover page for twitter (and most days on my FB page. It is a circle, like an enso: but the middle reads – “all oppression is connected” Various words comprise the outer ring. But some words are bigger – and the whole of it is done in rainbow colors.
Because [the concept of] intersectionality [of oppression] is comprised of words, it cannot be boxed and diagrammed ever and expect to “realistic”. It is comprised of such large concepts and perspective that it’s whole cannot be related except for what the beholder beholds. Oppression is dynamic and too slippery for a flat out definition. It is metaphorical. At least as my oppressed African friend tries to indicate – it CAN be understood by us plebes.
The costume changers cannot face their limitations. They just hope we don’t notice. How we relate to that factor is part of the intersectionality.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=967350053351781&set=a.862134427206678.1073741826.100002303858703&type=3&theater
I’d like to invite you to consider that all justice resolves ultimately to economic justice.
Oppression being the force applied to preserve injustice in the face of resistance by the oppressed.
Economic in-justice and oppression go hand-in-hand, since the people naturally resist in-justice, and TPTB feel the need to oppress.
Our oppressors use tools like Hillary to confound our efforts to fight for economic justice.
Excuse me! Are you mansplaining to me?
I grew up in a mixed family. I heard both sides since Day One. And I found it OPPRESSIVE. and rank and unjust. If you think ONLY the tptb go oppression you are sadly mistaken; I’d put you in the sectarian section.
No amount of money was going to stop the cops from picking on my elder brother after he turned 13.
It didn’t stop people from shunning my mother beccause refused to give up a VERY dark Seminole baby. And her action got her killed.
I could cite you endless other examples. But that’s all for now. I chose a couple close to my heart that made me the person I am today.
Sorry, that is not my intent.
Considering your personal experience, the way I would describe what I meant is that the genocide of first nations, and the theft of their lands by white people was an immense economic crime, destroying the native population and its economy.
This sort of behavior was resisted of course, which brings on the oppression.
The oppression never goes away because people will always resist injustice, and must be prevented from ever thinking their resistance might work.
If you focus on the oppression, it’s like playing wack-a-mole, and the oppressors never admit that it’s part of a system, and as you point out, a lot of political oppression is disguised as ‘law-enforcement’.
IMHO, oppression goes hand-in-hand with economic injustice because people will fight if necessary to feed and shelter their families.
Another way to look at the concept of intersectionality may be as the guiding theoretical framework of a newly emerging academic/managerial elite within black politics.
A cursory look at the credentials of some Black Lives Matter activists/leaders seems to lend some credence to this perspective.
Melina Abdullah is a tenured professor and chairs the Pan-African Studies department at Cal State Los Angeles.
Schamell Bell is a professional dancer and former student of Abdullah as well as a Ph.D candidate at UCLA.
Patrisse Cullors is a performance artist who studied religion and philosophy at UCLA.
Kimberle Crenshaw, is a UCLA legal theorist, who first coined the concept of intersectionality in her Stanford Law Review article in July of 1991.
Does such leadership and its theoretical concepts function primarily as a career advancement strategy rather than a grass-roots phenomenon?
In the version of intersectionality being pushed by HRC, yes, as concerns Black Lives Matter activists/leaders, no.
A cursory look is useful if the intent is to promulgate misunderstanding.
In a word, no, it’s function is an antidote to the isolation, hopelessness that result from lives lived within the silos of identity politics.
Watt4Bob
Way back in the late 1960s there were black student movements centered on may college campuses whose primary goal was to establish black studies centers.
One of the arguments used by these black activists was that the establishment of such centers on college campuses would somehow inevitably benefit the average black citizen within his own community.
Many black studies centers were established and it does appear that a small minority of black citizens did benefit from the creation of these centers (primarily through the opening of academic positions within these centers).
But, of course, as black studies centers flourished the economic/political/financial/cultural situation of black communities, generally, continued to deteriorate into places like 2016 Ferguson.
