How Intersectionality Is More Than “Just Navel-Gazing”
One of my favorite things about consuming media — books, magazines, music, theater, movies, etc — is when some concept, phrase, or image continues to sit with me after I’ve officially moved forward with my day. Whether it sparked joy, created discomfort, seemed “off”, or expressed a truth I had felt without ever being able to articulate, I’m here for it.
The other day at the library I picked up (and checked out) Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands. I’m super excited to read it, but so far I haven’t gotten past the opening Toni Morrison quote in chapter one:
No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.
The thing that immediately struck me was that I don’t think many white people naturally have that experience (although I think the last year has called it out in unprecedented ways). In some ways, I think that’s what I was realizing when I shared how whiteness was the most difficult intersection for me to write about (I talked about that in this article).
I hunted around a bit and saw that I had written in a previous essay:
Whiteness has been the most pervasive (and easiest to choose not to see) aspect of these three identities for me. Its saturation point is so high, I know that I’m a bit like the fish who has trouble understanding water.
And later followed it with this thought, published in my essay on norm referencing:
I am white, and in American society white is a norm-referenced point. It’s harder for me to see it because I am it. I don’t have a constant mirror being held up for me to reflect against….so unless I make an effort to really do so, it just doesn’t happen.
I think that identities we do NOT see, recognize, examine, and understand about ourselves are naturally going to create tension, conflict, confusion, and pain for ourselves and others. To Morrisson’s point — our identities should cause us to enter into a sort of negotiation (or renegotiation) with the world. Maybe that’s a way of conceptualizing what people mean when they throw out phrases like “You need to do the work.”
Perhaps part of the work is knowing who you are, and what that means for both yourself and others — how it lives and breathes in this world, how it can elevate or suffocate yourself and the people who cross your path, how it impacts how you work and live and learn and navigate.
At the moment, I have a few pages left before I finish Lama Rod Owens’ book, Love And Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. I’m loving it, loving the way he puts into words and action and embodied living so ideas and concepts I feel that I’ve glimpsed edges and pieces of.
In one of the closing chapters he references an article he published called Do You Know Your True Face? (with a quick Google search I found multiple versions — I ended up reading and quoting from the one published on Lion’s Roar in July 2018). With my thoughts swirling around concepts connected to recognizing, naming, and embodying the fullness of our identities, I found his thoughts on intersectionality highly compelling. The following are a handful of quotes I especially loved — please do read the whole article (and get the book!) yourself:
Teaching from intersectionality is really about the courage to be vulnerable and real on the spot, to embrace what time and history and various causes and conditions have shaped us to be. Only when we acknowledge both the forces that have shaped us as well as our unique identities molded through that shaping can we move through into the realization that we are much more than our intersectional identity.
YES — this says something that addresses a concern I have about people using intersectionality to limit themselves. Acknowledging, naming, recognizing, renegotiating, working through, understanding — it is THIS that allows us to ultimately own the reality that we are not *just* defined by a single aspect of our identities.
Most white teachers will not consider race in the dharma because white teachers have been conditioned not to see race and to normalize their racialization. It is the same for male teachers who do not openly talk about patriarchy.
My thoughts: The identities that we are conditioned not to see, or that we are afraid to really look at, are the identities that we will consistently struggle to ever be able to see past or move beyond. The identities that will keep causing pain and struggle, both within and without. The identities that actually WILL limit us because we literally will not be able to move past them.
To resist naming our identity locations is to commit a kind of aggression toward ourselves and to further obscure blind spots that hurt others. Others are hurt when they are not seen; invisibility is another form of violence and oppression.
If I cannot recognize an aspect of myself: my race, my gender, my sexuality, my class, my ability, my religion — then how can I allow you to do so? If I cannot be in dialogue with myself about those realities and what they mean within this social and historical and political and personal context, how can I be in dialogue with you? If they are not safe to even acknowledge or talk about, how can we possibly embody them, live them, or accept them?
Awareness of intersectionality also helps me see how I exert power as a teacher — or where others are exerting power over me. In seeing our own intersectionality, we can become sensitive to how other people intersect with us.
Ihave seen intersectionality condemned as a sort of myopic, navel-gazing practice that creates a sort of infatuation of self. I’m sure it can become that, but I’m equally as sure that it certainly does not need to succumb. At its best, intersectional awareness is certainly a tool that opens us to others, to their experiences, and to empathy and compassion and trust and wisdom. As James Baldwin says, “I am what time, circumstances, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So are we all.”
Intersectionality allows us to recognize all those things that inform who and what we are — but also gives us the opportunity to expand beyond those markers as well.
…teaching from a place of intersectionality requires us to be conscious of the ways in which we center our story lines. Having your own story line is not a bad thing. However, if we do not know how we are relating to our narrative, we begin to normalize it; this makes others in the room who do not identify with our particular story invisible — further trauma for those who are already marginalized.
Conscious awareness of who we are, where we care coming from, what we are informed by, and how that impacts our relationship to self, others, and the world is beautiful. It’s worth working towards. It’s the root of how I think about intersectionality.
With Intersectional Wellbeing, I hope to provide thought-provoking resources that will help us understand more about our own personal intersections, and what those intersections mean in our journey towards healing. If you’d like to get an occasional email with articles and resources on intersectionality & wellbeing, sign up here!
