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Episode 4 - “Intersectionality Primer”
58 Plays9 months ago
In today’s episode, “Intersectionality Primer”, we’re visited by Alison Symington, a legally trained advocate, writer, strategist, and project manager who has applied the concept of "intersectionality" throughout her twenty-year career in human rights and social justice. She will lead this discussion about intersectionality as a theory and practice.
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Transcript
Voice of Canadian Humanism
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to the Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the humanist lens.
Intersectionality Primer with Allison Symington
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to The Conversation. I'm Jared W. Klug. In today's episode, Intersectionality Primer, we're visited by Allison Symington, a legally trained advocate, writer, strategist, and project manager who has applied the concept of intersectionality throughout her 20-year career in human rights and social justice. She will lead this discussion about intersectionality as a theory and practice. Let's begin.
00:00:55
Speaker
Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Alison Sognington and it's my pleasure today to present this webinar for you on the topic of intersectionality, theory and practice. I'm a legally educated human rights policy analyst, activist, educator and project manager. I'm presenting this webinar today from my home in Toronto, Canada. This is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit,
00:01:22
Speaker
the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. I wish to express my gratitude for the resources I use every day and honor all the First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Indigenous peoples who've been living on and caring for these lands since time immemorial.
Humanist Canada Mission
00:01:41
Speaker
So this webinar today is presented by Humanist Canada. This is an organization that supports local and regional humanist groups to advance education in scientific
00:01:51
Speaker
academic, medical, and human rights fields. You can find out more about them and their webinars, discussions, et cetera, on their website, which is humanistcanada.ca.
Introduction to Intersectionality
00:02:04
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So intersectionality. I first learned about intersectionality when I was in law school, which is now many years ago. The thing about legal thinking is it's often about putting things in boxes.
00:02:18
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It's a lot about categories and definitions. So when I first learned about intersectionality, it was a whole new way to approach legal dilemmas and challenges that we were looking at. It was revolutionary, very exciting. Since then, I've explored and applied intersectionality throughout my career. So in this webinar, I will explain intersectionality and provide some examples in its application in social justice work.
00:02:48
Speaker
This of course is only an introduction to the topic, but I hope it'll give you some nuggets, some seeds, some ideas that you can take and plant and apply within your own work and your own life. So what is intersectionality? The word is actually used in several different ways. First, it's an analogy. It's also an analytical tool for understanding human rights and
00:03:15
Speaker
sorry, understanding human beings, skipping over my words here, an analytical tool for understanding humans and their situations holistically, a theoretical framework for addressing issues of power, privilege, and marginalization, and a resource or a tool for social justice and human rights advocacy work. So I think the best place to start in any discussion of intersectionality is with the work of Professor Kimberly Crenshaw.
00:03:43
Speaker
Professor Crenshaw is a US civil rights activist and a legal scholar. She is known for the introduction and development of intersectional theory, which can be defined as the study of how overlapping and intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, and discrimination.
00:04:09
Speaker
I've included on the slide here the citation of an early paper she wrote where she coined the term intersectionality and explores its meaning and use. It's important, of course, to note that others had been doing similar work before her and the ideas have been further developed by others since her. It's a large body of work, but I think it's good to focus on her work to get us started. She remains a great inspiration. She coined the term and she's done really impressive and helpful work.
00:04:40
Speaker
The quote on the slide emphasizes the position she was in. She was a feminist working for gender equality at the same time as being a person of color, a black person working towards racial justice. And in her activism, she was finding that those two movements weren't necessarily cooperating, but instead were bumping up against each other.
00:05:04
Speaker
So she as an individual working for justice was in between two movements at times. So I am not an animator. So with apologies, I'm going to present my best attempt at illustrating intersectionality as an analogy. So Professor Crenshaw explained that the discrimination black women experience is like the intersection of several roads.
Intersectionality in Legal Cases
00:05:33
Speaker
This realization came to her when she looked at the case of a woman named Emma. Emma had applied for a job in a car factory. She believed that the reason she was not hired was that the employer had discriminated against her. My judge dismissed her claim of race and gender-based discrimination because the factory employed both women and black people.
00:05:57
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The judge did not consider that the women employed at the factory, mostly in administrative roles, were all white women. Nor did he recognize that the black people who were employed at the factory, mostly in industrial roles, were all men. Only by looking at race and gender together could a judge understand Emma's experience of discrimination.
