My name's Robert Craig.
I'm a lecturer in
English and American literature
and culture at the University of Bamberg.
And in this video, I want
to introduce you to an idea
which in recent decades has come to play
a really important
role in helping us think
about cultural, ethnic
and racial diversity.
I'm gonna be talking
about intersectionality
and its origins in something called
critical race theory.
And I'm also gonna be
showing how we might understand
and illustrate some of the
ideas behind these concepts
with the help of a
very famous short story.
Let me start with an example.
So imagine there's a very well-qualified
female Syrian migrant,
originally from a poor
working class background
who's recently learned
to speak very good German
before coming to Germany,
but increasingly finds
herself more and more disadvantaged
in her workplace in Munich.
She's repeatedly overlooked
and given consistently
low level repetitive work
well beneath her
qualification and skill level
by her white German male boss,
a man who is very friendly
and not otherwise unpleasant to her.
It's clearly become a case
of bias, even of prejudice,
even if that's unconscious bias.
But how are we supposed to
tackle this problem of bias
when the boss can claim, for example,
that he's not racist because he's friends
with male colleagues and employees
of Turkish German background,
that he's not sexist
because he doesn't discriminate
against German female colleagues,
or for example, an
Italian female colleague,
or that he's not classist
because he himself comes
from a working class background?
Now, none of these
issues has an easy answer.
And clearly this case of bias
isn't just a social
and political problem,
but perhaps a legal problem as well.
Now, what intersectionality does
is to provide us with some of the tools
for starting to
analyze this kind of scenario
and perhaps starting to
find ways of resolving it.
Now, I want to say a little bit
about the origins of this idea.
So intersectionality has its roots
in so-called critical
race theory, or CRT.
And this first emerged in the United
States in the 1970s,
as the civil rights
movement of the 50s and 60s
was beginning to stall, was
beginning to draw to a halt.
It was driven forward, CRT, among others,
by the progressive legal scholars,
Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado.
And it was a new
politically radical way of thinking
about race and class
that was strongly shaped
by the radical feminist, the black power,
and the Chicano movements,
as well as by Martin
Luther King's movement
of nonviolent resistance.
And from the civil rights movement,
CRT took its focus on
practical political applications.
From second wave feminism,
it drew insights into the relationships
between socially constructed gender roles
and power imbalances in
society more generally.
And critical race theory was a movement
of political and social activism,
but it was also a movement
of practical legal activism as well.
And CRT is built
around a number of radical
and still quite controversial ideas.
First of all, it
recognizes racism to be an ordinary
and everyday phenomenon that is deeply
and structurally
rooted in Western societies.
And racism is so
difficult to completely eradicate
because it can never
be fully acknowledged.
And the interests of
different class groups
within the white majority
converge and come together
and form alliances in
effect to keep racist discourses
and policies in place.
A second key idea is the so-called
social construction thesis.
And that's the idea that race itself
is a constructed social reality,
rather than a set of
biological and genetic facts.
And in fact, it's worth
remembering that over 85%
of genetic diversity
among human beings occurs
within particular populations
rather than between those populations.
But powerful white
majorities, so CRT claims,
have historically
constructed and reinforced the idea
of discrete racial identities.
And in connection to
that, different minorities
have served different economic and
ideological purposes
in different Western
societies, white majority societies,
at different times in history.
And the fourth big idea,
and an idea that's
related to the first three,
is the recent concept,
or the relatively recent
concept of intersectionality,
which I'm going to explain
in more detail in a minute.
Now, I think it's important to remember
that critical race theory
is still a much debated,
even controversial set of ideas.
And it's become a bit of
a bogeyman, as it were,
of right-wing politicians and parties,
especially both in Europe and America.
It's become a bit of a caricature
of so-called woke politics.
But CRT is also a set of ideas which,
when it's handled simplistically
or not handled carefully enough,
can sometimes give people the impression
that there are unbridgeable differences
and even distances
between different social groups,
different social and ethnic groups.
In short, these are
ideas that can be very,
that it can be very
difficult to talk about accurately
and sensitively, particularly with young
adults and students.
And what I want to do is
illustrate some of the usefulness
of critical race theory
by taking a closer look
at one of its most
interesting ideas, intersectionality.
So intersectionality was a concept
that was first explicitly named
by the African-American legal scholar
and critical theorist,
a woman called
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw,
who is a professor of law
at the University of
California in Los Angeles.
Now, the concept had
existed before the 1980s.
And in fact, important
elements of this concept
had been developing really in the context
of the civil rights
movement ever since the 1960s.
But the concept was
first given its specific name
by Crenshaw in an essay of 1989
where she used it as a tool to analyze
intersecting forms of oppression,
faced particularly by
black American women.
And intersectionality
refers to an examination
of categories of identity like race,
ethnicity, class, sex,
gender, national
origin, sexual orientation,
and physical and mental ability and
disability, and so on.
And it considers the ways in
which these different facets
of identity interact, intersect,
and play out against one another
in different social contexts.
Intersectionality asks
how those interactions
shape specific forms
of personal disadvantage
or perhaps particular
forms of advantage in society.
And it's a concept that confronts us
with lots of really
difficult real world questions.
And given both the legal and the
political background of CRT,
it addresses those
questions from social, political,
and also legal perspectives.
It asks questions like,
how do we analyze the
lived experience of individuals
who occupy several of these
categories at the same time?
And in what ways do
forms of disadvantage shape,
intensify, and modify
each other's effects?
Now, as the name suggests,
intersectionality draws on the metaphor
of a crossroads, of an intersection.
Imagine, Kimberlé Crenshaw suggests,
the various axes of power of race,
ethnicity, gender, or class,
as constituting
thoroughfares, in other words,
roads that structure our political,
social, and economic terrain.
Just as vehicles
travel along these roads,
in the metaphor,
disempowering forces and dynamics
travel along these roads.
And it's women of colour in particular
who find themselves
caught at the intersection,
at the crossroads of a
number of different roads.
Injuries can be caused and
then made worse by traffic
from one, two, three, or
any combination of directions.
And if there's traffic
coming from all directions,
converging from all
directions on the intersection,
on the crossroads, it can
be very difficult to tell
exactly where the first hit, where the
first injury happens.
In short, different forms of disadvantage
overlap and intensify
one another's effects.
Now, that's a pretty dramatic image
and one that it might be
quite hard to relate to.
But in a sense, that's
what intersectionality
is interested in.
Those other personal situations,
those other different lived experiences
that we can find it hard to relate to
because they're so far
removed from our own.
But of course, just
because someone's situation
can be hard to imagine
doesn't make it any less real
or any less important to imagine.
And precisely because it's uniquely good
at helping us step inside other lives,
other lived experiences,
if only for a little while,
I want to suggest that
literature can help illustrate
and understand some of
these difficult ideas.
I want to turn now to
talk about a short story
called "Recitatif" by the
late, great African-American
female author, Toni Morrison.
She was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio
to black working-class parents
who had migrated from the American South,
from Alabama and Georgia respectively.
In a career as a writer, editor,
and sometime university professor,
she published 11 celebrated novels
and astonishingly only one short story
during her lifetime,
namely "Recitatif."
She won the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction in 1988
and then the Nobel Prize
for literature in the 1990s.
And she was the first
woman of colour to do that.
Throughout her literary career,
Morrison made it her
mission in her fiction
to bring repressed and silenced
and very often female voices to the fore.
She was brilliant at exploring
intersectional identities.
And "Recitatif" is one of the works
where she does that most brilliantly.
So it's very much worth
reading the story for yourself
and I'd encourage you to do so,
but for those of you
who don't know it already,
I'm going to give a brief summary.
So the story's slightly strange name
evokes the "Recitatif"
or "Resitative" of opera.
In other words, a musical declamation
of a kind that is
typical during the narrative
or the dialogue parts of
an opera or an oratorio.
And there's a second
obsolete meaning of the word
which refers to the rhythm or to the tone
that is particular to
a particular language.
This is a story which
stretches from the 1950s to the 1980s
encompassing five separate episodes
in the lives of the female protagonists,
Twyla, who's also the first person
narrator, and Roberta.
We first meet them as
two eight-year-old girls
in an orphanage for children.
They aren't really orphans,
but they've been removed
from the care of their mothers.
Roberta's mother is ill,
whereas we're told that
Twyla's mother has neglected her
because in part, quote unquote,
"She just likes to dance all night."
The suggestion is that
she might be a stripper.
She might be working as a stripper.
Twyla also remarks
very early on in the story
that quote unquote,
"We looked like salt
and pepper standing there,
and that's what the other
kids called us sometimes."
So we know for sure
that one of them is black
and one of them is white.
They're both very lonely in the home.
They're drawn towards each other
and they strike up a kind of friendship.
They also share a
sense of both fascination
and slight disgust at a
character called Maggie,
who we're told is old,
bowlegged, a bowlegged woman,
that is a woman who might
have a physical disability,
that she's sandy-coloured,
in other words, she
might be a woman of colour,
and she works in the
kitchen at the school.
