Problem: What were your general impressions of their post? What points of sympathy/empathy do you hold with them? What additional points should students consider when reflecting on intersectionality in one paragraph? Need Assignment Help?
John Foley:
Oppression is not always a focused beam of laser light, easily traceable in the fog of injustice. It is too often a maze of multiple beams, diffused and hidden by an unassuming sun, casting its oppressive shadow in all directions like a web of smoke. Perhaps you feel the choking palm of racial prejudice based on your Asian heritage, but you are also deaf, hearing only the sounds of society's judgment. Or you are Latino, but also transgender, buckling as injustice pummels you back and forth and from both sides. You may be autistic, and Middle Eastern, and in your twilight years, condemned from every angle, a shattered fun house mirror.
Emma DeGraffenreid was both an African American and a woman, applying at General Motors in the 1960's. She was caught in the intersection of racial and gender inequality and offered little opportunity. With 4 other black women, they sued GM for discrimination. The judge examined their case from the separate and singular lenses of discrimination common at the time: racial or gender wrongdoing. Narrowing his viewpoint too much, he noted that black men worked on the factory floor. Further, white women worked in the office. He concluded that both race and gender were represented in the General Motors staff and dismissed the case.
Sadly, this common and myopic view failed to detect that absent from GM's workforce of multi-racial men and light-skinned women were the lost oppressed: someone both black and a woman. Emma DeGraffenreid was invisible in two intersecting beams of discrimination.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, carrying the torch of the black feminist pioneers before her, calls these gaps in identified social injustice "intersectionality". She likened them to the intersection of traffic from two distinct flows of oppression. Those trapped in that intersection were in double jeopardy, but lost without a street name. The systems being built to attempt to protect against oppression were focused too acutely, protecting singularly against gender or racial injustice, missing those individuals most oppressed under the weight of the multiplying prejudices.
Emma DeGraffenreid was not protected like her black male counterparts. She was forgotten in the efforts of women suffragettes.