Marcia
As Dr. Douglas notes below, March contains both International Women’s Day and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Maybe we need an International Day for Intersectionality to recognize the fullness and wholeness of our identities and how that intersects with our experiences of social systems that structure access to power, money and resources- including the resource of health care.
From the time I was a junior faculty member, I would often use the predictors of referral for cardiac catheterization (table 5 from Schulman et al. – linked below) to highlight how it’s not enough to just say women receive inequitable treatment for heart disease, we have to look more closely at how different women are treated.[1] This isn’t a standalone study. Other research demonstrates Black Women have a higher risk of heart disease, hyperlipidemia, high blood pressure and diabetes but are significantly less likely to receive appropriate preventive care.[2] From maternal health outcomes to gender pay gaps, when we look more closely we see the interaction of race and gender- reminding us that both our analysis and our action needs to be more complex than trying to reduce our experiences of difference to a single variable.
[1] Table from Schulman et al. The Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations for Cardiac Catheterization. NEJM (1999). https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199902253400806.
[2] Jha et al. Differences in Medical Care and Disease Outcomes Among Black and White Women with Heart Disease. Circulation (2003). https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/01.cir.0000085994.38132.e5
Delia
Following a landmark ruling by Canada’s highest court of appeal in October 1929, some women were legally recognized as “persons.” Notably, this ruling did not apply to Black, Indigenous, or racialized minority women.
March is Women’s History Month.
March 8 is International Women’s Day.
March 21st is International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
While that ruling was passed nearly a century ago, the question of personhood, of humanness, remains a site of struggle.
I have been thinking about ongoing efforts to discipline and punish those on the margins.
Who is often excluded in language that homogenizes…which women are we referring to when we say women?
I have been thinking about women, 2SLGBTQQIA+, folx, and disabled folx – where and when (if at all) does race enter these conversations?
To put it another way, disability, gender identity, and expression, and sexuality are always racialized. Race is always present whether or not it is named. What I mean is this – there is a tendency to address race as if it is only relevant to those perceived to be raced subjects – Black, Indigenous, and racialized minority folx. Excluding whiteness from the racial order fails to identify the racialization processes assigned to people of European ancestry.
Racism occurs in 2SLGBTQQIA+ spaces. Racism occurs in disability politics. Racism occurs between and among diverse women…there is no place to stand outside of racism.
All our lives are shaped by multiple axes of power.
I have been thinking about recognition, survival, and resistance.
How might we begin to make sense of the complex ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and disability operate independently and simultaneously to shape our diverse lived experiences?
Diverse women are differently vulnerable in a society organized around heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and ableism. Not all women experience these violences, harms, and wounds in the same way.
We must acknowledge and prioritize complexity.
Disrupting and dismantling racial-sexual-gender-ableist hierarchies requires nuance and a rejection of either/or thinking.
The rejection and denial of difference, the rejection and denial of complexity, and the rejection and denial of personhood are part of past and present settler colonial projects.
If we can’t recognize the specific identities and experiences of people, then we won’t be able to adequately respond to their needs.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framing of intersectionality discourages us from attempting to determine one form of inequality as separate from other forms of inequality. For example, it does not see race as more or less important than gender, rather it acknowledges and responds to people’s experiences as simultaneously shaped by the intersections of the various elements of identity, including race, gender identity, and expression, sexual orientation and ability. Intersectionality is a lens that does not position forms of inequality against each other to determine who has endured harm, resulting in a hierarchy of oppression which is itself another form of harm.
So, I am thinking about the need for a racial literacy that is expansive in its capacity to identify and challenge multiple systems of oppressions at once. It is a racial literacy that considers disability and its integration with anti-racist, feminist, and queer practices in its conceptualization of social justice struggles.
Resources
Lindsey, Treva, B. (2015). “Post-Ferguson: A “Herstorical” Approach to Black Violability.” Feminist Studies, 41(1), 232-237.
Simms, Sy, Nicolazzo, Z., & Jones, Alden. (2023). Don’t say sorry, do better: Trans students of color, disidentification, and internet futures. Diversity in Higher Eduation,16(3), 297-308.