00:06:26
Speaker
But the judge thought it would give black women an unfair advantage that they could combine two categories of discrimination in a legal case. So Emma was in fact denied justice because her experience was not the same as that of a white woman or a black man. So the judge was unable to see the discrimination that Emma faced. So Professor Crenshaw proposed the analogy of an intersection
00:06:54
Speaker
to help judges see the dilemma Emma and people like her faced. One road, the first one we've got here, is the race road. Now the race road intersects with the gender road. Because Emma is both black and a woman, she's positioned where the two roads overlap, experiencing the simultaneous impact
00:07:19
Speaker
of the factory's gender and race traffic, the traffic including hiring policies, workplace culture, microaggressions, stereotypes, right? So that's the analogy. And there's three things I would highlight about the way Professor Crenshaw approached Emma's case. First, she looked at the single access framework that was dominant in anti-discrimination law. So this
00:07:47
Speaker
basically means that the judges were looking at one type of discrimination at a time, right? She is also looking at it from the perspective of activism, how feminist movements and civil rights movements were both overlooking the experience of Emma. Both movements were overlooking black women's experiences. So if we turn it around and approach it in the way Professor Crenshaw advises,
00:08:17
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We center black women. We center Emma at the center of her story. And that reveals the multi-dimensionality of the black woman's experience or of Emma's experience in the factory. And now again, Professor Crenshaw was speaking about anti-discrimination law. Law being about boxes and categories. The Canadian Human Rights Act, for example, states as follows.
00:08:45
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The prohibited grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability, and conviction for an offense, which
00:09:11
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for which, oh my goodness, sorry about that, conviction of an offense for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered. Now our provincial and territorial human rights legislation contains similar lists. These are quite long lists, much longer than the list would have been at the time of Emma's case or the grounds of discrimination listed in many other discrimination acts. But the point is,
00:09:42
Speaker
Up to today, in order to make out a case of discrimination in a court of law, the persecution you experience must fit into the categories in the list. Now, while Professor Crenshaw was focused on anti-discrimination law, her observations about intersecting and overlapping identities go far beyond legal categories.
00:10:07
Speaker
And I think that as humans, much of our thinking and acting and our understanding of the world actually depends on recognizing categories. So with that in mind, we can take intersectionality into many different parts of our experience. Just before we move on, I just want to point out that I've included the name here of a TED Talk that Professor Crenshaw presented in October 2016.
00:10:35
Speaker
You can Google the title and pull it up quite easily. It's an excellent TED Talk. And it is nice to hear her tell the story of Emma and the analysis that she developed, the analogy that she developed, and a very powerful TED Talk. So I would recommend it to you. So this is the analogy. We're looking at an intersection.
00:11:00
Speaker
If an accident happens at the intersection, it could be caused by cars, bikes, buses, traveling from any direction and sometimes from multiple directions. So if you were injured in that intersection, your injuries could be much worse or they could be different than they would have been otherwise if you weren't in the intersection. This is the analogy.
00:11:29
Speaker
From this, we can take that Black women experience discrimination that is both similar to and different from the discrimination experienced by Black men and white women. So sometimes discrimination is not the sum of two, but is a different sort of discrimination, discrimination against Black women specifically. So let's just look at a couple of examples of the application.
00:11:57
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of an intersectional analysis and this analogy. So these are two memes that pulled off of social media, just for some recognizable examples. The first is from the European Disability Forum. Now we know that women and girls living with disabilities are at risk of violence, as are all women and girls.
00:12:17
Speaker
But women with disabilities also experience forms of abuse that women without disabilities do not experience. So violence against women and girls living with disabilities is not just a subset of gender-based violence. It's the confluence of gender-based and disability-based violence that results in this extremely high risk of violence for women living with disabilities. The violence can come from family, strangers,
00:12:48
Speaker
intimate partners, personal care workers, educators, health care providers. Just to make it concrete in the Canadian context, a few statistics over 80% of women with disabilities will be sexually assaulted in their lives. Less than 5% of sexual abuses involving people with developmental disabilities are ever reported to
00:13:13
Speaker
and double the number of girls who are deaf have been sexually abused compared to girls who are hearing. Now listed in the mean are some of the specific forms of violence experienced by women living with disabilities. If you take a look at these, you'll notice that if we just are looking at the issue as a gender-based discrimination issue,
00:13:36
Speaker
We're not going to pick up on all of these forms of disability based discrimination and abuse. Some of these things are not visible to us if we're only thinking about gender.
