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Check out Highlights from our Community Showcase and Virtual Gallery!
Session Objective: to explore our identities amidst and knowledge of privilege & oppression as they play out in the world
When examining issues of environmental racism, it is important to understand how various forces impact justice and injustice. In addition to questions of race, other identity factors – such as gender expression, sexual orientation, nationality, disability, and age, to name just a few – have an effect on individual and collective experiences. Week 3 of the Community Audit wraps up our Orientation Unit by exploring how these issues overlap with each other to shape outcomes.
Recall: James Baldwin’s quote from last week’s artwork on the history of systemic oppression in America:
“American history is longer, larger...more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
Another memorable moment from an interview with Baldwin serves as a good introduction to the concept of intersectionality:
Watch: this explainer on “What is Intersectionality?” by 蒋梦珏 (Mengjue Jiang).
蒋梦珏 (Mengjue ‘Ashley’ Jiang) is a Shanghai-born lesbian Asian living in LA, giving her four marginalised identities: woman, queer, person of colour, and immigrant. Building on the theory of intersectionality by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ashley explains how these different characteristics overlap to create a unique experience of discrimination. She also discusses how the mainstream feminist, gay rights, and anti-racism movements all fail to adequately advocate for her full identity.
Read: more about the theory of intersectionality in this Vox highlight about how Crenshaw’s work has gone viral to shape modern conversations on race.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is a Black American lawyer and civil rights advocate. A leader in critical race theory and minority feminist philosophy, Crenshaw is a professor at both the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. Her work informed the South African constitution and continues to impact international law and politics. Dive deeper into intersectionality theory with her 1989 article coining the phrase — optional, but a meaningful read. (Photograph by Felix Clay for The Guardian.)
Connect: theories of intersectionality to environmentalism by watching this video produced by Intersectional Environmentalist providing more perspectives on the concept.
Hear: this cheeky take on white feminism’s struggle with intersectionality.
Carlita Victoria is an actor, personal trainer, and mental health advocate. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, Carlita earned a BFA from UNC Greensboro before moving to New York. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Darkness RISING Project, a nonprofit dedicated to create culturally competent mental health resources for the Black community. Carlita was inspired to do this work by her personal experiences with anxiety, depression and PTSD.
Katie Goodman is a comedian, author, and motivational speaker specialising in empowering women in leadership. Her all-women’s comedy and musical satire troupe, Broad Comedy, raises money for organisations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. Katie writes for O, The Oprah Magazine and is the author of Improvisation For The Spirit: Living A More Creative, Spontaneous and Courageous Life Using The Tools of Improv Comedy.
Listen: to this medley of voices sharing portions from Audre Lorde’s “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”. The piece reminds us why intersectionality is so important: not so we can engage in a competition over who is ‘worst off’, but so we can include the full range of people’s identities — because if we don’t, we end up marginalising others ourselves. As Lorde points out, it is a common strategy for those in power to “encourage members of oppressed groups to act against each other, and so long as we are divided because of our particular identities, we cannot join together in effective political action”.
Born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents, Audre Lorde described herself as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. A feminist writer and librarian, Lorde spent her life campaigning against racism, sexism, classism, capitalism, heterosexism, and homophobia. She spent time in Berlin in the 1980s, helping birth the Black movement in Germany and raising awareness of the connections between multiple racial and ethnic struggles. (Photograph by Elsa Dorfman)
Consider: Inga Bard’s #Intersectionality painting.
#Intersectionality (Oil on Canvas, 2017)
This #Intersectionality painting is one of the products of “Protest is the New Brunch”, an initiative by Inga Bard. The project took place at a secret party where guests were invited to paint by numbers, but, like most good cacophony, decided to paint by ideals instead. Inspired by Soviet propaganda posters, Inga Bard created prompts reimagining iconic proletariat poses with faces of Bay Area’s progressive creative class and replacing communist slogans with contemporary rallying cries seen on protest posters from the renowned Women’s March 2017.
About the Artist: Inga Bard was born on the eve of the dissolution of the USSR in Odessa, Ukraine, and became a naturalised US citizen after emigrating with her family as political refugees at the age of ten. She went off to study art in Miami soon after quitting high school, and has since studied and taught in Florence, London, and San Francisco. Her most recent project is Art for Civil Discourse, an initiative using public artwork to help communities spark conversation, dissect reality, and dream together.
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