| > The endgame of intersectionality is -- gasp -- considering people as individuals. I'm not sure I read your tone correctly but this is indeed what authors like bell hooks try to get at: being Black is one thing, being a woman is another and being a Black woman can be different from either of those things in isolation; ultimately our experiences are defined not by each attribute individually but the way they interact in combination. Any subset of attributes will always give you an incomplete understanding but they can still be useful lenses. Charles and Ozzy do have a lot of things in common and they do have many shared experiences because of them and do experience many things similarly because of them. Of course those things are not all there is to them and e.g. being born into the royal family may significantly outweigh most of the attributes they have in common for many such experiences. Modern feminist critique is intersectional because it recognizes these complexities and recognizes the limitations. But feminist critique explicitly challenges the systems underlying our society. Girlboss pop feminism did the opposite, an infamously inane example argument being that then-state secretary Hillary Clinton is underprivileged compared to a homeless man because she's a woman. Corporate DEI is a step up from this but still falls flat because its ability to critique systems is limited by being beholden to the corporate structures that allow for it to exist: it's essentially the "more female drone pilots" joke but without a hint of irony. Again, that does not mean DEI can't do good things (e.g. being mindful of inclusivity can reduce artificial or cultural barriers to entry and increase representation) but it can't solve systemic issues because it can't meaningfully challenge the systems it exists within. This is what led to the tensions resulting in stunts like those at Basecamp or Coinbase where the owners of the respective companies decided to expel DEI and claim to create a "politics-free" workplace because the people involved in their DEI projects refused to stay in the comfortable confines of feel-good corporate (literal) virtue signalling and got dangerously close to critiquing the structures around them. You need to consider people as individuals but if you want to make sense of systems you need to pick subsets (plural!) of the attributes that define each individual. Where DEI falls short is that it usually by design is only allowed to pick a limited number of attributes and is even more limited in what systems it is allowed to look at. Wheelchair-accessible workspaces, yes. Racism towards Black employees by their peers, yes. Sexual misconduct by middle managers, yes. But anything that challenges the leadership or ownership structure of the company is too close to unionization for comfort. |