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.

Why are the world's richest countries the least likely to practise religion?

If you know me you’ll know that I’m a Christian and take my faith very seriously. I’m also British-Nigerian and most of my family are Christians. In fact, most black people believe in God. I remember laughing with a friend when he joked that when you meet a Nigerian they’re either a Christian or a Muslim. There was no talk of being a Nigerian atheist.

And after some thought I’ve realised that this situation couldn’t really be more different in countries like the UK. At my university the average student is an atheist. The vast majority of those that do identify as Christians generally admit to it being more a cultural thing than a practice: they only call themselves Christians because they were christened; or because they went to a Church of England school; or perhaps because they go to church on Christmas Day. The case is much the same in other Western nations, as we can see in France and even the U.S.A., which in spite of its motto ‘In God We Trust’, maintains what many would regard as an irreligious stance towards a number of big topics (think sex, possession of guns) as to make it one of the most secular countries in the world. Although some 70% of Americans profess to be Christians, according to head counts in church, less than 20% regularly attend services. Australia, though on the other side of the globe, is much in line with the thinking of the geographical West.

On the other hand, countries that are less affluent are much more likely to have a higher rate of religious practice. Why is this? I’ve been pondering over it for a while and I’ve come to my own conclusions. Want to hear them?

I think it’s because when we’re well-off and have lots of luxuries and comforts it’s much easier to believe that we can do this whole ‘life’ thing all on our own.  

Wealth and Religious Practice  

The GDP of the European Union stands at roughly $18.5 trillion (£11.9 trillion), whilst the United States alone has a GDP of $17.84 trillion (£11.44 trillion). The average income of a UK employee is around $41,340 (£26,500) a year. Compare these statistics with the GDP of the Asian economic power India, whose GDP stands at $2.3 trillion (£1.47 trillion) and whose citizens earn around $1,570 (£1,007) a year. If we look at the rate of religious belief and practice on these two opposite-facing sides of the globe, the contrast is stark.

Figures as of April 2015 show that 62% of Britons do not practise any religion.  72% of young Brits between the ages of 18-24 admitted that religion was ‘not important’ in their lives, even if some of them had previously described themselves as religious.  Compare these statistics on religion and belief to those of India, where approximately 80% of the national population practise Hinduism, with the practice of Islam and Christianity taking up 2^nd and 3^rd places (around 12% and 2.5% respectively.)  In Nigeria, Africa’s richest country, where the average annual income is $3,000 (£1,925), Christians make up some 50.8% of the population, whilst Muslims tot up to about 48%. A poll for the BBC in 2004 revealed that 100% of Nigerians believed in God or a higher power, and 91% said they regularly attended a religious service.

Suffering and Religion

You might wonder why people in these countries are so likely to practise religion and believe in a deity when they are part of the continents which people often think of when they ask, “If there is a God, why is there so much suffering in the world?”

In Afghanistan, although the poorest country by GDP in Asia and increasingly troubled by political instability and civil insurgency, 99% of the population are practising Muslims. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country ravaged by civil wars and the poorest country in Africa, 80% of the population are practising Christians. The citizens of Moldova, although faced with high levels of unemployment in the poorest country in Europe, are also primarily Christian, with 90% naming themselves as of Eastern Orthodox. In Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, 93% of the population practise a religion.

Some people may say that this points to religion simply acting as a crutch in people’s lives. They are too weak to manage on their own, they say, so they use something to help prop them up and make them think life is OK. Such people might be thinking of Marx’s quote: “Religion is the opium of the people”. This metaphor suggests that those that practise a religion have become completely incapable of using their brains and instead are dancing along drunkenly to a tune that makes them feel better.

Is that so?

Why would someone that has almost nothing – lives in a slum, has to walk miles to get water, doesn’t have access to a good education, you name it – still choose to believe in a God? Surely they are the people that should give up on any form of religion.

I often think about how the Jewish race and black race have suffered immensely throughout history. Yet as ethnic groups they are still highly likely to practise religion even now. To me, rather than showing weakness, this shows the strength of faith. It shows resilience to believe in a God even when times are hard; to continue to pray and attend worship services even in the face of hatred. Immigrant communities like those from Nigeria and Poland have done a great deal to stem the tide of decline in church attendance in the UK.

Religion in Fair Weather

I’ve come to realise that the luxuries and comforts that come with living a fairly easy life means for many it simply becomes unnecessary to believe in a God or practice a religion. You may not feel the need to pray because you’ve got everything you want: a nice house; nice clothes; a pricey smartphone and whatever else floats your boat. You may not feel the need for hope because you’ve got everything you could ever hope for. Religion becomes simply an accessory. By contrast, when you’re sitting on the hard floor of one-room house and your children are starving, you’re more likely to question whether this is really the meaning of life, or whether there’s more to it. Religion and faith are likely to have answers to your questions.

You don’t have to be poor to wonder what the meaning of life is. It’s probably true that if right from the cradle you’ve lived in poverty but are still here, you’re more likely to think that there really is a purpose for your life – otherwise why would you still be living? Most people that do believe in life having a purpose believe in a Creator.

Many of my non-believing friends agree with me when I say to me it is a pretty depressing thought this could be all there is to life: going through an education, getting a good job, doing some cool stuff along the way and then dying. I mean, you could have a wonderful life; a wonderful marriage and wonderful kids, but if there’s nothing at the end of it then what’s the point? If your well-kept body simply gathers dust at the end of it all, where’s the reward?

For me, my faith provides hope and something better at the end of this life. Even if I became the wealthiest person on the planet and achieved all of my life ambitions I am sure that what comes after this life would be better.

Remember how I said the United States is the richest country in the world? It’s also one of the most depressed – 19.2% of Americans report suffering from depression in their lifetimes. Money doesn’t buy happiness, clearly. France, the country which prides itself on being a secular state – with some 40% declaring themselves atheists – is the country which has the highest rate of depression in the world, with the average prevalence of depression at a whopping 21%. Dr. Stephen Joseph of the University of Warwick is quoted as saying, "Religious people seem to have a greater purpose in life, which is why they are happier. Looking at the research evidence, it seems that those who celebrate the Christian meaning of Christmas are on the whole likely to be happier.”

It seems kind of incredible, but it would appear that even in the toughest conditions and in the depths of poverty, religion provides happiness and fulfilment. Money may help provide short-term happiness and fulfilment: it gives people plenty of things to fill the jar of life with – but too often so much that they don’t have space for God.