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Full summary of Sociology course Intersectionalities: Class, Race, Gender & Sexuality (7332F004AY) as taught by Prof. Sarah Bracke, in English.
Contents:
WEEK 1 INTRODUCTION
Kimmel, Michael S. (2017). Introduction: Toward a Sociology of the Subordinate. In: Michael S. K...
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1 Introduction
Kimmel, 2017: Toward a Sociology of the Subordinate
This Breeze at My Back
• Kimmel makes the analogy of the wind: being white, male or heterosexual is like having the
wind at your back. You do not feel how it pushes you along, but it is there.
• The ‘victims’ of this wind are the ‘others’, who have started to make these issues visible to
scholars. They put these problems onto the agenda.
o People often respond defensively. They see racism as an individual choice, or as
something performed by bad people who have bad judgments.
Making Privilege Visible
• Being white, straight or male is invisible and thus unmarked / ‘unbiased’. Invisibility is a
privilege, that covers up the other privileges that the dominant group receives. Those upon
whom privilege is conferred, often do not see the processes that privilege one.
o The middle-class white man has no class, race or gender: he is the generic person.
o Unmarkedness is signified by the analogy with country codes: the United States
doesn’t have a country code in web addresses (instead, it has .com) because it was the
dominant state to start with it. From the point of the United States, all other
countries are ‘other’ and should be marked.
o It is this invisibility that causes people to become so defensive.
The Invisible Knapsack
• We can also quantify inequality from the perspective of privilege: instead of putting the
discriminated group as baseline, we indicate the privileged group as such.
o It’s a different thing to say that ‘$1.21 is earned by men for every $1 that women
earn’.
• Peggy McIntosh has invented the notions of invisible knapsack: we are born with this
invisible knapsack of privileges that we should open up, and we have come to believe that
ascribed characteristics no longer matter, and that instead, only achieved characteristics
determine our life events.
• We should note, though, that not all forms of privilege are the same, just as not all forms of
privilege are the same.
o Note for instance that race and gender are inherently visible in someone, but that
doesn’t hold per se for sexuality: one can go through for a member of the privileged
group.
o Privilege based on physical ability is tough, because the world was made largely by
physically able people, for physically able people. In this case, equality entails that
we may have to use different means to arrive at the same place.
o When it comes to class, we experience one’s class as a status that one is not born
with but one has earned. It is also the most invisible privilege: we can act as if we are
high-class (e.g. all people that wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts). Class can be concealed
and feel as if something that we have earned by ourselves.
o Privilege of religion is interesting in the sense of Christonormativity: the
assumption that everyone else is also Christian. You may offend someone by
wishing them ‘Merry Christmas’, even though you think you’re being inclusive.
,Intersectionalities: Class, Race, Gender & Sexuality (7332F004AY)
Samenvatting door Tahrim Ramdjan 3
The Souls of White (and Straight and Middle-Class and Male) Folk
• Solutions are not aggregates of individual decisions. We are often discouraged because of
the notion that an individual alone doesn’t have sufficient power.
• Sometimes, we feel guilt. It is not per se a bad emotion, it can politicise us. But guilty self-
negation alone won’t bring us much good: it leads to isolation and despair.
o “It’s the loneliness of the long-distance runner against the wind” (p. 10).
A Method of Analysis
• Intersectional analysis was first developed by women of colour who responded to the fact
that feminism was dictated by white women, and anti-racism by men of colour.
o Sometimes, one of the axes of intersectional analysis becomes a master status
through which other dominances are filtered. But one should not resort to
individualism, in the sense of enumerating all of someone’s individual statuses:
that leads to an infinite regression.
• A study has shown that people are most conscious about the characteristics in which they do
not occupy a privilege: e.g. African-American students listed their race in describing
themselves as opposite to white students; LGBT students listed their sexuality as opposite to
straight students; etc.
o But no one wrote down their class (!)
o Nevertheless, we should describe ourselves in the terms of subordinate and
superordinate: it enables us to define who we are.