So she has a physical
disability and she, it seems, is mute,
that is, she seems to be unable to speak.
The girls guess that
she's probably deaf as well.
Soon after this,
Roberta leaves the orphanage
and the girls are forced
to go their separate ways.
Their next four chance meetings stretch
over several decades
and these meetings
offer us brief snapshots
of these women's lives, which are
themselves snapshots
of the tensions and the battles
within American society and politics.
Twyla never really leaves her
working-class origins
behind her and she
ends up marrying a fireman
and settling in a
relatively working-class city
in New York State.
By contrast, Roberta's
social status rises and rises.
She ends up marrying a
wealthy IBM executive
and she enjoys the services of an
Asian-American chauffeur.
A particular
flashpoint in the story occurs
in the late 1970s when both women find
themselves protesting
over the controversial policy of
desegregation busing.
And what this was, was an
ultimately abandoned policy
which was aimed at desegregating schools
in otherwise racially and
ethnically segregated areas.
But against the
backdrop throughout the story
of changing personal fortunes and
political disagreements,
the unanswered question
that both Twyla and Roberta
keep returning to is the fate of Maggie.
Did they bully her in the orphanage
with the other girls all those years ago?
Did they push her over?
Did they show violence towards her?
Was she black or was she white?
And what became of her?
In fact, the story's closing words are,
"Shit, shit, shit.
What the hell happened to Maggie?"
So this summary might
make the plot of the story
sound slightly
pedestrian, slightly ordinary,
but that's before we consider the twist.
You'll remember that Twyla told us
that she and Roberta
looked like salt and pepper.
And the hook of the story
is that we are never told
who is white and who is black.
Morrison herself said she wrote the
story, quote unquote,
as, "An experiment in the
removal of all racial codes
from a narrative about two
characters of different races
for whom racial identity is crucial."
And what Morrison does is to invite us
to play a guessing game,
to figure out who is who
on the basis of the many
ambiguous clues that she provides.
As the celebrated black
British author Zadie Smith argues,
the subject of Morrison's little
experiment is us, her readers.
At every stage in the
story, both protagonists,
along with their mothers
and later their families,
are given certain characteristics
and associated with certain behaviours,
certain modes of self-presentation,
which we might traditionally or
stereotypically associate
with white Americans on the one hand,
or black or African Americans
or Americans of colour on the other.
Twyla had been told by
her mother that they,
and Twyla clearly includes Roberta in
this, quote unquote,
"Never washed their hair
and they smelled funny."
But is that the kind of
thing that a racist white mother
would tell her daughter?
Or perhaps a defensive
and proud black mother
would tell her daughter?
And there are so many of these
ambiguous clues lying around.
And this particular clue
gives you a sense of the game
that Morrison is playing.
At every point, as we try
to identify the protagonists,
as we try to solve
the case, you might say,
we're confronted with the
reality of the stereotyping,
of the pigeonholing that we've been
socialised to engage in,
if only unconsciously.
And when I teach this
short story and discuss it
in my introduction to cultural studies,
I encourage my own
students to play Morrison's game,
to guess along.
And sometimes as they
explain how they've arrived
at a particular conclusion,
they often feel the
need to justify themselves
by insisting that they're not racist
and they want to distance themselves
from some of their socialised assumptions
about who is white and who is black.
But the main point of the
game is not to shame the reader.
And it certainly
isn't to find out for sure
who is white and who is black.
This seemingly colourblind
story invites us to reflect
on how our judgements are
shaped by our socialised,
our society influenced
and our media influenced
preconceptions, even prejudices.
It's a story which reminds us
of the social constructedness of race.
And it also draws our
attention to the complexity
of identities and lives
lived out at the intersection
of different forms of privilege
and different forms of disadvantage.
Recitatif is, I argue,
a story which brilliantly
illustrates intersectionality.
But of course, I'll let you read it
and decide for yourselves.
Finally though, what about Maggie?
What the hell happened to her?
Well, we never find out.
It's clear that she's a woman of colour
who has physical and maybe
some mental disabilities.
She's disempowered.
She has no words to tell her own story.
Of all the characters,
she most clearly embodies the story's
intersectional dynamics.
And the terrible, in some cases,
violent bullying that she faces
recalls many of the darkest moments
in America's interracial history.
But Maggie is also a reminder, finally,
that the lives that are the strangest
and the most distant from us,
the lives that are lived out
at the largest number of intersections
are also the lives we need
to try hardest to understand.