00:13:52
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Now at the same time, if we're only focused on the aspects of living with a disability, we may not recognize some of the gender-based and sexual elements to the abuse and violence facing women with disabilities. So it's only when we put the woman or girl living with a disability at the center of her own story and understand her experience at the intersection
00:14:21
Speaker
of gender-based and disability-based violence that we can understand the situation for these women. At the same time, what about the sexual and reproductive rights of women living with disabilities? Do we even recognize those or understand how they are being limited if we're only looking at gender
00:14:49
Speaker
and disability as separate categories and not looking at the experience of the woman living at the intersection. Quickly, just a second example. This one is to think about the situation of men who have been incarcerated. So what factors increase the chances that a young man will end up in conflict with the law? To my mind, I think of things like race, poverty,
00:15:19
Speaker
access to education, maybe a history of abuse. Now, if I think about what identities might be taken into consideration, excuse me, in decisions around laying charges or bail, sentencing, parole, those same categories and identities come up again. Then when we think about the experience of imprisonment and how that affects someone's future, their mental and physical health, their employment opportunities,
00:15:48
Speaker
their personal relationships. Again, we see the impacts of those identities and their prison experience. So how things turn out for a young man who's accused of committing a crime can vary significantly depending on their identities and circumstances. So let's just take a moment to pause and reflect.
00:16:10
Speaker
Take a look at this diagram and think about the intersecting identities amongst your clients, patients, students. Thinking about that cohort, what experiences are unique to the intersections of identities and what might be obscured or invisibilized by the overlay of identities? So here I'm asking you to identify things that are about race and gender
00:16:39
Speaker
and disability at the same time, where things that result from religion, class, sexual identity coming together. We can also think about immigration status, family status, and sexuality. How does that impact an experience? I'll give you just a moment to reflect on that. And then a second question. Thinking about current and past political campaigns
00:17:09
Speaker
policy debates, ask yourselves who were the people most impacted by the social and economic issues confronting our societies? Now, once you've identified some of those groups, are there subgroups within those identity categories that have gone unnoticed? And casting your minds back over time, have the groups or individuals who are affected shifted, changed over time?
00:17:39
Speaker
So keep those questions and practices of looking at intersections in your mind and we'll move on to the next component. So the next step in intersectionality is to connect individual and group experiences to the structures and systems of power that create and maintain privilege and depression.
Systems of Power and Privilege
00:18:04
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Because really, there's nothing inherent in the identity of being a migrant, transgender, youth, or any other identity category that makes us have more or less power in social, economic, political, or legal contents. The key is how our identities and the privileges or disadvantages associated with them influence our opportunities.
00:18:34
Speaker
or influence how we're perceived by others. An intersectional lens directs us to focus on the dynamics that create and sustain the systems of identity-based power and oppression. Many challenges that people face aren't due to their individual abilities or failings or just deficiencies. Sorry, tripping over my words today. Not their individual failings or deficiencies.
00:19:04
Speaker
we have to consider things like racism, patriarchy, ableism, xenophobia, et cetera, and how those structures give meaning to their identities in ways that limit equality. So let's take a look at another little case study to make this concrete. I think most of you will be familiar with the idea of the social determinants of health.
00:19:30
Speaker
So we know that various assumptions, policies, and practices affect our access to education, to healthcare, a healthy diet, exercise, jobs, housing. All of these things are determinants of health. As a result, the fact that a higher disease burden falls on a certain population isn't because that population doesn't try to take care of their health, or they're somehow predestined to poor health.
00:19:59
Speaker
The disproportionate ill health burden is due to who holds power in our society and factors such as environmental risk and access to services. How do those in the decision making and power holding positions distribute and redistribute resources is the biggest determination of the big category of social determinants of health.
00:20:27
Speaker
And I think one way to really make this concrete in our minds is to think about the impact of COVID-19 on a large urban center such as Toronto. Poor racialized neighborhoods were universally throughout Canada, the most impacted by the pandemic. Why is that? A few different things that pop into my head would be newcomers and people who don't speak English or French as their primary language in those neighborhoods
00:20:57
Speaker
would have less access to information about vaccines, prevention, isolation, right? Those neighborhoods also have larger, more crowded households. Rather than large single-family homes, we have apartment buildings with many people living within the same structure, or more crowded multi-family, multi-generational homes.
