Hardware – intersectionality

When we think of critical race theory at least at its genesis in the 1960s and seventies, coming from the civil rights movement with scholars and activists in law and sociology, to some extent, scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda and others, we see where it was meant to critique legal structures and institution and how those led to racialization and racial barriers. So at its core, it speaks about racism and race being socially constructed. However, although it’s socially constructed, it mentioned that it has real implication for people, especially black, Indigenous, racialized people, and how they access services. So it was really meant to critique institutional and systemic racism and barriers, oppression and to create more liberation, for want of a better word, for people who are who are impacted by these structures. 

So intersectionality is one of the key terminologies coming out of critical race theory. It was popularized by Kimberlé Crenshaw, even though other scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins, made note of intersectionality as black women’s experiences with racism in the U.S., you know, prior to that. But it’s really been popularized, coined theorized explicitly through Crenshaw’s work, and it looks at the ways in which our layered identities, particularly looking at race, gender, disability, class, etc., implicates our own lived experiences. So thinking about the ways we experience biases or our structures based on our race, our class, abilities, disabilities.  

So as a way to illustrate this, as a accented first-generation Jamaican, Canadian, but being educated and being a professor, how that would be different from another accented Jamaican Canadian first generation or perhaps with precarious legal status right and how they interact the systems, especially if they’re from the working class, not having access to services versus with me by rights of citizenship, I can access certain services differently. And then I get into the whole traveling and what that means having to dress business casual because I don’t want to be pulled out of the line and searched by security versus what that means for white presenting people and how then they get in or I guess an easier way through immigration by virtue of their whiteness.