In this post, I wanted to specifically focus on Political Intersectionality -- its function, positives and negatives. Dis-empowerment, the author suggests, occurs when the need arises to "split one's political energies between two sometimes opposing groups." Her example for this is colored women. Colored women belong to two groups. On the one hand they are women and on the other they are colored. This means they are a part of the feminist movement as well as the anti-racism movement. Unfortunately, however, the anti-sexist group focuses more on "white" women. And the anti-racist group focuses more on African-American males. Personally, I find this point really interesting. Its almost ironic to me how in creating a group that is supposed to represent someone underrepresented that one ends up under representing a subset of that group. In other words, a group that is against oppression is in turn oppressor. But does that make it excusable? Its almost absurd to think about; and frankly, I'm not sure what I think about it yet. I'm almost curious if this is just a facet of human nature and as people we just accidentally and easily neglect things. Surely, these groups don't deliberately neglect these intersections -- why would they? Another point I'd like to bring up is how far should one go in splitting up these groups into subgroups and so on? Will we really be able to accommodate for everyone? -- Maybe not, but I do think its important that we push for the greatest accommodation to all people possible.