00:21:24
Speaker
We also have lower incomes, which means people didn't have sick days. They didn't have extra money on hand to enable them to take precautions. What really drives it home in the situation of Toronto is that the neighborhoods that were the hardest hit are the neighborhoods that have large industries and warehouses, such as the Amazon warehouses.
COVID-19 and Systemic Inequities
00:21:48
Speaker
So these people were packaging and addressing and shipping out parcels. So many of us would not have to leave our homes and go to grocery stores and department stores and risk exposure to the virus. The people doing that work were actually the most impacted by COVID-19. Consistently across waves of COVID, low income neighborhoods in Ontario had two to 2.5 times the mortality rate
00:22:18
Speaker
of the highest income neighborhoods in Ontario. That is a very significant amount of loss of life. So again, it comes back to power and privilege. There are structures and systems that maintain power and privilege and create oppression within our society. Heterosexism, racism, ableism, ageism,
00:22:47
Speaker
Transphobia, Islamophobia, income inequality, access to education. These structures create and maintain privilege and oppression. So it's how our identities influence our opportunities. They influence how we're perceived by others. That's what we need to focus on. Focus on the systems and the dynamics
00:23:15
Speaker
that are creating and sustaining identity-based oppression. We want to get to the roots of the problems and make change. So understanding our own position is part of using an intersectional approach. We all benefit from some societal structures and are disadvantaged by others. How do our identities situate us as having more or less power relative to others?
00:23:44
Speaker
How do the privileges or oppressions associated with our identities influence our perspectives, our struggles, our opportunities? So take a moment now to jot down some notes about who you are, some of your identities. Financially stable, citizen, university-educated, able-bodied, queer or cisgender, white or racialized. Just jot down what comes to mind.
00:24:15
Speaker
And then I invite you to hold on to that list and come back to it after this webinar and think about each of those identities and what privileges or disadvantages are associated with them. Note that whether it's a privilege or a disadvantage that's associated with the identity might shift in different communities and different contexts. For example, being an elderly person may make you revered and respected in certain communities
00:24:44
Speaker
In others, it gets you shipped off to a long-term care home and forgotten about, just to take a blunt example. So think about assumptions that have been made about you based on your identity. I think we've all walked into a room at one time or another and had something assumed about us that wasn't necessarily true based on an assumption made based on one of our identities. So think about
00:25:14
Speaker
your identities and how they've affected how you're seen, when you're listened to, when you feel isolated or disadvantaged. Now, I just wanna mention that this exercise isn't meant to make you feel shame or resentment. Some people don't like this exercise because of that. And I just wanna emphasize that it's really about awareness
00:25:42
Speaker
and being very aware of our own multifaceted and complex identities and the ways we go out into the world. So moving into the final section of today's presentation, I want to talk about solidarity and allyship. I think we all come together because we care about social justice, we care about equality, and we want to make our world a place worth living in for everyone.
00:26:12
Speaker
Professor Crenshaw recognized different movements in different communities are fighting their own battles and they're not necessarily coming together in order to build strength and to make positive change. It's important to ask what are the commonalities that we share, right? If we work from our points of intersection, from our commonalities, we'll be a much larger movement.
00:26:42
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We'll have a lot more voice, a lot more power.
