Journal #5: Intersectionality - Connections

Watching the "What is Intersectionality?" video was a very helpful break down on what exactly we are talking about. I loved the use of colors and the examples given to really break down intersectionality for everyone to understand it. As a white person, I've never been forced to think about my identity like Greta from the video, but people like Jerry and Fatimah are forced everyday to think about their identities just because it's marginalized. It's been really helpful to fill out the identity wheels with the layers of privilege and to look at S.C.W.A.A.M.P. and relate it back to this. Sometimes you don't realize just how much privilege you have until it is laid out in front of you. Luckily, with the world we live in today, I think people are starting to realize privilege and are at least trying to make a change. Advocacy is a lot bigger in this day and age.

Intersectionality definitely reminds me of S.C.W.A.A.M.P. because of the layering identities that people have. S.C.W.A.A.M.P., identifying the main points of privilege, directly connects to intersectionality because the topic of privilege is prominent in the discussion. As we know, intersectionality is the overlapping layers of identity that everyone has. Some people have marginalized identities such as being Black or not able-bodied and despite it not having privilege, it continues to be part of their overlapping identities. In the TED talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw, she says, "There was no name for this problem and we all know when there's no name for that problem, we can't see a problem. And when you can't see a problem you pretty much can't solve it." I can relate this quote directly to a quote I used in my blog from Johnson which goes as follows, "We can't talk about it if we can't use the words" (11, Johnson). Both of these quotes discuss how we need to make light on the problems in our society by bringing them up in discussion despite it being uncomfortable. To be able to solve the problems of injustice, we need to use the proper language and identify exactly what is going wrong.

This article about intersectionality also gives a background on our TED talk speaker Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originally coined the term.