Hi, howdie, hello!
It’s Black History Month here in the UK. Did you know?
Every month should be black history month. Black history is
world history. Nuff said. (And here’s a piece I wrote this month for TLG.)
Hopefully you have spent some time this month
learning more about some of the heroes and heroines who have been whitewashed
out of our volumes. I have!
That’s not what this blog post is about, though there is a
link. I’m here to talk about intersectionality.
Intersectionality
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| Kimberlé Crenshaw |
The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by civil rights
activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in
the 1980s. Simply put, it refers to:
The interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender, which combine cumulatively to create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination.
Even words like ‘socio-economic’ acknowledge that any given discriminative structure rarely exists in a silo.
Gender
Sexism is one of the oldest systemic forms of oppression. It is embodied in numerous discriminatory practices. Beyond examples of gender-based violence: including sexual assault, rape and domestic abuse; which are perhaps the first that flooded your mind, the economic disparity between men and women shows more evidence of the trail sexism leaves in its wake.
The gender pay gap continues to be a thing. Journalist
Samira Ahmed’s win against the BBC earlier this year highlighted that even when
doing the same work as men, women are often paid less.
Enter Covid-19.
The coronavirus epidemic has deepened the disadvantage that millions of people across the globe were already living with.
Many women were already in financial precarity before Covid. Women are disproportionately more likely to work in jobs where contract hours are long, but pay is low – such as in hospitality, retail and care. When the full UK lockdown came into force, restaurants and non-essential shops were forced to close. The ramifications quickly became clear; a UK study released in May found that by that point in the lockdown, of those who had lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, 78% were women.
In addition to being more likely to be left jobless, women
are also more likely to have their hours cut or to be placed on furlough.
(This, paradoxically, exists alongside the reality that women are actually more
likely to be key workers than men – working in supermarkets and as nurses, to
give some typical examples.) And that’s just Covid-specific stuff. Outside of
the pandemic, the unfair dismissal of pregnant women is still not a thing of
the past.
Class & Poverty
It’s already clear to see that gender and economic status intersect. Being a woman, in itself, makes you more likely to earn less. So then, what about if you start your life already at an economic disadvantage – gender aside?
Studies conducted in 2019 showed that over 4 million children in the UK live in poverty – and contrary to common belief, the majority of these children live with working parents. Covid will have changed those figures for the worse, of course. (Not that the government cared enough to extend free meals to those will go hungry in the holidays without help.)
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| Mancunian footballer Marcus Rashford has drawn national attention to the issue of free school meals |
Children growing up in poverty face a number of obstacles.
Going hungry is nothing trivial and is terrible enough. In a home where parents
struggle to find enough money to pay for food, there is often little cash spare
to pay for gas and electric bills, to keep the family warm. Having to choose
between having food on the table and having a home is a very real dilemma for
some people in this country.
In homes where children are going hungry, it goes without
saying that many of the privileges most of us take for granted, are out of
reach. Fresh clothes. Money for stationery. Internet access.
How well can you really concentrate when your stomach is empty?
Is it any wonder that schools in deprived areas perform less
well than institutions in affluent neighbourhoods?
The A-Level fiasco we saw in the UK this year demonstrated
clearly that even though working-class people are already worse off, the system
is bent on reinforcing their disenfranchisement. If you went to a state school
in a disadvantaged district, managed to work hard and get high predicted grades
despite this… And all the same,
found that the exam regulator had discarded all your teachers’ predictions –
concluding instead, that as you went to such-and-such school, it was legitimate
to award you results three grades lower than what you had been
consistently achieving… How would you feel when you learnt that people who went to the independent school on the other side of town had received no
such treatment?
The academic system routinely fails those of poorer
backgrounds. Aside from financial capital, those in poverty often lack the
cultural capital to successfully navigate processes such as university
applications and university itself. And that’s “just” poverty.
What about when you’re poor and female?
There are these things called periods – you may have heard
of them – which affect more than 50% of the population every month. I don’t know
a woman who loves that time of the month, but I can think of girls and women for
whom it is more than an annoyance.
There are girls and women in this country who live in such
poverty that they can’t afford sanitary products. Yes, in this country.
The pandemic has only exacerbated the issue. The charity Bloody Good Period typically distributes around 5,000 sanitary products to women and girls in Britain – in the first three months of the lockdown, that figure mounted to 23,000.
It is estimated that about 137,000 girls in the UK will miss school each year due to a lack of access to sanitary products.
