Intersectionality is Important.

 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

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.)

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.

The BBC estimates that in her lifetime, the average woman in the UK will spend about £1,600 each year on period. When you are a woman and poor, this is no joke. The intersectionality of double disadvantage cannot be dismissed.

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.

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.

Imagine it were your last day on Earth… What would you do?

It was the 19^th of March, 2020.

The handyman was a few metres away from me, fixing my blinds.

And that was when I said it: “I feel like I’m going to die soon.”

It was the weirdest thing.

I felt overwhelmed by a very uncanny premonition. I had never before experienced anything like it.

I had not long quit my job. It was the right decision.

Despite all the uncertainty around me, I was covered by an indescribable peace.

I also felt weirdly unbothered about the future. Not worried at all. Just knew that everything was going to work out right – even though it was a very strange time to be so certain about that.

And then came this weird sensation. I felt a presence around me, thick in the air.

And I said out loud: “I feel like I’m gonna die soon.”

I knew it was weird. I felt weird and the sentence I had strung together sounded very strange to me. I apologised to the handyman, whom I had been chatting with on and off as I went about my business and he did his work. And I walked out of the room.

And I had a chat with God. Not out loud, I don’t think it was. And I started to cry.

I felt from that moment that I was going to come very close to death, very soon.

I had no idea what was going to come next.

                                             *                                            *                                                  *

After the handyman left, I went out to the corner shop to get some milk. I am a careful driver anyway, but I all of a sudden felt extremely cautious as I steered through the neighbouring roads. I thought, Perhaps someone is going to knock me over in their car?

There were actually a few moments on the journey there and back that car drivers nearly did not see me, but driving is a risky business, and I have actually been in much closer near-death experiences on the road and on the motorway. I figured I wasn’t going to die in a car accident around my house as I got my milk after all.

But as I walked to my car after purchasing my blue bottle, I started to feel very odd. Dozy. Dizzy. Bit out of it. I thought that was strange, but this was a day on which I had quit my job and had become overcome with the presentiment of dying soon, so that didn’t seem like the strangest thing to happen in the last few hours.

In the three minutes that followed, I realised I was probably quite ill. I began to feel extremely dizzy, and climbed into bed not long after. In the time I was between the covers, my temperature soared blindingly quickly. Before I knew it, even in my light clothing, I was dripping with sweat.

Ah, I thought. I probably have the coronavirus.

This wasn’t such an unlikely possibility, considering two colleagues at my workplace had been sent home the week prior, with suspected coronavirus, and I had sat next to one of them a few days before that, training her on something. I didn’t know at the time that she had contracted the virus. Neither did she.

I didn’t worry, despite the likelihood. I just went to the NHS website and checked to see what I should be doing to combat the virus, and to verify that the symptoms I was experiencing were indeed related to Covid-19.

It was then that I discovered that I was actually now in the high-risk category. As someone that already has an existing long-term condition, I was more likely to suffer seriously from Covid-19.

Ah well, I discovered that a bit late! I had been taking sensible precautions: washing my hands for 20 seconds and standing far enough apart from people, as we had all been advised to do, but before now, the guidelines had been different, and I hadn’t seen myself as at any especial risk.

Looking back now… I realise that I had not factored into the equation an infection that specialists have been trying to help me fight for months – which is still being treated.  A later discovery revealed that I had also probably been carrying and living with another serious infection for about a month before I even contracted Covid-19. So, these things in addition to the long-term condition I already have, meant my body was not ready to handle a virus of this magnitude.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that the presentiment I had sensed was probably to do with Covid-19.

Over the next few hours, I did everything I could to try and alleviate my pain, which was immense. Consider that I already live with chronic pain. This virus made everything about 100x worse. That is no exaggeration.

In those hours, I had a long chat with God. And I cried, a lot. 

I eventually came to a place where I had accepted that I was going to die soon. The sadness only came from thinking of my young brothers and my mum, whom I would leave behind. The peace came from knowing that I knew where I would go, and that I would be reunited with family and friends who had died, and see my Heavenly Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit – the Triune God - face to face, and LIVE WITH NO PAIN!!

The next few days are a bit of a blur. Everything happened so quickly.

Although my temperature did not remain at an all-time high all the time, other symptoms quickly appeared and started to get in the driving seat of my body. Within a few hours of me realising I had contracted the virus, my breathing started to get more and more laboured. My spine hurt. It felt as though the virus had taken over my air passageway, and was creeping further and further down my spinal cord.

I only told a few people at first. I didn’t want people to worry. I later changed my mind: the thought that people might not be taking the government guidelines seriously – and could potentially be spreading this deadly virus around – filled me with horror.

As the illness quickened its takeover of my body, I made sure to reply to every open message I could see, and tell everyone I was in contact with that I loved them. Not that saying "Love you" is at all uncommon for me; the frequency and urgency just increased. It may not have made much sense to my friends and family at the time.

 As the day wore on, though my symptoms got worse and worse, I had resolved with myself not to call the ambulance. After all, I believed that my time was coming, so didn’t see how calling the ambulance would help or change anything. I also firmly believed that it was much more important for someone that didn’t know Jesus to go to the hospital to get help to stay alive, than it was for me.

I should explain some things about myself. I have seen a lot of death, come very close to me, since the age of ten. My own father passed away when I was thirteen, and I have continued to be very close to a lot of people dying. For a number of years, I have been ever-aware of my mortality, and thus, it is an entirely normal thing for me to think, as I prepare for bed,

“What would people say about me if I were to die tomorrow?” 

