Are We All ‘Baskets of Characteristics?’ Intersectional Slippages and the Displacement of Race in English and Scottish Equality Policy

Is intersectional racial justice organizing possible? Confronting generic intersectionality

“…The UK's internationally unique unification of equality legislation and architecture creates both opportunities and challenges for intersectionality's operationalization (Solanke 2011;Gedalof 2013;Hankivsky, de Merich, and Christoffersen 2019;Christoffersen 2019).…”

“…In policy and practice, due to both the relative novelty of attempts to operationalize it and the workings of gendered racism, it is ripe for co-optation, in the form of distancing it from both its radical origins in Black and women of colour's activism and social justice aims. While Black women can be viewed as key subjects of intersectionality (Jordan-Zachery 2013), it is being controversially operationalized for a more generalized "equality" and applied to a range of marginalized social groups (Christoffersen 2019) by academics, policymakers and practitioners alike. Particularly in UK equality policy, it is typically used in an unspecified way, across up to the nine "protected characteristics" named in the Equality Act 2010: age, disability, gender re-assignment (i.e.…”

“…Particularly in UK equality policy, it is typically used in an unspecified way, across up to the nine "protected characteristics" named in the Equality Act 2010: age, disability, gender re-assignment (i.e. transgender status), marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation (Christoffersen 2019). Ange-Marie Hancock argues that intersectionality's analytic/ontological project, to reconstitute relationships between categories of difference, is inseparable from its "project to render visible and remediable previously invisible, unaddressed material effects of the sociopolitical location of Black women or women of color" (Hancock 2016, 33).…”

“…Ange-Marie Hancock argues that intersectionality's analytic/ontological project, to reconstitute relationships between categories of difference, is inseparable from its "project to render visible and remediable previously invisible, unaddressed material effects of the sociopolitical location of Black women or women of color" (Hancock 2016, 33). In different sites of practice, depending on whether race, "a central analytic element that cannot be jettisoned without inflicting fatal violence on the integrity of intersectionality's intellectual project" (Hancock 2016, 13), continues to be a central focus, intersectionality's contemporary uses may variously be found to be an extended application of intersectionality or an effacement of Black women, women of colour and the intersection of race and gender (Christoffersen 2019). Yet Jennifer Nash has more recently argued that in a US context, Black feminist critique of intersectionality's appropriation can fall into proprietary narratives which engender a defensiveness which serves to stall Black feminist theorizing, and proposed "letting go" (Nash 2019).…”

“…Nash's argument is compelling, and yet it remains important to carefully examine dynamics of appropriation in a European context similarly characterized by antiblackness, which disavows and displaces race (Lewis 2013;Mügge 2018). It also remains important to examine these dynamics in a particular UK context, which consistently fails to act on long-accumulated bodies of evidence of systemic racism and antiblackness more specifically (Meer 2020), and in which most uses of intersectionality in equality policy fail to meaningfully engage with race and race/gender as central social organizing logics and categories of intersectionality theory (Christoffersen 2019). Black feminists theorize the ways in which Black women, "as both representation and embodied, sentient being[s]" (Lewis 2017, 117), are effaced, discursively and materially made absent across many sites; meanings and uses of intersectionality in policy and practice are sites of this epistemological and material erasure of Black women, as both knowledge producers and actors in these social worlds, as well as of their resistance to it (in other words, perhaps, their "presencing") (Lewis 2017).…”