Solidarity and Social Justice Movements
00:26:45
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So the way I look at it, challenging injustice requires us to understand who is being othered, who's being pushed to the margins and excluded from rights protections and opportunities. We need to understand and explore why the exclusion is happening. What are the long held beliefs
00:27:08
Speaker
or policies or laws that allow the discrimination to continue. The better we understand how identities and power work together, the more likely our movements will be able to come together in strength and change those factors. So I would suggest that by intentionally approaching our research, service provision, activism, whatever type of work we're doing, if we intentionally approach it
00:27:37
Speaker
with intersectional lenses, we can better grasp the interconnectedness of the multitude of factors that may be involved. We can better understand the particular impacts of intertwined systems of impression and aim to ensure that no one is left behind. I think here about things like HIV-related stigma,
00:28:04
Speaker
ageism, the stigma against people who use drugs, the stigma against sex workers. There's a lot of intersection and overlap that can be used to make positive changes in the lives of these people. It's important to understand this so that we don't have a victory and inadvertently leave
00:28:33
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one sector of the community behind, and also so that we don't inadvertently generalize or reproduce inequalities in our work for social justice. And I acknowledge that conversations about identity and privilege are often uncomfortable in movement spaces, but they're necessary for growth and progressive change. And there's also power and joy that comes from recognizing commonalities. So I think it's very important
00:29:03
Speaker
as we try and change the world that we do this work. So we just wanted to offer an example from my own work. A lot of the work I do is about human rights and HIV around the world. And one of the issues about the ongoing HIV epidemics around the globe, 40 years after HIV was discovered, is that laws and policies shaped
00:29:32
Speaker
vulnerability to HIV. So we want to get this virus under control and all of the negative social impacts that flow from it. We have to look at criminal law and punitive approaches with respect to people living with HIV and also intersecting categories of LGBTQI plus people, migrants, sex workers, people who use drugs. So
00:30:00
Speaker
You know, I've just put a few different points here to show some of the intersections that come out and why we can't just hand out condoms and medications and think that will end HIV. People who are living with HIV in various parts of the world can face high levels of discrimination. When you're being discriminated against, you often have to work in the informal economy. You've got less security and stability
00:30:30
Speaker
that makes you highly visible. It also opens you up to more experiences of harassment. And if we're talking about police, the possibility of arrest. Similarly, if we look at gender issues and parenting, we see that a lot of mothers living with HIV have very unique experiences around meeting their own needs and putting the needs of their infants and children first.
00:30:58
Speaker
And here we see policies and practices about parenting and childcare, substance use, mental health, the treatment and medical care for children, as well as during pregnancy and post birth, coming together to create different risks, different vulnerabilities and different obstacles for women.
00:31:23
Speaker
who are parents or who want to be parents with respect to HIV prevention, care, and treatment. I've also listed here sexual violence. It's well documented that sexual violence is greater in communities with people living with HIV, people living with HIV who've experienced violence, have a lower uptake of treatment, may take more sexual risks. Again, a whole other area of vulnerability
00:31:53
Speaker
related to sexual violence in HIV. And then, of course, wealth and privacy impact very much on the actions a person can take, the way they experience surveillance, their risk of arrest or punishment, their ability to protect themselves. So just
00:32:14
Speaker
I know it's in very general terms, but wanted to just offer one other example of the way that this type of approach, an intersectional approach and focusing on programs and policies and laws can really change the way we're addressing a public health issue.
00:32:35
Speaker
So we've gone through the four different ways that intersectionality can be used. And I just wanted to wrap it up by bringing it back to something really practical that I think applies throughout this discussion. And that's that if we can't see something, we can't fix it, right? So many of our social problems result from overlapping oppressions.
00:33:03
Speaker
When we've got racism and sexism and ageism and ableism and heterosexism and classism, et cetera, coming together, we see challenges with respect to access to education, health care, legal services, food security, et cetera.
00:33:23
Speaker
When we can recognize the nuanced oppression created by interconnected systems, we can better identify how to allocate resources and services in our communities to create a more equitable human experience. And I think that is our shared objective. So understanding the nuances of these connections guides us
00:33:49
Speaker
in making social and economic policy, which finally brings me to the point that without systemic change, without changing laws and policies and structures and stereotypes and assumptions based on identities, without that level of systemic change, we cannot ever achieve equality and justice.
Intersectionality: Visibility and Change
00:34:15
Speaker
There's no amount of charity.
00:34:18
Speaker
that will give us a world that is welcoming and supportive of everyone if we don't do the work to change the systems that are marginalizing, oppressing, and excluding people. If we can't see it, we can't fix it. Intersectionality helps us see it and guides us to know how to fix it.
00:34:48
Speaker
That is my conclusion. So thank you very much for sticking through to the end of today's webinar. I hope that you found some nuggets in it that have sparked some ideas in your own mind or that you can take forward in your humanist objectives, your everyday work, and your interactions in your community. Thank you very much. My contact information is there. If you have any follow-up questions,
00:35:17
Speaker
And I wish you all a lovely evening, afternoon, depending on what time of day you're watching this. Thank you so much.
00:35:30
Speaker
Thank you for listening to The Voice of Canadian Humanism. We would like to especially thank our members and donors who make our work possible. If you feel that this is the type of programming that belongs in the public conversation, please visit us at HumanistCanada.ca and become a member and or donate. You can also like and subscribe to us on social media at Humanist Canada. We'll see you next time.