Intersectionality: Playing a Game of Social Justice Telephone
by Asia Hayes
My experience with workplace icebreakers follows a similar pattern. The facilitator introduces a game or activity, a feeling of despair sinks in, and I coyly send memes from The Office to close friends, so they too are brought into my discomfort.
The purpose of icebreakers is to build community, maybe even alleviate the tension when someone eats your lunch out of the community fridge. At least you know two truths and a lie about their life, right? Sometimes, though, icebreakers go deeper.
The first time I heard the term “intersectionality” was in 2018 during an onboarding icebreaker activity. Each team member was encouraged to evaluate different aspects of their identity. For the first time, I heard vocabulary that, in some ways, captured the difficulties I had in explaining my experiences in academia and other professional settings.
But just as quickly as this new knowledge and language captured the essence of my experience, it started to fade when I realized the origin of this term and the history behind it was lost.
As our nation enters a racially conscious milieu, the term has gained momentum. Today, when we speak of race, we speak of intersectionality. It’s been at the forefront of conversations as our nation works toward a collective consciousness-raising to address racial discrimination. For me, it’s been especially prevalent working in an education-based nonprofit serving Black and Latinx students as well as in my graduate coursework at a predominantly white institution (PWI).
But while the term intersectionality has been in the legal lexicon for more than 30 years, some users of the world fail to acknowledge its origin, and effectively ignore the Black woman behind it.
Black women joined together to bring cases such as DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, Moore v. Hughes Helicopter, Inc., and Payne v. Travenol to the forefront to address discrimination they were experiencing in the hiring process. Kimberlé Crenshaw, the black female lawyer behind these cases, created the term intersectionality as a means to describe the disparities in the hiring process that these Black women faced. Employers argued there was no wrongdoing. They claimed they were hiring both women and African Americans. However, what the law and Kimberlé attempted to demonstrate was employers were not hiring Black women.
Intersectionality was used to describe the unique experiences of Black women, highlighting a specific type of discrimination that had yet to be acknowledged. From a legal perspective, it was difficult to prove wrongdoing when the victims didn’t fit neatly into one or the other category.
Since becoming more public, intersectionality has taken on a meaning of its own, casually entering conversations in most workplaces as leaders work to build more mindfully inclusive spaces, and emerging in the digital lexicon of SEO buzzwords. Its popularity has, in some ways, upstaged the players behind it.
So, what happens when a word gains more power than the people and its history?
As a Black woman, I feel intersectionality has lost its power. As more spaces tout inclusivity and acknowledge what they call intersectionality, it effectively diminishes the power it holds for the populations that need it the most. We’ve begun to conflate intersectionality with the fullness of being human. This attempt to use intersectionality as an equalizer is where we miss the mark. From its origin, intersectionality is not just the intersection of multiple identities, but rather the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, and the way these identities compound experiences of discrimination and oppression.
In my last professional role, during an after work happy hour, a co-worker flippantly remarked, “I feel like Asia forgets she’s Black sometimes.” I felt these words heavy in my chest. To him, Blackness meant something I “sometimes” didn’t represent based on his definition of Blackness. The thing that made me intersectional was taken away by someone else. In one statement, they’d rendered my ability to claim intersectionality obsolete.
My workplace was proud to claim themselves as social justice-oriented. Staff regularly participated in workshops and trainings that pushed us toward conversations of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As an organization, they’d taken on the phrase “social justice” as their identity. How, then, could I bring forward my co-worker’s comment? What place did I have to say anything, considering the most present aspect of my identity went unseen?
Then May 2020 came, the killing of George Floyd shook the nation, and my organization held meetings and interest groups touting the verbiage of “antiracist,” when in reality they were just doing better than most. I pushed back. My decision to say something was both liberating and left me feeling a bit empty, as my colleagues welcomed my Zoom meeting interruption with words like, “I am glad you felt safe to tell us.”
It was not safety I felt, but urgency.
Acknowledging intersectionality is the gateway to addressing race in a critical way. It not only represents the anecdotal experiences, but also the true essence of being a person of color and working within a system built to keep you oppressed. By understanding intersectionality and its fullness, it creates a bridge to better capture what it means to work toward a true antiracist mindset.
I share my experience, to some degree, as a caution to organizations and individuals who proudly wave the flag of social justice, to strike a balance. Organizations shouldn’t become so entrenched in a social justice identity that they ignore people on the other side of this. Even if they’re changing, it would be wise to be cautious about how much holding onto antiracist thinking is happening, while ignoring those impacted by it.
Individuals must strike the same balance and remember my Black anecdote is not everyone's Black anecdote. Gauge your relationship with coworkers and ask yourself if and when it’s appropriate to intervene. Above all, trust that people of color are capable of sharing their experiences: if they need to, they will. It took me three months to say something, but I brought it up when I was ready.
As a person who experiences intersectionality, it’s important to me that the power of this word is restored. I can see this accomplished by acknowledging experiences like mine. Recognize the words of colleagues as more than just an anecdote or cautionary tale. Acknowledge them as a reclamation of power.
It’s essential to evaluate how and why we use the term intersectionality. Whether we’re in academia or the workforce, there is an urgency to understand the purpose of intersectionality. Often, we conflate terms used in racial justice spaces with ideas and terminology that don’t always align with the origins.
We should constantly evaluate the stories we tell ourselves about why we use words and when we choose to use them. When playing a game of social justice telephone: words lose their meaning as they’re used by more and more people. As a community invested in working toward racial justice and equity, we need to be more aware of entering a space with newfound vocabulary where we don’t fully understand the origin. Understanding when to use a term effectively, with all the knowledge of its concepts, is vital in this work.
Without evaluating how and when we use words like intersectionality, we continue to diminish the stories of individuals who stand at the intersection of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other marginalized groups. When we co-opt words as influential as intersectionality and make them interchangeable with words that are not synonymous, we make it more palatable to forget.
Asia is a graduate student in St. Louis, MO pursuing a joint Master of Social Work and Juris Doctorate degree. Her experience lies in educational justice and education-based nonprofit organizations. When she’s not in class, she can be found enjoying a cup of coffee and a good book.
