The Importance of Intersectionality

Since President Cheeto has been elected, women have had a hell of a year. But throughout that year, I have noticed that while we have been making strides in raising our voices, we often forget that ALL women deserve to raise their voices. Intersectionality is often left to the wind, and white women have taken over this wave of feminism we are riding.

Let me be clear, if your feminism isn’t inclusive, it’s not feminism.

But white feminism isn’t new in our country. This dates back to the very first feminist movement that took place in this country, the women’s suffrage movement. The movement was founded by white women, who intentionally chose to fight for the white woman’s right to vote over abolition. Susan B. Anthony once said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.” The suffragettes made a guest appearance at the 2017 Women’s March as white women dressed in white, reminiscent of their predecessors who did the same as they marched for their right to vote.

PSA: the Nineteenth Amendment, when ratified in 1920, exclusively applied to white women. In 1947, Native Americans got the right to vote. In 1952, people of Asian ancestry got the right to vote. In 1963, voting rights were declared civil rights, and African Americans finally got the right to vote. After that, it took years of activism to make it so that those laws were followed, because white folks didn’t make it easy for African Americans to actually register or vote.

As we figure out how to navigate this newest wave of feminism and the mounting social movement we are in, we must consider what intersectionality means. The dictionary definition is: “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” It’s pretty straightforward—no one is made up of any one identity.

Just think of every label you can attach to yourself. Here’s my list:

• Woman

• Indian

• First generation

• Cisgender

• Straight

• Able-bodied

• Middle-class

• College-educated

• Gemini

• (Funny)

The point of this is to show that there are so many different aspects of my identity that mean something in every interaction I am a part of. Every social situation I enter, each of those factors acts upon what’s happening. When I go for a job interview, the fact that I am Indian, the fact that I have a degree from a college, the fact that I am a woman, all means something, good or bad. The point of intersectionality is understanding that you have to consider the that there is more than one factor at play in any given situation and movement.

It’s important to understand your place of privilege when entering a social movement and know that your experience as a woman is not the same as the woman next to you.

Let’s look at some of the biggest feminist movements taking place at this time: #MeToo and Time’s Up. Lupita Nyong’o was one of the first women to out Harvey Weinstein. While it’s great that other women have also stepped up, where was the coverage for her? On All In with Chris Hayes on MSN- BC, Jane Fonda said, “Something’s shifted. It’s too bad that it’s probably because so many of the women that were assaulted by Harvey Weinstein are famous and white and everybody knows them. This has been going on a long time to black women and other women of color, and it doesn’t get out quite the same.”

By Valerie Reynoso

When you use your privilege to overshadow others, you silence a whole community. You create an environment where someone either has to hide a part of who they are or has to completely take themselves out of the conversation. We don’t get to pick and choose who we are. You don’t get to pick and choose who other people are. And you certainly do not get to dictate who has the right to speak out and who has the right to equality.

I was at the Women’s March in D.C. in 2017. I was there surrounded by white women chanting for Scarlett Johansson to come back on stage to finish her speech about how her friend, not even she herself, needed Planned Parenthood. I watched these women chant and yell for the white speakers. Then I watched the white woman next to me shout, “Let’s go already!” while the women of color who organized the damn event tried to speak.

Six women of color are on the board of the Women’s March organization (don’t ever forget the leadership role women of color have always played in social movements). And none of them got the respect they earned at that march. There was a sea of pink pussy hats in retaliation to Agent Orange’s disgraceful remarks, but what about the women who don’t have vaginas? Where was their place in that?

Women make up a majority of the eligible voting population in America. That means if 60% of female voters voted the same, we’d win every election. We have so much power that we don’t realize. And it’s because not all women welcome every kind of woman. Women of upper-middle class status need to fight for women on the brink of poverty. Women who have the right to marry their partners need to fight for those who don’t. Women who can walk down a street and not have slurs thrown at them need to fight for the women who are degraded every day. Those with voices must help those who don’t.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “No one is free until we are all free.” That quote might be a few decades old, but some of y’all need the reminder in the year 2018.

I can’t explain to you why you should care for other people. I can’t tell you why you should care about the DREAMer, the transgender woman, the lesbian, the black woman, the Muslim woman. You just should. People are people, and in the years to come we’re either going to be the generation that brought justice and equality to all, or we are going to be mocked for our lack of empathy.

There is a right and a wrong side to this. It’s time to choose because as long as we fracture ourselves into groups, we are weaker as a community. We let crazy orange men sit at our capital, and watch as one by one, his employees resign. We watch the government he’s created slowly strip away civil rights. We watch our government break and realize too late that we did this to ourselves.

We are always stronger together. And it’s about damn time we stood up for each other.

By Anahita Padmanabhan