Traffic control
You know how people like to use “intersectionalism” as a kind of intellectual bludgeon? Well that’s a silly question; of course you do, because we keep talking about it. Anyway – I’m wondering how they’re dealing with Toronto Pride and BLM. They crashed right into each other at that intersection on Sunday.
Members of the Black Lives Matter Toronto group briefly halted the Pride parade today, holding up the marching for about 30 minutes.
The parade didn’t re-start until after Pride Toronto executive director Mathieu Chantelois signed a document agreeing to the group’s demands.
The organization was given the status of Honoured Group for the parade, which is the grand finale of Pride Month. It did not give Pride Toronto advance notice of their planned sit-in.
In other words BLM was given the status of Honoured Group beforehand, and then halted the parade without warning.
Alexandra Williams, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, told CBC’s Natasha Fatah that they held the sit-in because they wanted to hold Pride Toronto accountable for what she called “anti-blackness.”
Will Toronto lesbians and gays interrupt the next BLM event? Intersectionalism is supposed to cut all ways, you know.
Meanwhile, a gay Toronto cop has written an open letter to Pride:
This year, 2016, marked a first for me. My first Pride parade. I would be working, nonetheless it would be my first one in any capacity. Wow, what an event. What a spectacle, a joining of everyone.
The 2016 pride events really opened my eyes to something. The support that I have from my peers and supervisors has been unwavering. When I saw all those floats and officers marching (hundreds), I realized that my employer fully supports this part of me, and so many others like me. As I stood post at Yonge and College, ensuring a safe atmosphere, Chief Mark Saunders came up to me. I had the opportunity to salute him, and I knew that I had a leader who was invested in this celebration of Pride.
LGBTQ cops have struggled for decades. I am fortunate, because it is their struggles in the past, that have made my orientation an irrelevant factor in my workplace interactions. Members of police services, and their employers (like RBC, Telus, Porter, etc) have just as much right to participate as any other group.
Police officers are significantly represented in the LGBTQ community and it would be unacceptable to alienate and discriminate against them and those who support them. They too struggled to gain a place and workplace free from discrimination and bias.
I suppose this illustrates why intersectionalism isn’t the answer to all questions. You can invoke it all you want to but it doesn’t resolve issues like this one. It’s tragically easy to understand why BLM doesn’t want to participate in honoring cops as cops – and it’s also easy to understand why LGBTQ cops don’t want to be excluded from Pride. What’s the solution? I have no idea, and invoking intersectionalism doesn’t help me a bit.
For me intersectionality is a useful tool to remind us that the effects of advantages and disadvantages can be cumulative. However, it is completely useless at helping us set a priority or quantitative value on those (dis)advantages. Rather, many of those factors are context sensitive and perhaps best serve to remind us of the depth and breadth of human experience. I try to treat it as a prompt to consider applying a bit more empathy or critique, rather than a guide as to who I should support or why.
An accumulation of significant disadvantages certainly doesn’t make a person right about everything, or indeed anything, or even a good person. But it might help explain why a person is angry and why they have ended up where they are. it should also go without saying, but I’m going to, that the person with all the advantages and the success that so often goes with that is not necessarily right or nice or good and should probably be expected to consider the needs of others a bit more readily.
As I understood it, intersectionality was intended as a tool to denote, for example, “black lesbian woman” as a discrete class from “black woman” rather than denoting some weird pecking order amongst the oppressed.
It depends on whom you ask, of course – but my experience with people who wave their intersectionality like a flag has very much been that it’s about some weird pecking order amongst the oppressed.
Except older white feminists who don’t see everything quite the “right” way, which “right way” seems to depend on whichever young intersectional feminist has the podium at the moment
Well basically older white feminists count as totally privileged on every possible axis so they just plain don’t get a spot at the intersection. Soz but that’s how it is.
But such ambivalence IS intersectional. That’s precisely what intersectionalism entails. Sometimes intersecting power axes pull in different directions. People who think intersectionalism is a fancy word for “oppression Olympics” misunderstand intersectionalism. Intersectionalism isn’t a solution: it’s a complication.
And that describes a lot of people. So many. So so many.
@OB #3:
At the very least Kimberle Crenshaw wasn’t talking about the Oppression Olympics when she coined the term. Language is constantly evolving I suppose…
Well, at least one of those Toronto Police is a Cis-White-Male. So its open season on them. BLM is acting in a way that makes the whiny ‘but don’t ALL lives matter?’ line look less sleazy.
Indeed, isn’t the ‘all lives matter’ line an iconic example of bogus Intersectionality?