Scarcity of money means that without help, girls and women who experience period poverty frequently resort to using toilet roll, pillowcases, or even newspaper to try and contain their menstrual flow.
Race
Last week, the newly-appointed Covid-19 and ethnicities advisor to the UK government declared that ‘structural racism is not a reasonable explanation’ for why a disproportionate number of BAME - Black, Asian and minority ethnic (I hate that term, but I’ve got to use it here) - people are dying of Covid. I say: intersectionality, my friend, intersectionality...
Structural racism, in its very terminology, acknowledges that racism does not exist in a silo. It is embedded not just into individual psyches, but institutional structures; into systems.
It’s almost comical that a few days after this advisor’s words, Labour peer Baroness Lawrence published a damning report which elucidates the impact of Covid-19 on BAME people.
This conversation is about more than just, say, whether a patient receives adequate care from health workers when they are seriously ill. Intersectionality requires us to look at whole structures rather than single strands. In so doing, when we step back, we quickly see that systemic racism is cemented into the groundwork of each of the structures before us.
BAME people are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts. They are subsequently more likely to live in overcrowded housing. And we know that Covid-19 is a dynamic virus which spreads easily in small spaces. Socio-economic factors mean that people of colour are also more likely to live in multi-generational households, which of course puts elderly members of the family at greater risk. These structural inequalities all factor into the overrepresentation of people of colour in Covid fatalities. This is a pattern that has played out in the US, too.
Reports have revealed that black people in the healthcare sector are more likely to be sent on the frontline of Covid treatment than their white counterparts, despite being at greater risk.
It is silly to disregard the influence of race when it comes to any inequality.
Black women are five times more likely than white women to die of maternal mortality. – UK study.
There are a lot of feminists out there who pretend that every woman has the same experience of sexism. That just isn’t the case – and that’s why many women of colour now distance themselves from ‘feminism’; branding it ‘white feminism’.
Anyone that declares that they are for the emancipation of women, has to be for the emancipation of all women. Anyone that calls themselves a feminist but is not simultaneously anti-racist, is not a feminist – they are only for some women’s rights.
Black women are often found at the bottom of the social ladder. Just think of Breonna Taylor. Apartment walls were deemed to matter more than her life. What that tells us about the value U.S. society ascribes to black women is frightening.
Sexual objectification is a prevalent problem which affects all women – but it reaches another degree when it comes to black women. Just look at how Serena Williams is treated. She’s described in papers as “aggressive”, animalistic features are attributed to her, and there’s an incessant focus on her curvy figure. Serena yells when she hits a tennis ball, granted, but when Sharapova and Arazenka screamed, I never heard anyone calling them gorillas. The centuries-old trope of black women as sexual beasts – sexy, but not pretty – can be directly traced back to human zoos which placed women like Sara Baartman in their display cabinets.
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| Serena Williams and her daughter Olympia earlier this year |
I may not ever have been forced to participate in a “freak show” (thankfully), but I’ve most definitely been impacted by the hyper-sexualisation of black women. Most notably, in Italy, where men just presumed that they could ask me for sex.
And we haven’t even talked about the stereotype of the “angry black woman”…
Disability
Imagine what happens when you are black, female, poor and have a disability.
Or wait – let me just tell you how severe disadvantage gets if you are a black boy of Caribbean heritage in a low-income household, and have special educational needs (SEN).
You are 168 times more likely to be excluded from school by the time you are 16 than a white British girl without special educational needs, who is from an affluent household.
In this case, yes, it is males that are more on the back foot. There’s good (bad) reason for that. Black boys in particular are often unfairly earmarked as troublemakers and academically incompetent, due to long-existing stereotypes.
To put the above statistic into perspective…
Economically disadvantaged pupils who are on free school meals (FSM) are four times more likely to be excluded than those not on FSM. Black Caribbean pupils are three times more likely on the whole than white British pupils to be excluded. Pupils with SEN (disregarding the other disadvantages) are eight times more likely to be excluded than their peers without.
And that’s just at the start of a child’s life. Think of how these adversities multiply as these children grow older…
.. And we haven’t even talked about physical disability…
Final thoughts
As you’ve read this far, I’d like to think that you, too, care about dismantling structural inequality. I hope I’ve helped you see, with just a few examples, that we cannot ignore intersectionality. Are you with me? Then let’s start changing these conversations – discouraging discussions which place any given inequality in a silo. If we don't holistically tackle injustice, we'll never truly tackle any of it.
Intersectionality is important.
