Intersectionality struggles with fluid racial identity despite its anti-essentialist aims

Evidence

As other theorists have noted, intersectionality assumes stable categories of race and gender it is not anti-essentialist per se. Moreover, the theory remains moored to a spatiality, a solidity or materiality that doesn’t change, a hierarchy that doesn’t quite get at the dynamic interaction of different subordinations that continues to produce different forms of inequality and oppression. Color and race are not interchangeable, and that very fact vexes their conflation in any theory of race. Anti-Black racism cannot be reduced to colorism which affects South Asians who can and have passed for Black but escape anti- Blackness. Light-skinned Blacks who can pass for white may escape colorism but not anti-Blackness depending on their ascriptive identity and whether they hold themselves out as Black. In some parts of the United States like South Florida, Spanish speakers are not at the bottom of the hierarchy even if they may be in other parts of the country. But if they are Afro-Latinx, they may very well be at the bottom, or close to it. If intersectionality posits that these multiple identities are not additive, then separating them out and not accounting for the interplay among them that creates a sum greater than its part is a problem. Intersectionality is most effective as a framework for uncovering discrimination that is a result of multiple identities coming together in a structural context like law. It does not work well with fluid identity. Yet, it has become a descriptor of identity itself and of approaches to other liberation projects. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 76

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s central project: Choudhury’s critique of intersectionality’s static categories dovetails with how racecraft theory (Fields sisters) treats race as a fluid, practice-based construct rather than a stable attribute. — connects to: Feminist scholarship on race often fails to interrogate the writer’s own location — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 161; Intersectionality fails because it assumes race and gender categories stay fixed; Constructivist views of race enable mixed-race identity mobility — Anna X. Huang, Jacqueline M. Chen, and Juliane Degner, Being One or the Other, Both or…, 104 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: How does Choudhury’s rejection of intersectionality’s spatial/material mooring compare with how Aziz’s ‘Racial Muslim’ frames the category?

Broader Connections

• Intersectionality fails because it assumes race and gender categories stay fixed #corroborates (0.95)
• A black-white paradigm in antiracism theory obscures other racisms and inequality forms #qualifies (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 900
• Constructivist views of race enable mixed-race identity mobility #complicates (0.72) — Anna X. Huang, Jacqueline M. Chen, and Juliane Degner, Being One or the Other, Both or Neither, 104
• Even single-group settings keep mixed-race identity chronically salient #qualifies (0.71) — Anna X. Huang, Jacqueline M. Chen, and Juliane Degner, Being One or the Other, Both or Neither, 57