Activity 1.2 | Intersectionality and privilege

Knowing more about how bias and privilege wire our brains, and influence our behaviours, another crucial step towards understanding ourselves and our orientation to the world is to examine our own privilege and power. In this section we will be examining our own identities through a framework of intersectionality.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is a distinguished professor at the Columbia Law School and an advocate for Civil Rights. She coined the term, “intersectionality” as a framework to illuminate and analyze the ways that multiple factors of a person’s identity can overlap and intersect, and inform their likelihood of experiencing either disproportionate disparity or privilege, based on factors beyond their control.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work emerges from the United States, and yet, her framework of intersectionality applies in Canada. 

Weaving back to adrienne maree brown and Baratunde Thurston’s TED Talk, we can see how in both countries “founded through a genocidal, colonial act … it’s normal to live in an extremely violent, extremely unjust world” (TED, 2024, 11:02).

It’s time to say their names.

Spend some time researching the number of Indigenous People who have died in police custody in recent years.

        Keep breathing, and notice the implicit biases that arise.

Reference

Crenshaw, K. (2016, October). The urgency of intersectionality [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality