Intersectionality: A collection of stories
The concept of Intersectionality was introduced in 1989 by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in the critical legal studies arena, and gained mainstream attention during the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. Intersectionality is not about individual identity. Rather, it's about structures and how those structures lead to unique forms of discrimination. Without this acknowledgement, critical social movements such as LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights, Black Lives Matter, Stop-Asian-Hate, climate justice, and disability rights, seem disconnected when in reality are intertwined.
What brings us together at PDXWIT is our shared commitment to transforming the tech industry. Our collective strength comes from celebrating our differences, and from acknowledging and uplifting the unique lived experiences of those made the most vulnerable by intersecting structures of oppression.
Our members have come together to share their own perspectives around intersectionality and the reckonings they have had in these four powerful stories.
ANUSHA NEELAM (she/her/hers), PDXWIT VOLUNTEER - PODCAST CO-HOST
I grew up as the child of immigrants in one of the whitest cities in America. To say intersectionality plays a role in understanding my identity as an Indian American woman would be an understatement. I viewed my world in different dimensions, each with its own unique challenges. In one, I watched my parents endure the harsh realities of immigration with little to no guidance on how to navigate a new country. In the other, I was painfully aware of the micro-aggressions from the community around me.
I spent much of my childhood determined to fit in with my white peers. I inhaled pop culture and tried to imitate what was portrayed. I perfected American slang and begged my parents for an allowance so I could spend it on “All-American” clothes at Ambercrombie and Hollister. (Cringey, I know.) I grew up speaking English at home, but there were differences in pronunciation and dialect that elicited laughter from friends and teachers alike. I read as many books as I could get my hands on so I could wipe my vocabulary clean of anything that would deem me foreign or different. I eventually learned to mask some of the differences, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. The discrimination found me. The incessant questioning continued. “Can you say something in Indian?” “Why don’t you eat Lunchables like us?” “Why don’t you wear a dot?”
I am the oldest child in my family so I was the first to be raised in this country. As such, it fell on me to pave the way while simultaneously upholding my culture. This is no small task to which I often fell short. Relatives would regularly make remarks about me losing touch with my heritage — opting for jeans over lenghas, speaking English with more ease than my mother tongue, and not understanding customs and traditions as well as they would’ve liked. I have immense respect for my Indian community, but sometimes it had a hard time accepting me for my western mannerisms.
Of course, both of the environments that I was exposed to have a deeply rooted patriarchal system. This developed an early sense of understanding that I would have to work harder than my male peers just to prove myself.
For those who understand what it feels like to be a minority in various spaces, you know how alienating that can be. Intersectionality is vital in understanding that discrimination can affect the same person on multiple grounds. To have to change one aspect of yourself at any given time to be accepted is, simply put, unfair. It is one thing to view your world in different dimensions, it is another to be guilted to live that way. Today, as a member of society and as a professional, I show up as my whole self for myself. After all, I am a product of my many layers and to know them is to know me.
NATALIE RUIZ (she/her), BOARD MEMBER - PDXWIT
When it comes to equality and inclusion, the more I learn, the more I realize I have so much to keep learning and unlearning… When it comes to intersectionality, I have had to face some inconvenient realizations.
Intersectionality is defined by Merriam Webster’s dictionary as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.”
The real power of the concept comes from the combining and overlapping. The layers that make us who we are also influence the way we may be treated and seen by society as well as how we might see ourselves.
For example, I have always seen myself as a woman and as a feminist. Later in my life, I started to embrace being a woman of color. I’ve long accepted the idea that I was an advocate for equality, diversity and inclusion. For as long as I can remember, I read and followed leaders like Gloria Steinem, Malala Yousafzai, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Emma Watson; they helped shape my thinking, actions and my language around feminism. However, after reading Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism, I had to recognize how limited my perspective had been. Intersectionality was missing in much of the feminism and equality I had been celebrating. I felt ashamed at missing this, and I went down a complete rabbit hole of examining the various pieces of our identities and how the combinations influence privilege.
I mentioned that later in life, I began to accept the part of my identity that often entered the room first or at least second: the brown part. While I have owned being a woman and working for equality when it comes to gender, I had missed the finer aspects that came into play, like ethnicity, ability and disability, education, class, religion, sexual orientation and more. For me, I am not only a woman, I’m also a mixed-race Latina who grew up in a very rural community in the Pacific Northwest. I am a [brown] woman in tech and I am not a college graduate. There’s plenty more to me, but even these aspects highlight how varied someone’s makeup can be. These intersecting aspects of my identity have led me to encounter racism, sexism, and assumptions about my abilities. However, they also represent plenty of privilege.
Growing up brown in a rural, predominantly white community while being raised by my mother who is blonde and fair-skinned meant that I was perceived as racially ambiguous. I also sometimes benefited from that ambiguity and my proximity to whiteness. I didn’t use my hispanic last name until later in life, never really learned to speak Spanish, and spent a lot of time hoping that people would not notice that I was brown.
I spent a laughable amount of time trying to fit in at work. When I was 18 working among mostly white men over the age of 50, I bought high waisted pleated pants and tweed blazers. I kept my hair in a low bun and my makeup neutral. I thought maybe they would be kinder and more accepting of me if they didn’t notice I was young, brown and female. It didn’t work. It never works!
Over the years, I have come to realize that no matter what we do to try to blend in, we will still often be othered. No amount of tweed or pleats was going to change how my then coworkers saw me, and focusing on assimilating only dulled the magic that made me who I am.
