pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2018-04-11.pdf, 3
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CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2018-04-11 | 3 | ITEM 2-A COMMISSION ON DISABILITY MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, April 11, 2018 6:30 p.m. Karen Nakamura: And so anthropology, as a discipline that studies diversity across time and cultures is in a particularly good space to think about what it means especially in terms of all of its different ramifications. Now, disability also has an expressive component. So it's also a new way of thinking about human diversity. And one of the complexities of disability is that we are always constantly being changed by emerging disabilities. So the disabilities that we thought about 30 or 40 years are still with us, but there are also new emerging disabilities and new ways of thinking about disability that challenge and bring us to different places. And so the topic I want to talk about today is intersectionality. Now, I am the Chair of the Disability Studies Cluster in the Haas Institute for a fair and inclusive society which is a new institution that was created by UC Berkeley with generous funding from the Haas Foundation to really think about what intersectionality is. Karen Nakamura: Although I'm the Chair of the Disability Studies Cluster, there are other clusters that are thinking about race, questions about gender, questions about sexuality, questions about economic disparity, religion, socio-economic differences and so forth. And the goal of the Hass Institute is to try to figure out how all of those work together to try to bring us to a place where our society is more fair and inclusive. Now, the concept of intersectionality was brought forth by two African-American study scholars, Kimberle Crenshaw and Patricia Collins. And it comes out of many of the criticisms that especially black feminism and third world feminism had of second wave feminism in the US, that they were feeling increasingly left out of the conversations and out of some of both the political as well as the intellectual developments that were coming out of feminism, and they wanted to emphasize that identities interact in complex ways. Karen Nakamura: So if you look at that little chart that I have there, in many ways black women found themselves at If we think back to the '60s and the '70s there are two major movements, there's the feminist movement happening and the civil rights movement happening at the same time. And in some ways the civil rights movement was supposed to be addressing the concerns of African-American men and women, but it was really focusing on the men. And feminism was supposed to be dealing with the questions that affect all women, but was really addressing the questions that were being posed by white women. And so black women were put in this position of feeling left out of both movements, and both movements saying "Well, if you're a black woman. the civil rights movement was saying "Well, you know, women's issues should be handled by the feminist movement", and feminists were saying, "Well, your questions about race, that it was really a question of the civil rights movement," and so they were betwixt and between and really feeling that actually the circumstances that affect people who are at the intersection of two categories are often unique and addressed by neither of the individual ones by themselves. Karen Nakamura: So that in a nutshell is intersectionality, but it proves to be much more complex in practice. So we can think for example of the disability rights movement and how the disability rights movement interacts, and so we can think, "Well, the disability rights movement and its interactions with, for example, gender." So we have the disability rights movement on one hand addressing the questions of disability, but really focusing in many ways on the needs of disabled men and not in particular thinking about disabled women. While at the same time we have feminism really not thinking about disability at all. And so again, people who are at the intersection of those two find themselves, disabled women, find themselves left out of both movements. Now, where intersectionality gets complex is that there are so many different categories that we can be 04/11/18 Page 3 of 18 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2018-04-11.pdf |