The Need to Reframe Intersectionality in Activism

Photo by Fred Murphy is licensed under CC BY-ND-NC 1.0.

Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related issues compared to white women. Whites experience 17 percent less air pollution than they produce, whereas Blacks and Hispanics bear 53 and 63 percent more air pollution than they generate. Transgender people are 3.7 times more likely to be targets of police brutality than cisgender victims.

Conversations on intersectionality naturally gravitate toward statistics like these. They demonstrate that inequalities compound one another and affirm the need for intersectional activism; they are valuable and necessary to tell the stories of society’s most marginalized communities.

However, using these figures to lead discussions on intersectionality causes an excessive focus on the effects of inequality, often manifesting in little more than a nod to these statistics at the beginning of a statement/post/speech/rally to highlight the disproportionate struggles of specific groups.

Recognition alone does not even begin to embody intersectional activism. Intersectionality is not a box that can be checked by acknowledging disproportionality, yet, how we frame intersectionality today has opened avenues for performative allyship and armchair activism. Intersectionality requires us to think beyond how issues disproportionately impact certain people. Intersectionality is going deeper to analyze and identify the sources—and thus solutions—that run common to societal crises. The activism space must shift the narrative away from focusing on the intersectionality of problems to the intersectionality of causes and solutions. Doing so will pave the way for developing more inclusive solutions, building communities, and uniting movements.

Black LGBTQ feminist scholar-activists began employing the theoretical idea of intersectionality in the 1970s to call for more inclusive feminism beyond the wealthy, white, heterosexual advocacy of the twentieth century. Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw coined and popularized the term “intersectionality” in 1989 when she published a paper entitled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” on the compounding effects of racism and sexism on Black women. Crenshaw defines the term as “a lens...for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.”

The last sentence is especially significant when discussing structural inequality and how to solve it. Crenshaw argues that a Black woman not only experiences racism for her Blackness and sexism for her womanness; she does not solely experience the racism that Black men confront or the sexism that white women encounter. Her existence as Black and woman means she faces overlapping, compounding inequalities that reinforce and perpetuate one another more than if race and sex are considered alone.

The idea of intersectionality began in the modern feminist movement and has slowly seeped into others ever since, including racial and environmental justice. However, as Crenshaw’s term gains more mainstream attention and awareness, the concept has become largely about acknowledging inequalities rather than taking action to seek solutions through an intersectional lens. An example is the current intersectionality dialogue in the environmental justice movement, which concentrates on disproportionate impacts and disparity.

Founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist and leading climate activist Leah Thomas writes that “when it comes to exposure to poor air quality and water quality, BIPOC are disproportionately impacted. Underrepresented and low-income communities are also more likely to be concentrated in areas with nearby toxic waste sites, landfills, and other environmental hazards.” According to Thomas, the first steps to practicing intersectional environmental justice are acknowledging environmental racism and injustice, amplifying unheard voices, and unlearning one-sided histories.

But the conversation has to surpass preaching acknowledgment and amplification. Words such as “acknowledge” and “amplify” largely dominate exchanges on environmental justice and race, but such rhetoric perpetuates the notion that environmental justice and race are disparate. If “acknowledgment” and “amplification” are the best the climate movement can do when it comes to race, it creates the perception that environmental advocates are bystanders in the fight for racial justice and should move aside to heed the voices of racial justice activists. Climate change and race become more siloed through such speech and that’s harmful to the communities confronting both crises at the intersection.

Like environmental justice, modern feminist discussions tend to lead by acknowledging the disproportionate experiences of certain groups. Womanist scholar, author, and activist Ebony Janice Moore writes that “intersectionality means we can not talk about gender equality without acknowledging the unique ways other marginalizations layered onto gender impact that person’s gendered experience.” She suggests that the simplest way to be an intersectional feminist is to “pass the microphone” and allow the voiceless to speak for themselves.

Uplifting marginalized voices is vital to intersectional activism, but the conversation cannot end here. When it halts at passing the microphone, intersectionality becomes a passive role of allyship that manifests itself in “I see you” and “I hear you,” so I will “pass the microphone” to you but without tangible actions.

Activism today frames intersectionality as discourse on recognition and disparity. But doing so is dangerous because such rhetoric keeps movements separate and does not recognize many of the shared root causes of systemic oppression like power structures and exploitation. When activists begin incorporating solutions into how they talk about intersectionality, issues become more connected, and opportunities for inter-movement unification and collective action arise.

Regarding environmental justice, the link between climate change and racism is even more intertwined than the communities they most affect. New Republic journalist Kate Aronoff says on the “Hot Take” podcast, “so much of the language around race and climate is so limited...When it does come up, which is not enough, [it] tends to be this story of disparity...It’s undeniably true that people of color, Black folx, are more affected by climate change, by environmental racism, by pollution, all of the footprints of the fossil fuel industry.” But the solutions and root causes of climate change and racism are one and the same, and the narrative needs to broaden to encompass them.

In the same podcast episode, Aronoff describes how defunding the police is good climate policy. “We have budgets, which are written to criminalize Black and brown folx, and those budgets are not being devoted toward climate action if 50 percent of the city’s spending is going toward police. That is not money which is going toward climate adaptation and resilience and mitigation.”

A 2017 report from the Center for Popular Democracy found that nationwide cities devote between 20 and 45 percent of their budgets to policing. These overinflated, indulgent funds for criminalizing Black and brown bodies suction funds away from other causes, namely affordable housing, public transportation, and job programs, all of which could double as climate policies. As Aronoff writes, “Budgets that revolve around criminalizing [B]lack communities...are ill-suited for taking on the climate crisis.”

Almost poetically, climate policy also defunds the police. When Black and Hispanic communities are already the most at risk from air pollution and disproportionately suffer respiratory and cardiovascular disease, it is that fossil fuel giants prop up the very police departments that criminalize the same communities they are suffocating. Chevron is the world’s second dirtiest fossil fuel company and funds and serves on the board of many police departments in major U.S. cities, including Houston and Salt Lake City. Shell, who is number seven on the list of dirtiest polluters, is also a partner of the New Orleans police foundation and sponsors Houston’s police department. Climate action requires holding polluters accountable, and stricter regulations mean punishing fossil fuel corporations for their hand in exacerbating environmental and racial injustice. Exposing the links between racial and environmental justice means that the two movements have a common oppressor: big corporations.

The solution to climate change and racism is inextricable, but how we currently talk about the two does not reflect reality. Including intersectional solutions in intersectionality expands the conversation. It moves beyond how specific demographics are disproportionately affected to how solutions can mutually benefit more than one cause. When we begin talking about solutions to climate change and racism in this way that acknowledges shared roots in the extraction and exploitation of colored communities, the two become less distinct from one another.

Reframing intersectionality to encompass solutions in activist spaces is an ongoing process. Like anti-racism and allyship, intersectionality is an asymptote for which we must all strive. There is no single action that will automatically check the intersectionality box; it is a muscle that we must practice exercising.