by Hooshyar Afsar
In the past year, the debate around intersectionality as a major pillar of Critical Race Theory has heated up in the United States. While it has been adopted by many activists of racial and social justice movements, it has also been used by white nationalists and Trump supporters to attack those movements as “unpatriotic” and “un-American.” Many politicians and legislatures have gone as far as removing it from the curriculums of school districts in their jurisdictions. In this piece, I intend to cover this topic and consider the relevance of intersectionality to the Iranian American community.
What is Intersectionality?
Intersectionality is a framework by which various aspects of a person’s or group’s identity are considered as interconnected and overlapping rather than in prioritized and/or isolated fashion. These aspects include—and are not limited to—race, gender, caste, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and citizenship (immigration status). Intersectionality also looks at how these aspects are used to keep discrimination and systems of privilege in place. One could argue that we cannot fully analyze and understand how systemic racism continues to stay in place in the U.S. without understanding intersectionality. For example, how intersectionality is denied and/or rejected in the U.S. judicial process is a major aspect of keeping systemic racism and patriarchy intact. I shall attempt to explain this better by using examples and analogies before I talk about its relevance to the Iranian American community. Let’s start with a historical perspective.
Intersectionality: Historical Advocates
Long before intersectionality was coined as an academic term in the late 20th century by UCLA and Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, it was used in action by Black feminists of the 19th century.
The most well known example is Sojourner Truth’s famous impromptu speech at a women’s rights conference in Akron Ohio in 1851. Six feet tall and a strong formerly enslaved woman, Truth stood up in the middle of the conference and challenged both racism and patriarchy by declaring: “Ain’t I a woman.” Many white women wanted her silenced because they thought her speech took attention away from the women’s suffrage movement. At the same time, most men who ridiculed women as weak did not like her speech because she clearly exposed their lie. Truth lived intersectionality in action; she saw women’s rights as inseparable from the struggle to abolish slavery. Without using today’s terminalogy, she saw gender equality as an integral part of bringing freedom and equality to formerly enslaved people after the abolition of slavery.
Truth’s story is truly remarkable. It is short of unbelievable that after she gained her freedom she fought and won in Alabama courts in 1828 to be reunited with her son who had been sold into slavery. She campaigned for land grants to the formerly enslaved after the end of the Civil War and even met with President Lincoln to forward her case because she understood economic justice as a major part of attaining racial justice for Black people. During one of her speeches in 1858 in Indiana, when facing male hecklers who claimed she was a man, she exposed her breasts to prove her case. As her biographer Nell Irvin Painter wrote, “At a time when most Americans thought of slaves as male and women as white, Truth embodied a fact that still bears repeating: Among the blacks are women; among the women, there are blacks.” She went far beyond breaking that stereotype in the minds of white people. Truth lived and breathed intersectionality over 130 years before it became an academic framework and over 150 years before racial justice activists began to adopt it as a cornerstone of the movement.
Of course, Truth was not the only Black feminist of the 19th century who understood intersectionality in action. Anna Julia Cooper—who was born into slavery, became the fourth Black woman to earn a PhD, and is recongized by many as the first Black Feminist—criticized many Black leaders who did not speak for Black women while claiming to speak for the race, noting that “Only the Black Woman can say, when and where I enter … then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.” Among other prominent Black women racial justice activists of the 19th and early 20th centuries who demonstrated their commitment to intersectionality in action was Ida B. Wells. Born into slavery, Wells later became a prominent anti-lynching activist reporter, the only Black woman founder of NAACP, and a leading Black suffragist. Wells confronted the racism of white women suffragists and understood the key role of Black women in achieving gender equality.
Professor Crenshaw’s Landmark 1989 Paper Analyzing Intersectionality
While in many branches of science a scientific theory could emerge before there is experimental evidence to prove it, in the realm of social sciences there are many occasions when a theory emerges after there are social movements and/or other phenomena that require its creation. This doesn’t take anything away from the importance of theory and academic work. In fact, such work gives more credibility to the movement and could help guide it more effectively.
In the 1970s and 1980s, after it became clear that the Civil Rights Movement had not accomplished its fundamental racial justice objectives and many of its gains were being overturned (a process that even continues today), many activists and academicians became interested in devising new theories to critically examine race, racism, white supremacy, and the racial justice movement. A key part of this endeavor happened at Harvard Law School, where Black law students in opposition to the policies of the school administration started the “Critical Race Theory Workshop.” One of the founders of this workshop was Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw.
Later in 1989, while teaching at the UCLA School of Law, Professor Crenshaw wrote a landmark paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum (aka Chicago Unbound). In this paper, she analyzed three anti-discrimination lawsuits brought by Black women and showed how the court system uses singularity of racial discrimination against Black men and sexism against white women to erase discrimination against Black women. The court argued that Black women are not a “new class of protected minorities” and ruling in their favor would open a “Pandora’s box” of “new classes of protected minorities.” In other words, Black women could only argue that they were racially discriminated against if they made a case of their Blackness or argue that they were the target of sexism if they made a case of their womanhood, but they could not make a case that they were target of discrimination as “Black Women.”
