Karen Crenshaw Intersectionality

In 1989, women’s rights were on fire, especially in the eyes of feminist Peggy McIntosh. At this time, she created an article titled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” that inspected just that: white privilege. As expected, she forms an argument that argues against those who do not recognize their all-too-common- white privilege. After looking into the structure of “White Privilege”, a few obvious aspects make the piece successful in what it does. Overall, the format of the article allows for ease of a compelling reading.

In “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform,” Dean Spade proposes that the United States was founded through “racialization…(which) continues to operate under new guises… that produce, manage, and deploy gender categories and sexuality and family norms” (16). More over, these laws and norms tend to maintain the “status quo,” and employ an inherently flawed justice system that is only equipped to address single-axis discrimination issues (5). Thus, the intersectionality movement is largely dismissed by the social and justice systems, as it utilizes “critical intersectional tools… that are often (too) difficult for legal scholars to comprehend” (17). Interstionality’s progress is also impeded by advocates leaving to support single-axis issues. However, Spade warns that this approach is ineffective, as it fails to protect the most marginalized members of society.

This novel highlights the fact of the injustices people of color are faced with in everyday life. In the introduction of this book, Michelle Alexander highlights the criminal justice system and how rather than identifying people by their race, people of color are labeled as criminals. I believe the criminal justice system, racial caste, ideology, and global examples of racial caste are all connected to racial inequality. I feel that the race and criminal justice system are connected on the basis that people of color are seen as unequal when compared to Caucasians. In the reading the author provides good examples of how officers are well trained at defending against claims of racial bias in policing.

In an article by the Crunk Feminist Collective, it discusses a video of a white woman who was getting harassed as she walks down the streets of New York City. The article discusses how the Hollaback video was not only sexist but racist as well. The white men who catcalled the white woman were edited out. Meanwhile men of color are still represented in a “dangerous” way that threatens an innocent white woman. The article also discuses how Black women have the right to occupy public spaces without enduring street harassment.

Sakia Gunn was a fifteen-year-old black teen who was violently targeted for a murdering due to her identifying as a lesbian. Leah Lakshmi realized the magnitude of this hate crime and used it as a platform to bring awareness to the situation. There has been and currently exists a structural problem that consistently harms people of color. Historically hate crimes were blatant, showing up as lynchings and other publicly violent portrayals. However, recently hate crimes have become more invisible.

Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed”(Lee 276). The minute a white woman, Mayella Ewell, accused a black man of assaulting her in any way it was an unfair fight. Due to these discriminatory acts Tom Robinson was found guilty, even though we find out he was innocent after all. This challenges the American value of equality, because in Tom Robinson’s case nothing was fair and equal about it. Similarly in Esperanza’s case, she experiences racism in her own neighborhood and from her own acquaintances.

One of the themes in Angela Davis’s essay, “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist”, is the necessity of using an intersectional framework to analyze rape and lynching in order to understand how racism and sexism work together to maintain capitalist relations of production. With the advent of Reconstruction came the socioeconomic and political threat to the White bourgeoisie from former Black slaves who sought citizenship, land and equality. Seeing the potential erosion of their control, the [1983:185] “lawless killings of Black people were portrayed as a preventative measure to deter the Black masses from rising up in revolt.” When these accusations were shown to be false, the bourgeoisie were forced to reinvent the form of racism that

In the 1980’s black women are faced with a lot pressure in society, Because women of color are both women and racial minorities, they face more pressure in which lower economic opportunities due to their race and their gender. This pressure is reflected both in the jobs available to them and in their lower pay. Also because they are women of color they are likely to be the giver of the house and also within the families. Through the use of anecdotes,rhetorical questions, anaphora, ethos and metaphors, "In The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, Audre Lorde argues that women of color need to respond to racism with anger spurred from their fear and that not a bad thing depends on how anger is portrayed.

At times whiteness can hold sentiments of privilege or a desirable social status. Other times, it can position itself as source of victimhood or a “tenuous situational identity” (Twine & Gallagher, 2008, p.7). The study of “whiteness” was birthed in the early 1990s from critical race theory (CRT) in the United States of America (Delgado &Stefancic, 2001). CRC was built on two movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism (Delgado &Stefancic, 2001).

The content of the chapter is centered on the experiences of microaggressions, particularly those experienced by Black women. The author uses personal anecdotes, interviews, and historical examples to highlight the insidious nature of these experiences, which are often dismissed or overlooked by those who perpetrate them. The author's writing is lyrical and evocative, drawing the reader into the emotional landscape of the experiences being

He conveys this through his powerful use of diction, even in the first sentence he says “My first victim was a woman-white” (Staples 1). The word victim gives a very dark and scary tone as if something horrible is bound to happen, but as the reader reads along the whole scenario is just the narrator walking through a park at night and the white woman feels threatened and progressively runs away from the man. The narrator is a college student. The main message is that people are still so quick to judge and feel like they are in danger when they are around african american people they’ll in this case run away. It's also a proven statistic by Havard University states that women are in fact scared of men.

He expands the action by discussing a social experiment performed by Ian Ayre, a law professor in Chicago. In Ayre’s experiment, he found that women and African Americans were considered to be suckers and were often pushed to buy a car for a much higher price (Gladwell 93-94). I feel this experiment is very true because, as women, we are immediately viewed as weak and dependent on others. This causes us to be overlooked when it comes to running a company or buying a car. Today, genders have started to even out when it comes to jobs but there are still times when women are faced with discrimination.

The climax of this story is a rape trial that involves a Negro, Tom Robinson, and a white woman, Mayella Ewell. In the court’s eyes’ her power is clear, but is she that powerful? Because of her vulnerability as a woman and a very low-class status, she’s powerless, but her privilege as a white person in a racist society is very powerful. Mayella is powerless because of her gender. In the trial, it’s revealed that Mayella is physically, verbally, and sexually abused by her father.

As black women always conform under patriarchal principles, women are generally silenced and deprived of rights because men are entitled to control everything. Women are silenced in a way that they lose their confidence and hesitate to speak up due to the norms present in the society they live in. Hence, even if women have the confidence to try to speak, men wouldn’t bother to listen since men ought to believe that they are superior to women. In addition to that, women often live in a life cycle of repetitions due to patriarchal principles since women are established to fulfill the roles the society had given them. It is evidenced by Celie as she struggles to survive and to define oneself apart from the controlling, manipulative, and abusive men in her life.

Kareen Harboyan English 1C Professor Supekar March 15, 2018 Word Count: Crenshaw’s Mapping the Margins: The Marginalization of Women of Color Analyzed Through Generalization and A Feminist Lens Crenshaw's Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color expands on the multifaceted struggles of women of color and the generalizations ingrained in society that limit women of color and keep them in a box. In this text, Crenshaw builds on the concept of intersectionality which proposes that social categorizations such as gender and race are intertwined and have great influence on one another.