| > That is not a conclusion of intersectionality. Could you explain more? Because it seems to me that's how it's used in practice. See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change [1,2,3], and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears [4]. > the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive Again, depends on the group. For example, white privilege is seen as negative, but it's just white group solidarity. [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/28/kashmir-muslims-fe... [2] https://time.com/5877176/kashmir-special-status-india-domici... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/why-ho... |
> Could you explain more?
Sure. Intersectionality is a comparatively recent concept that privilege and disadvantage experienced by individuals is not a simple additive or multiplicative combination of the privilege or disadvantage associated with isolated parts of their identities, but that the interaction of such group privilege and disadvantage is more complicated, and particularly that discourse and solutions centered on serving the needs of single-axis identity groups in isolation, even when aggregated, often do not well serve the interests and needs of individuals in overlapping disadvantaged groups; it specifically originated in the late-1980s/early-1990s black feminist movement with the argument that generalized race and gender dialogue missed the particularized issues faced by women of color.
The idea, on the other hand, that there are ethical differences between (in the US, particularly) white identity movements and black, etc., identity movements (and, more generally, in identity movements among locally advantaged classes and those of less advantaged ones), is many decades older than intersectionality theory, having a variety of different roots, the clearest theoretical one (that not the oldest or necessarily the most important) being the "prejudice plus institutional power" view of racism (first expressly articulated in the those terms in 1970), which was immediately applied to the idea of relative merit of group identity movements.
The two ideas can interact (as they do in, e.g., dialogue about "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism"), but are essentially orthogonal concepts. One can fully subscribe to either without subscribing to the other.
> See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change, and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears.
The difference there is about institutional power and single-axis identity movements. It has nothing to do with intersectionality, and everything to do with perceived alignment of group identity and preference with institutional power (Muslims being seen as disadvantaged with regard to the Hindu-dominated institutions in India, while no similar institutional disadvantage is perceived for the white ethnically-British in Britain.)