McIntosh, 1989: White Privilege and Male Privilege
• McIntosh notes that men are often reluctant to acknowledge their overrepresentation in
curricula. But she also realised that, as a white person, she has been taught to see racism as
putting others at a disadvantage whereas she has not been taught to see it as something that
puts herself at an advantage.
o So, the dominant group is taught to see affairs from the viewpoint of the
dominated.
o White privilege is like the invisible knapsack.
o White people and men have herein the same attitude:
§ They tend to acknowledge discrimination, but rarely will acknowledge that
they have been (unearnedly) privileged.
§ Even the most progressive men will resort back, during a call for change, to
explanations in sociobiology or psychobiology to explain for the centrality
of men. Very few men will indicate overreward alone as the sole reason for
that.
§ But, all this oppressiveness occurs unconsciously! We are taught to see
ourselves as an individual with our moral states depending on our own
moral wills.
• The pressure to avoid privilege is great because it violates the myth of meritocracy: it sheds
light on the fact that many doors open for certain people without any effort on their part for
it.
o To make the invisible knapsack graspable, McIntosh listed conditions of daily
experience that she deemed neutral, normal and universally available, just as she
perceived a male-only curriculum to be ‘neutral’.
o Whiteness as skin colour is an asset for any move McIntosh wanted to make; others
either didn’t exist or didn’t try successfully to be more like people of her race.
, Intersectionalities: Class, Race, Gender & Sexuality (7332F004AY)
Samenvatting door Tahrim Ramdjan 4
o Whiteness is socialised to a group with self-confidence, comfort and oblivious
towards other groups of colour.
• We have the notion that ‘privilege’ is a favoured state, but is that true?
o It’s the state in which one group is conferred dominance (permitted to control),
where this group’s attitude may range from thoughtless to murderous. Is that
desirable?
o Also, privilege confers power, but does not confer moral strength. Underprivileged
people of colour have survived their oppression and this may have granted them
moral strength. Hence, she makes a distinction between [I] earned strength and [II]
unearned power.
§ Unearned power comes from unearned privilege, and may look like
strength, but is in fact permission to escape or to dominate.
• We should distinguish between:
1) Positive advantages – come about as unearned advantage – that should be normal for
everyone in society and that we want to spread throughout the entire of civil and social
fabric. E.g. feeling of belonging.
2) Negative advantages – come about through conferred dominance – that should be
rejected insofar they still reinforce our hierarchies. E.g. cultural permission to not take
the Other seriously.
• In a privileged position, one also has the power to choose either to discuss this subject or
not.
o McIntosh has not a great deal to loose in touching upon this subject, just like men
don’t have a great danger in either supporting or opposing Women’s Studies.
• There is a necessity for more precise description and identification of how privileges affect
our daily lives, and we should be more down-to-earth in writing about this.
o White people do not see ‘whiteness’ as racial identity.
o Men do not think Women’s Studies concern them because they are not female.
o We should show the universal effects of privilege, but also elaborate on the specific
effects of privilege in specific contexts.
• All privileges are interlocking so it is tough to trace back whether a privilege stems from
class, race, religion or sexuality.
• But, these privileges are visible in two ways:
1) Individual acts of meanness, discrimination or cruelty
2) Embedded forms which you do not see as member of a dominant group, because it
concerns systems. McIntosh regularly forgot the privileges that she enjoyed as a white
person until she wrote those down.
• Those embedded forms and the immense social systems underneath it keep the myth of
meritocracy alive.
Smith, 2013: Unsettling the Privilege of Self-Reflexivity
• People often tend to ‘confess’ their individual privileges. The point of such confession is
unclear. It doesn’t lead to much political action, but became political action in itself.
• Only for an instant is it so that the dominated has power of the dominant, in the possibility
of absolving the latter.
o One fails to notice that this reinforces the structures of domination, as the white
subject becomes the subject capable of self-reflexivity.
• Individual transformation must occur simultaneously with collective social and political
transformation in order to actually reach an effect, so to dismantle systems that enable
privileges.
o Nevertheless, the response to structural racism became an individual one.
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