Critical Race Theory: A Primer by Khiara Bridges

Author:Khiara Bridges [Bridges, Khiara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683284437
Google: VMhDvAEACAAJ
Publisher: Foundation Press
Published: 2019-11-15T23:34:34.942929+00:00

E.Intersectionality Does Not Theorize Privileged Groups

Some have argued that intersectionality is only interested in multiply-subordinated individuals and groups. As a result, they say, the theory is not useful to the task of helping us understand the experiences of individuals and groups that are privileged along one or many (or all) axes—like straight white men and women. Similarly, it does not help us understand how structural processes produce and support these privileged groups.

This criticism clearly results from Crenshaw having examined a multiply-subordinated group—black women—in her early work on intersectionality. And the criticism finds continued support in most studies that self-identify as intersectional investigating individuals and groups that are burdened along many axes. As Nash summarizes it, “[T]he overwhelming majority of intersectional scholarship has centered on the particular positions of multiply marginalized subject,” making it “unclear whether intersectionality is a theory of marginalized subjectivity.”27

One might begin a response to this critique by noting that while Crenshaw purported to analyze “black women” as a multiply-subordinated group in her early articles on intersectionality, the group that she actually analyzed was, in fact, privileged along some axes. In “Mapping the Margins,” Crenshaw acknowledged that she was going to omit some factors—specifically, class and sexuality—from her analysis.28 And she did. However, while many of the black women that Crenshaw discusses in the ensuing investigation are unprivileged along class lines, most of them are straight and cisgender. Thus, intersectionality, in its initial presentations, did theorize a group that was privileged—with respect to sexuality and gender identity. This suggests that intersectionality is not limited, as a matter of course, to theorizing subordinated groups.

Scholars have expanded upon the notion that intersectionality can theorize those who exist at the intersection of privilege—like the straight, wealthy, cisgender, white male—as capably as it can theorize those who exist at the intersection of unprivilege. (As Devon Carbado writes, “[I]t is a mistake to conceptualize intersectionality as a ‘race to the bottom.’ The theory seeks to map the top of social hierarchies as well.”29) Some have noted that when we acknowledge that intersectionality can theorize the privileged, it actually reveals the instability of categories of privilege and unprivilege. For example, 246

black men, because of their gender, are usually imagined to be privileged vis-à-vis black women. However, consider the criminal justice system and mass incarceration. While black women are overrepresented among those who are under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system (i.e., in jail or prison, or on probation or parole),30 black men nevertheless outstrip them in this respect. Moreover, many would argue that gender—specifically, ideas about black masculinity—informs the overrepresentation of black men within the criminal justice system. That is, black men’s maleness makes them vulnerable to the excesses of the criminal justice system. In this way—and in this specific social context—maleness, when it intersects with race unprivilege, may be an unprivileged position vis-à-vis femaleness. With respect to the muscular criminal justice system, femaleness—black, white, and other—may constitute the privileged side of the binary.

Darren Hutchinson has done a similar analysis of heterosexuality, which we tend to imagine as existing on the privileged end of the sexuality spectrum.

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