The L.A. City Council, intersectionalism and the Crenshaw vs. Betita cage match

 I shall assume you have encountered the leaked recording from the Los Angeles City Council.  My reaction, from the political science perspective, is to recall two names: Kimberle Crenshaw and Elizabeth Betita Martinez.

Having heard the recording, you will hopefully have contrasted the recordings with the obnoxious attempt at a definitional escape from moral culpability: "racism = prejudice + power."  The construction, or perhaps, reconstruction, popular among the far left, is an attempt to redefine "racism" to immunize anyone in a set of demographic categories from the most heinous of charges-- racism-- no matter what they do, through the all-powerful legerdemain of redefining the words in a sentence.  It doesn't count when I do it because I redefined myself out of guilt.

Anyway, what happened?  Essentially, one group of non-white people expressed their animosity towards other non-whites.  This is intersectionalism, and Elizabeth Betita Martinez warned about it.

You probably think that you have a vague sense about what intersectionalism is, but have you actually read "Mapping The Margins?"  That was Kimberle Crenshaw's article, which was the foundational article, both for critical race theory broadly and intersectionality specifically.  In the most generous reading of the concept, Crenshaw observed the following true proposition:  being African-American and a woman is more than merely the additive sum of those two components, there are unique characteristics, and simply looking at traits one at a time, distinct from each other will miss the importance of intersections.

One can even make a simple mathematical observation.  A firm can hire women, and claim representation.  A firm can hire African-Americans, and claim representation.  Yet if we do not look at the intersection of those two categories, a firm may have no African-American women, and we may miss that.

Um... yeah.  That's actually right.  And if Crenshaw had kept it focused on such observations, she would be more universally lauded.  She didn't.  Instead, she derided the idea of universal humanity, and instead, advocated the reification of demographic divisions for strategic political purposes.

Consider:  "We can all recognize the distinction between the claims 'I am black' and the claim 'I am a person who happens to be black.'  'I am black' takes the socially imposed identity and empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity.  'I am black' becomes not simply a statement of resistance but also a positive discourse of self-identification, intimately linked to celebratory statements like the black nationalist 'black is beautiful.'  'I am a person who happens to be black,' on the other hand, achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality [emphasis added] (in effect, 'I am first a person') and for a concommitant dismissal of the imposed category ('black') as contingent, circumstantial, nondeterminant.  There is truth in both characterizations, of course, but they function quite differently depending on the political context.  At this point in history, a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it."

Critical race theory is explicitly a rejection of universal humanity.  Her words, not mine.

What happens when you reject universal humanity and divide rather than unify, which was the demand of Kimberle Crenshaw?  Do you know the actual origin of the phrase, "oppression olympics?"  Probably not.  You probably think Rush Limbaugh came up with it to own-the-libs, or something like that.  Nope.

What happens when you think like Crenshaw is that everybody puts themselves into their own little, tiny boxes and asks how oppressed their boxes are, and then they rank themselves.  Intersectionality is not just a conceptual framework.  It is a mapping in which more marginalization-- more victimization-- is more status, and hence, one competes for status through more claims to group victimhood.  Limbaugh did not say this.  A Latina feminist named Elizabeth Betita Martinez did, in 1993, because she was arguing with the more Crenshaw-influenced Angela Davis and looking down the road.  Crenshawism leads, not even to marginalized groups unifying against the man, or whatever, but to turning on each other as they compete to see who is more victimized.  That is the oppression olympics.

Betita pointed out how fucking stupid and counterproductive that was.

Behold, the LA City Council.  The irony is that Crenshaw would have been pissed because the racism was directed at African-Americans, but it was her style of racism, so, you know, maybe you should have listened to Betita.  Not Rush, Betita.

Betita is not the only way to go, of course, but she makes a hell of a lot more sense than Crenshaw.

Nicole Mitchell, "Shiny Divider," from Mandorla: Awakening II.