Assignment: Diversity And You

Having developed a definition of diversity in the last module, this week we’re turning to how diversity applies to you PERSONALLY. This could be related to your personal experiences or things you’ve observed of those around you. Because Milestone One is also due this week, we’ll start to discuss the issues and events that interest you. Based on the module resources and your own research, write an initial post that addresses the following:

Describe an event related to diversity that either you or someone around you has experienced. What did you take away, and how did it enhance your understanding of diversity?
Share a current issue related to diversity that you have found interesting or that has personally impacted you. Post an article from a news source. How does diversity help you better understand this issue?

I’d like an event of diversity within the nursing field as a nurse related to having to understand ones decission making process based on religion.

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Origins and uses of intersectionality While intersectionality can provide a frame- work for integrated analysis of the intercon nected realities of many social identities, it historically has involved particular attention to the central roles of race and gender. In a 2015 contribution to the Washington Post titled “Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait,” Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, the legal scholar whose 1989 article “put a name to the concept,” succinctly explains how a 1976 discrimination suit against General Motors prompted her, as a young law professor, to define the “profound invisibility [of black women] in relation to the law.” She explains:

Racial and gender discrimination over lapped not only in the workplace but in other arenas of life; equally significant, these burdens were almost completely absent from feminist and anti-racist advocacy. Intersec tionality, then, was my attempt to make feminism, anti-racist activism, and anti discrimination law do what I thought they should—highlight the multiple avenues through which racial and gender oppression were experienced so that the problems would be easier to discuss and understand.

Her delineation of the case demonstrates the complexity of how race and gender interact, and clarifies how considerations that rely on racism alone can obscure the function of gender discrimination.5Assignment: Diversity And You

While Crenshaw’s work has proved founda tional to our understanding of intersectionality, the concept’s origins can be traced back at least

as far as Sojourner Truth’s 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. In fact, scholars throughout the years have proposed similar approaches to analyzing race and gender, although often circumscribed

by the silos of their own disciplines or inter disciplinary fields. The 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, for example, clearly signaled intersectionality:

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppres sion, and see as our particular task the devel opment of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.6 Assignment: Diversity And You

In the 1980s, feminist scholarship took what one might now call an intersectional approach, with a focus on expanding the “women” in women’s studies. For example, in their 1984 book Women’s Place in the Academy: Transforming the Liberal Arts Curriculum, Schuster and Van Dyne called readers to “pay meaningful attention to intersections of race, class, and cultural differences within gender” (bold in original);7 similar calls appeared in Culley and Portuges’s 1985 volume Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching.8

If similar delineations of intersectionality predated Crenshaw’s foundational 1989 work, interest in the topic has only continued to grow in the decades since. In 1991, arguing for the potential of ethnic and women’s studies to transform the liberal arts curriculum, I recom mended beginning any curricular change by teaching about the experiences of women of color, which reveal how race, class, ethnicity, and gender modulate one another: “The cat egories of race, class, ethnicity, and gender are unified; likewise their related ‘-isms’ and their correctives.”9

The fall 2011 volume of New Directions for Institutional Research, entitled “Using Mixed- Methods Approaches to Study Intersectionality in Higher Education,” provides examples of intersectional analysis applied to researching the faculty experience, college access and equity, racial “hyperprivilege,” student experiences, and mixed-race identity, among other topics.10 More recently, in their 2013 fact sheet “Inter- sectionality in Sociology,” Jones, Misra, and McCurley identify intersectional sociology as occurring most frequently in journals focused on feminist, ethnic, and racial issues and those discussing social problems.11

Indeed, intersectionality has come to serve as a key point of connection across disciplines. In literary studies, Ketu H. Katrak posits that “intersectionality precedes interdisciplinarity, the former method leading and informing the latter.” She states that the theoretical category of intersectionality

includes the analysis of a growing intersection of categories that are crucial in interpreting ethnic literary texts: the centrality of race and ethnicity as intersected and modulated by gender, sexuality, class, the state, and increasingly, by nationality, immigration laws, and diasporic concerns. I assert further that intersectionality, in terms of the deployment Assignment: Diversity And You