Please explain to me concretely how the wider inclusivity of intersectionality benefits the average citizen in the black community.
I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to understand the subject, or its importance.
I’ll reserve judgement as to whether you intend to nurture a similar misunderstanding amongst others.
Intersectionality should be understood, not as a basis for promoting wider inclusivity, (as Hillary’s obscurantist tactics attempt to portray it) but as a tool to help one see where one’s interests coincide with others, even those whose concerns don’t at first seem to be related to our own, or in some cases seem even to be in opposition.
An understanding of intersectionality could lead us to examine where the interests of Sanders supporters intersect with those who support Trump for instance, which is an endeavor of a totally different flavor than either campaign attempting to co-opt the others supporters.
The former being a possible long-term exercise in coalition building, the latter being just more short term, 50+1 political voodoo.
So, intersectionality might benefit the Black community by enlarging the universe of potential collaborators, which in turn might just have the effect of loosening the grip of the Black miss-leadership class for instance.
What Hillary is aiming at is to continue co-opting progressive activists by basically shouting “Me too!” at the top of her lungs.
She’s basically saying “I stand at the intersection of all your interests.” which is first of all total BS, but more importantly, that’s not for her to say.
Hillary is trying very hard to maintain an increasingly illusory advantage, that of being the champion of identity politics.
A widening understanding of, and leveraging of intersectionality as concerns people currently living in identity silos threatens that advantage.
Why do you begin each of your responses to me questioning my sincerity on these issues? I didn’t do that with you?
Does the concept of intersectionality have any real following other than in academic communities or by supreme opportunists like Hillary and her apologists?
I totally agree with you that the interest of Sanders supporters and Trump supporters overlap but do we need a concept of intersectionality to point that out? How about, instead, a concept and a movement of genuine democratic populism that could bring democratic control and leverage to local communities.
It is true that a sexual and gender politics had little representation in the older Black Civil Rights movement but from my perspective, intersectionality, as indicated by Lambert in the above analysis, can easily be grafted onto a radical inclusivity based on a Judeo-Christian ethic– which,however, the Black Lives Matter leadership appears to reject because it sees the black church as highly critical of its sex and gender identity politics.
“but do we need a concept of intersectionality to point that out?”
No, we need it to support the tenured professors.
It’s almost exactly like…..economics!
I question your sincerity because so far there’s no evidence that you are sincere.
You insist on ignoring what Lambert’s post explained, and my comments amplified, that the notion of intersectionality gives hope to moving away from the mire of identity politics because it prompts people to drop their fixation on one issue activism.
Hillary is attempting to portray intersectionality as identity politics on steroids, which in her alternate universe translates to “I deserve your vote because I’m so intersectional!”
Intersectionality is not identity politics on steroids, it’s a technique for getting past the limitations of identity politics, and Hillary is the embodiment of the limitations of identity politics.
Yes we do because so far it’s clear that most of the members of those two camps think that their groups are mutually exclusive, witness the violent expulsion from Trumps rallies of people even suspected of disagreement with the ‘leader’, and the categorizing of poor republican supporters by progressives as both ‘stupid’, and uninformed.
It’s hard not to read Hillary’s mis-appropriation of the term, and you’re accusations of self-serving careerism on the part of those positing the concept, as prima facie evidence that it’s something important, or people wouldn’t be fighting it so hard.
Watt4Bob stated “I question your sincerity because so far there is no evidence that you are sincere.”
Well there you have it a real contest of ideas and strategic concepts from my perspective, deteriorates into a strawman charge on your part despite the fact you know nothing about me.
I’m trying to keep the discussion on the level of ideas–but I guess you will have none of that.
Do you see Black Lives Matter as a political and a cultural movement or simply a political movement without a religiously grounded ethic.
Was the success of the black political movement in the South linked to a Christian ethic quite similar in message to Lambert’s interpretation of intersectionality?