Professor Crenshaw revealed that this singular and prioritized way of dealing with racism and patriarchy was not limited to courts—the antiracist and feminist movements were also dominated by it. She showed that the definition of discrimination assumes discrimination against all members of a group in the same manner, and argued that this definition not only misses the variations and experiences of subgroups within the larger group, but also fails to challenge the perceived notions of race, gender, and class domination and helps keep them in place. In a sense, the intersectionality of white supremacy, patriarchy, and economic class hierarchy keeps them in place by denying the intersectionality of race, gender and class of the affected population. She wrote: “According to the dominant view, a discriminator treats all people within a race or sex category similarly … Consequently, one generally cannot combine these categories. Race and sex, moreover, become significant only when they operate to explicitly disadvantage the victims; because the privileging of whiteness or maleness is implicit, it is generally not perceived at all.”
To elucidate her analysis, Professor Crenshaw used a “traffic at an intersection” analogy, writing: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.” Professor Crenshaw then argued that our legal system and even the anti-racist and feminist movements are like an ambulance that shows up and fails to treat a victim of the accident in the intersection because it is not clear which line of traffic caused the accident! She further elaborated that this also results in erasure, because when a certain subgroup doesn’t fit the mold, then it is ignored as if it doesn’t exist. One could say intersectional erasure is the ultimate form of marginalization.
Depolying vivid imagery, Professor Crenshaw further shed light on this complex legal and social phenomenon that is essential to systemic racism: “Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked-feet standing on shoulders-with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside. In efforts to correct some aspects of domination, those above the ceiling admit from the basement only those who can say that ‘but for’ the ceiling, they too would be in the upper room. A hatch is developed through which those placed immediately below can crawl. Yet this hatch is generally available only to those who-due to the singularity of their burden and their otherwise privileged position relative to those below-are in the position to crawl through. Those who are multiply-burdened are generally left below unless they can somehow pull themselves into the groups that are permitted to squeeze through the hatch. As this analogy translates for Black women, the problem is that they can receive protection only to the extent that their experiences are recognizably similar to those whose experiences tend to be reflected in antidiscrimination doctrine. If Black women cannot conclusively say that ‘but for’ their race or ‘but for’ their gender they would be treated differently, they are not invited to climb through the hatch but told to wait in the unprotected margin until they can be absorbed into the broader, protected categories of race and sex.”
Professor Crenshaw wrote: “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating ‘women’s experience’ or ‘the Black experience’ into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast.” She uses Black women as examples because they are the most marginalized to make us understand the problem. One could replace Black women with immigrant women or immigrant transgender people of color and so on to make the case that we can not really address fundamental problems of U.S. society in particular and human society in general without having an intersectional view of human groups, their movements, impediments to justice, and potential solutions.
Why Is Intersectionality Important to Our Community?
When we think about our Iranian American community or the Iranian community globally— including Iran itself—we are anything but a homogenous group. Unlike what some politicians have comically claimed in the past, our community, like other human communities, is the intersection of many subgroups. One could make a solid argument that Iranian women are heavily marginalized inside Iran by the patriarchal political and social structures of the theocracy in place and they are also, to a lesser degree, marginalized by the culture of patriarchy in our communities outside Iran. While systemic racism and marginalization of Black women in the U.S. is of a distinct character, further marginalization of Iranian women based on race and colorism, ethnicity, and class is a reality for our communities inside and outside Iran. Could one then argue along the same lines that when Iranian women enter, we all enter?
How about the Iranian American community? Are we really as homogenous as stereotypes tell us? Are we all highly educated and economically successful and drive black Mercedes and BMWs? Reality tells us otherwise. In fact and to a great extent, we are similarly diverse and valuing intersectionality will only empower us to come together and celebrate our diversity. On the other hand, denial of intersectionality will only add to division and lack of unity across our communities.
Denial of intersectionality in the Iranian community takes various forms. While public denial of the existence of an LGBTQ community in Iran by politicans may be comical, there is a very strong tendency in the Iranian American community to use the myth of “Aryan race” in order to “pass as white.” In fact, many in our community would like to be considered white and they think it helps their social standing. In past articles on this subject in Peyk, I have made scientific and historical arguments that whiteness and white supremacy were invented by Europeans during the time of enlightenment and are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of human society. In fact, race is a social construct invented for economic, social, and political gain/domination. “Passing as white” completely misses the boat of social justice and helps keep white supremacy and patriarchy in place. It is the most overt form of denial of intersectionality in our communities and robs us of our unity and solidarity with other marginalized communities.
Many of us may read Professor Crenshaw’s analogy of a stack of humans of different race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, immigration status, and ability and think as “homogenous” Iranians we are very close to the top of the stack and could somehow crawl through the ceiling hatch on to the first floor above. But what if there are limitless possibilities if we strive to embrace intersectionality and eliminate the human stack and multiple floors in the first place? What if we stand in solidarity with communities of color who have paved the way for our rights as immigrants? What if we all belong and are related as humans when we embrace intersectionality?
______________________________
References:
1- Crenshaw, Kimberlé, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
2- Afsar, Hooshyar, “Black Lives Matter and the Iranian American Community,” Peyk 188, July 2020. Available at: http://peykmagazine.com/en/2020/07/06/black-lives-matter-and-the-iranian-american-community/
Hooshyar Afsar is one of the founders of Racism Awareness Project (RAP), an educational program on history of and present-day racism in the United States and its impact on Iranian American Community. RAP has had a variety of educational forums across the United States. Mr. Afsar has written several articles and book reviews on the topic for Peyk and other publications. He can be reached at hoosh.afsar@rapusa.org.