This is why intersectionality is so important. The recognition that we are not all the same — that there are differences we can see, and many we cannot see, that alter the experiences we have navigating life is essential in the pursuit of true equity.
I’ve grown older and a bit wiser over the years, and am working to continue to learn and unlearn while utilizing the privilege I have to be more outspoken about inequities in the workplace and in society. I’m also pushing myself to be more vocal and transparent with the various pieces that make up who I am, as I know seeing is believing, and it would have been impactful for the younger me to know that it was ok to show up authentically at work and beyond.
My hope is that we achieve a level of inclusion and equality that allows individuals to come as they are, with all of their layers, and be accepted completely.
ZHOU FANG (she/her), PDXWIT VOLUNTEER
Growing up in China, the concept of intersectionality never occurred to me as China is the largest predominantly monoethnic country in the world. Although now I see intersectionality everywhere I go even if we are the same race: social class, gender, sexuality, economic status, health condition, age, shade of skin, accent, pay gaps, climate justice, mental health, etc.
To me, my experience with intersectionality began with the realization of my immigrant and Asian woman identities. Associated with my “alien” status on all my immigration paperwork, I had always considered the word immigrant negative (the U.S. has reduced the use of the word “alien” on immigration paperwork in recent years). And I rarely acknowledged the fact that I am an immigrant (now I say that proudly), especially when people would (and still do) constantly ask me “where are you from” and tell me that “your English is so good.” In order to separate myself from being “someone from somewhere else,” I avoided acknowledging my immigrant identity for years.
I also didn’t like the idea of describing myself as an “Asian woman” versus just “woman.” It felt racist to me at times when I thought “why differentiate women among women.” Since the BLM and Stop-Asian-Hate movements, as well as learning about White Supremacy, however, I have learned that it is critical to emphasize the differences and unique challenges women from different cultures and groups face. To crush the myth of Model Minority, I have to keep reminding people that I am an Asian woman and I face unique difficulties and discriminations in both professional and personal lives. At the same time, I also have unique leverages and advantages as an Asian woman, and I use them to lift others.
We talk a lot about inclusion, equity, and diversity these days, especially since the covid-19 pandemic. In my mind, all these buzzwords and important work we do come down to one place: Intersectionality. Without a proper understanding of intersectionality, we will not be able to develop empathy, which is a key component of DE&I. Equity largely is about being fair, just, and allowing people to have a voice and achieve what they deserve. Without empathy, we would blindly think that what we know is “fair” while oftentimes, it is not. Empathy puts ourselves in others' shoes and helps us think holistically. And learning about intersectionality leads us to be more empathetic and kind, which lays the foundation of a more just and equitable society that we are so far away from now, but desperately in need of.
DIYANA MENDOZA-PRICE (she/her), PDXWIT COMMUNITY MEMBER
Before shifting to tech, I spent over a decade in the nonprofit world. My work included leading workshops on privilege with people of all ages and backgrounds. I used to share a quote from Lilla Watson during those workshops: “If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
I love this quote because it compels us to consider our interconnectedness. How is your liberation bound up in mine? Perhaps it’s because oppression is also a bound-up thing. An instance of unjust treatment is an interaction between people, and its impacts ripple out across communities and time. Whether it’s a biased hiring decision, or a student disciplined more often based on their identity, or a low-income neighborhood historically subjected to more air pollution, injustices like these compound to situate us all in positions of advantage or disadvantage.
To get people thinking about these dynamics, I used a tool in my workshops called the “Privilege Wheel.” You may have encountered it before if you’ve participated in a privilege reflection. For those who aren’t familiar, think of a pizza pie with a wide crust. Each slice represents an identity category: gender, race, sexual orientation, disability status, citizenship status, economic class, and so on (keeping in mind that there are many identity categories that we could include). For the cheese part of each slice, the participants would discuss this question: “Which group in the U.S. holds the most institutional (think government, financial, etc.) power?” No matter the group demographics, participants would ultimately agree on the following: Gender - cisgender men; Race - white; Sexual Orientation - heterosexual; Disability Status - none; Citizenship status - citizen; and so on. These would be written on each slice accordingly.
The next step was done privately. Each person was invited to write down how they identified per category on the crust of each slice. Then, participants shaded in the slices where their identities overlapped with the privileged identities, with attention to nuance. For example, I always modeled how, as a mixed race person with light skin privilege, I chose to put partial shading in the “white” slice even though I do not identify as white. Then participants would engage in individual and group reflection on how they can “work together,” in Lilla Watson’s sense of the phrase, towards equity.
An important takeaway that always arose from these reflections was this: our identities and experiences of privilege and oppression are, in fact, intersectional. We sliced up identity for the sake of the exercise, but how we understand ourselves, how we treat others, and how we are treated are never based on just one slice. Multiple slices are ever at play, intersecting in different ways. And deeper than that, there is an intersection of histories informing our experience, too. Understanding this intricate web — this intersectionality — is key to liberating us all from the power structures that limit us.
We will not achieve a more just and equitable society without acknowledging and studying intersectionality. To ignore or deny it is to be complicit about racism, sexism, and other biases and injustice that have plagued our society for as long as history remembers. These individual stories indicate that intersectionality exists in every person, every family, and every community. It is incredibly brave and empowering to see one’s own intersectionality and acknowledge others’.