Some people die – and the people with whom they interacted have very little good to say about them. I don’t want to be one of those people. I want to be someone who people remember as having loved well, laughed hard and made the world a better place, just by being herself. And the person that enables me to do that is God. Well, God in three Persons.

It is because of my relationship with Jesus Christ that I felt this indescribable peace as my breathing progressively deteriorated. It is also because of Jesus, that in this time, I started frantically rushing around to tell people about Jesus.

You see, when you are so ill and have already had a premonition that you are going to die soon, a few things become blindingly clear. I became impressed with an impervious sense of urgency.

It may seem crazy to you, but as my temperature soared and my face turned red and sweat dripped down my face – my overwhelming concern was that the neighbours in my building that I had not yet spoken to, needed to know about Jesus. I knew Him, and knew that if I were to die, I would be with Him. But I could not be sure that I had given them the answer that would make a way for them to know the peace that surpasses all understanding.

So at a time when most “normal” people would ring the ambulance, I spent time composing this, and placed it on the entrance to my building. I was literally gasping for air as I wrote this, and my temperature was probably at around 42 degrees Celsius, at a guess. My handwriting kind of shows that I was feverish.

Although in my head I had decided I would not ring the emergency services, late that night it became clear that the situation had gotten a lot worse – and my supposed impending death was taking a lot longer than I had foreseen. Where I had imagined I would die peacefully in my sleep, I found I was in so much pain that I could not sleep, and that my struggle breathing made the lying awake even more unpleasant. If my death was going to come, I would rather have some help in feeling less agony when it did take place! So I asked my friend to ring the ambulance for me: remember, I no longer had a voice.

That night, the emergency services were exceedingly busy, as you can imagine. I waited for HOURS. Finally, I accepted that the paramedics were not going to come in time. My breathing was so bad that my friend later told me she thought I was going to die that night. So did I! At one point, it felt as though I had a centimetre left of my air passageway to breathe from. When I tell you, I thought I was minutes away from Heaven, I kid you not.

And then, suddenly, it was as though my lungs slowly started filling with air. I can only describe it as a miracle. I KNOW it was a miracle. There were a lot of people praying with me.

I had two paramedic visits after that incident, and the second paramedic told me that: the way that I had been breathing… it doesn’t get better from there on out. Well, it did! And without help from emergency services – because they hadn’t made it to me yet. So, take from that what you will.

Even though I survived that night, the journey had barely begun. Over the next few days and weeks, I would experience severe pain, feel my body fill up with salt to the extent that I actually had visible salt granules on my tongue… I won’t show you the pictures but my face and lips did turn a combination of blue and purple. NHS clinicians decided that it would be best not to take me into hospital, because my immune system was so weak at that point that I probably would easily have caught something else from other patients that would further worsen my state. I forget that even several weeks on, I am still in recovery: although no longer contagious – my body still hasn’t adjusted from going through that nightmare.

There were points when, though thankful to God for bringing me through, I wondered why He had kept me alive – only for me to live life as a vegetable. I was unable to do the simplest things for myself – and living alone, there was no one else to do them for me (although I did get lots of help from people dropping things off for me that I needed!). There were days that I was so weak that it took me a good two hours to get out of bed to even make myself breakfast! And of course, when your body is fighting infection, you need to eat!

We’re talking about someone that had literally packed up their bags in preparation for Heaven. I didn’t see for a number of days why God hadn’t just let me die. After all, I knew that where I was going there would be no pain! Instead, He had kept me alive (great) to keep me in indescribable pain (not so great). I was definitely not suicidal, but I really struggled to see the point of my life at this point.

That’s when I called on my friends for encouragement. I literally didn’t see what else I had to do here. (Yes, I would have liked to get married and have kids, but I think Heaven is better than all of that, so there.) They helped me get to a turning point where I decided that God still had more plans for me down here – and the crux of that was, I needed to tell more people about this Jesus. The Jesus that does miracles. The Jesus that gives you peace when it doesn’t make sense.

It isn’t a secret that I’m a Jesus follower. Jesus addict, as I like to say. But going through the mill has taken me to a whole new level of telling people about Him! I literally wouldn’t let the paramedics leave until I told them about Jesus, haha!

God gave me a revelation a few years back, which has forever changed the way I see this.

Imagine, you are a seismologist. You study the patterns of the Earth’s vibrations, and help foresee earthquakes so that you can get people to safety before their worlds cave in. Well, the seismologist has information that can save people’s lives! Can you imagine being a seismologist that KNOWS when an earthquake is coming, and knows exactly how far out residents of the affected areas need to be in order to escape its wrath… AND DOESN’T TELL ANYONE?!

I reckon you have a few words for a person like that. “Selfish” would probably be one, right?

Or, here’s a more topical analogy. You are a virologist and have the cure for the coronavirus, but decide you will guard it with your life – only administering the life-saving treatment on yourself and your family, but keeping it a secret from everyone else. Ummmm….

Jesus has changed my life. He has saved me from spiritual death, and now has also given me a new lease of natural life. I can’t think of anything more important to share with you.

Imagine you knew it were your last day on Earth. What would change about your today? Would you love people around you a little more? Would you reverse some decisions you took yesterday?

Would you feel peace because you knew exactly where you were going when your breath expires?