NBC ran a doting headline about “Why Kamala Harris’ nomination is pushing this academic idea further into the mainstream.” The idea is “intersectionality,” and it dates to a 1989 law journal article by Kimberle Crenshaw: “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” At its core, the intersectional insight is reasonable enough: If we look at racial oppression and sexism, it isn’t as simple as adding things up. Understanding how women in general are disadvantaged and understanding how black people are disadvantaged isn’t really enough to understand how black women are disadvantaged.
“Intersectionalists” also make a great deal more of this insight than it deserves. The study of demographic identity-group disadvantages is a booming academic industry, and innovations in that space tend to garner a lot of scholarly adherents. As “Parkinson’s Law,” the classic Economist satirical study of bureaucracy, states, the work will expand to fill the time allotted. A lot of time is allotted to parsing and elaborating on buzzwords such as the one Crenshaw coined. And it has made its way into other contexts. For example, it is now quite common for job descriptions or scholarly research areas to be described as existing at “the intersection” of this and that.
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell writes that “a newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes, there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.” Intersectionality is, at best, no longer a visually clear metaphor. The metaphorical invocation of an “intersection” is either to geometry or else to traffic. It’s what lines and rays and segments do in math class, or else, it’s where stop signs and red lights are on the road.
In geometry, infinite lines may be able to intersect in any number of ways, and you could plot this out in infinitely complex ways. But in common usage today, “intersections” seem not to look at 360 degrees of human experience, but to examine only one of a few vectors — racial designations, gender designations, sexual orientations, and gender expression, reified primarily through oppression. NBC quotes an old interview with Harris: “When I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created.” So, maybe the traffic metaphor is the image in question. There are four-way intersections, T-junctions, off-ramps, and multileg intersections. Traffic engineering is complex, but there are only so many ways to make a road intersection. It’s ultimately a limited area of study, and it mostly involves repeating the same ideas.
Per the NBC piece celebrating Harris’s intersectionality: “For activists, Harris’ newly publicly embraced identity alone is not enough to make her an intersectional candidate: She also has to prioritize intersectionality in her policymaking and in a potential Biden-Harris administration, they insist.” So, in order to be an intersectional candidate, Harris has to prioritize intersectionality? Perhaps, then, even the traffic metaphor is too broad. The only intersection “intersectionality” offers is the cul-de-sac. You can go around and around and back the way you came. But that’s it. It’s a dead end.
