Here I need to backtrack and talk about that intersectional grid. Although most people in American uni-
versity communities and some in the general population are familiar at this point with the basic outlines of intersectionality, a theory of social power and subjectivity propounded by critical legal theorist Kimberle´ Crenshaw in 1989, 2003 wasn’t 2021. I wasn’t yet familiar with the term, although I’d caught inklings of intersectional thinking while a graduate student at Princeton in the mid-to-late 90s, and neither Crenshaw nor the word “intersectionality” were mentioned in our training manual. But one of our first lessons, the fourth out of fifty-two encompassed by the multi-workshop training protocol, put forward what I can now plainly see was a simplified version of intersectional theory. Jane and Leah framed our entire weekend’s work through the lens of a single page headlined “Power Grid & Social Rank.” “Each of us,” it began, “has many group identities in society. These group identities determine our social rank in U.S. culture. Following are some examples of group identities and the relative power those identities are given.”
Across the top of the chart were the categories “Race,” “Class,” “Gender,” and “Sexual Orientation,” plus
“Etc.” Running down the left side of the page were two categories: “More Power” and “Less Power.” The quadrant bracketed by “Race” and “More Power” contained a short stack of words: “European,” “American,” “(white).” You’re already familiar with this particular declension; I knew where we were headed the moment I saw the chart. “Upper,” “Middle,” “Male,” and “Heterosexual” fill out the “More Power” line. “African American,” “Latino/a,” “Asian,” “Native American,” “Working,” “Poor,” “Female,” and “Homosexual” fill out the “Less Power” line.
It was a primitive, brutalist reduction of intersectional theory; it doesn’t capture Crenshaw’s foundational
point, which has to do with the way in which a black female legal complainant’s intersecting blackness and femaleness may effectively place her beyond the legal protections conferred separately on blackness and femaleness. Nor does it make a space for trans and genderqueer identities. But the chart, sketchy as it was, did what it was designed to do. It took a room full of self-identified white people and, rather than joining them in community, taught them to slice and dice themselves and each other into component parts. As Jane and Leah worked the chalk board, I could feel everyone making macro- and micro-assessments about where each workshop participant should be placed in our new hierarchy of virtue. Since we were all white people—surprise!—race couldn’t be a part of that process. We were guilty as charged there: cast helplessly into the “More Power” quadrant. This clarified the activist-in-training pecking order. (Presumed) class, gender, and sexual orientation suddenly took on preternatural importance.
If I’d brought with me any residual notion that a workshop called “White Antiracist Allies in Training”
would ground itself in a shared desire to find common ground with one’s racial peers as a way of raising our collective game and being a credit to our race, that quickly evaporated. We’d been thrown into a state of nature, a Hunger Games training ground for edgy activists. Dr. Gussow—white, male, Princeton educated (and therefore presumptively Upper or Middle), presumably heterosexual, twice as old as the median workshopper—had drawn the short straw. How does it feel to be a problem? asked Du Bois. There was a weird kind of frost in the room, a shiver of stigma that the researcher noted silently, intrigued. It wasn’t yet clear to me how all this was going to play out. I did, however, find myself protesting silently—not the first straight white guy in my position, I suspect—about the degree to which the harsh contours of the Power Grid (and the subsequent lessons on “Rank Awareness” and “White
176
176