Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater
There are a number of ideas that have become bugbears the anti-woke crowd. The complaint is not just that these ideas have occasionally been taken to absurd excess, but that they are inherently dangerous and perhaps best not to be brought before students at all. The problem is, many of these ideas seem pretty clearly correct.
Take intersectionality:
As formulated by Kimberle Crenshaw, it was explicitly not a “grand theory of everything” — as it is often portrayed on the right (and by some on the left). The claim was fairly humble: the social implications of blackness tend to vary systematically between women and men, just as the social implications of womanhood tend to vary systematically between whites and blacks. Consequently, the social effects of being both black and a woman are not merely additive. Instead, the intersection of these social conditions results in a unique set of outcomes. In statistics, this is called an interaction effect.
Crenshaw’s 1989 landmark legal paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” paralleled a movement that was being advanced by statisticians since the mid-70s – namely, to think in more sophisticated ways about how various independent variables interact with one another, and how that might systematically change the effects of these factors upon some dependent variable.
These effects are very easy to observe in the world. Let’s just stick with Crenshaw’s example of gender*race:
Black men are far more likely to be to be victims of homicide or to be incarcerated than either white men or black women. Black women are near parity with white women with respect to many socioeconomic indicators, yet stark divides remain between black and white men. Black men lag far behind white men or black women in educational attainment and intergenerational social mobility. And yet, black men tend to have higher median earnings than black women.
This is all fundamentally consistent with the idea of intersectionality: the interaction of gender and race produces results not derivable from looking at either independently. The only thing that is refuted by these examples is a facile sort of analysis that runs something like:
With respect to a given outcome
women < men
black <white
Therefore: black woman < black man.
Again, in the examples above, there is systematic variation at the intersection of race and gender. However, those effects cannot be determined apriori because they do not trend in the same direction across all dependent variables. In many important respects black women are significantly better off than black men. In other respects, the opposite is true.
To drive the point home, let’s add another variable into the mix: sexuality. According to a recent meta-analysis, lesbians tend to earn significantly more than straight women, but gay men earn significantly less than straight men (according to the authors, the results “show much stronger evidence of discrimination for gay men than for lesbians”). Again, there is systematic variance along the axis of gender and sexuality: being at the intersection of ‘female’ and ‘homosexual’ tends to have a positive effect on earnings, while belonging to either of those categories independent of the other has a negative effect.
Based on the facts detailed in the examples above, what could we infer about the differences in earnings between black queer women as compared to black queer men (given that black men tend to earn more than black women, yet queer women earn more than queer men)? One would not be able to determine this by doing a non-parodic version of the ‘intersectionality score calculator’ (through which we would arrive at the conclusion that black queer women must be worse off than black queer men, because they belong to three historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups instead of ‘just’ two). Instead, this is the kind of question that would have to be empirically investigated.
Crenshaw understood this. In her paper that coined the term ‘intersectionality,’ she didn’t simply posit that black women must face more discrimination than black men or white women in all circumstances, simply in virtue of the fact that they belong to two historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups. Instead, she empirically demonstrated that there was systematic variance along the intersection of gender and race using data she collected from the firm at the center of her legal case – and suggested that this example may be illustrative of many other cases as well.
In a nutshell, critics are often pointing to that fact that many activists and scholars evoke intersectionality in goofy ways in order to claim that the idea itself is goofy. It is not. A similar story could be told for social constructionism, ‘whiteness studies’ and most other punching bags for the anti-woke crowd. Do many people make absurd claims to ‘trauma’ and ‘victimhood’? Certainly. This is hardly grounds to go back to the pre-Vietnam condition, where those who suffered substantial trauma were routinely dismissed and shamed into silence about their struggles. In all cases, the goal should be to roll back the excesses of how various ideas and approaches are sometimes applied – but without sacrificing the important insights that underlie these frameworks and approaches (and which often explain their durability and wide appeal to begin with).