Intersectionality And Gender

Is our justice system corrupted, racist or is it perfect? Did you know African Americans now constitute for nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population? This is probably the case because Blacks are incarcerated six times the rate of whites. African Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people. I believe race, ethnicity and gender disparities play a large role in how our system is executed. To support my claims I will be talking about incarceration, pullover rates & situations and police training in great detail.

Intersectionality has become the latest feminist “buzzword” as it comes to the discussion of pop culture, politics or academia. the article “Intersectionality” by The Washington Post, tells us how the term intersectionality was initially used to describe how race and gender could bisect as the forms of oppression. However, now the term is used to trace how different forms of discrimination overlap and relate. It also describes how important is it for feminists to consider women from diverse backgrounds when advocating for social causes. This term encompasses numerous social factors such as sexual orientation, disability, class and nationality. Recently, this term has been used by social activists either as a rallying cry or punishment for

Courts are a major evaluative stage of the criminal justice system and we rely on these courts to determine our outcomes based on the crime that was committed. Today, there is more diversity of leadership in the court system but, race still plays a role in the outcome of the offender. This could range from petty crimes being committed like traffic infractions or facing the death penalty based on the race of the offender or victim. This paper will examine the three types of disparities that cause biased sentencing in the courts. The three types of disparities are race, social class, and gender and these all play a huge factor when making a decision based off an offender.

It is impossible to discuss gender and the influences it has on one livelihood without acknowledging the other aspects of one’s identity. Other aspects such as race, class, and sexuality in combination with will always play a major role in one’s life choices and the way they are perceived by others. The term intersectionality as stated by Susanne Hochreiter offers a way to understand the multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed. Intersectionality explains why gender cannot be in isolation from other inequalities in the social world. As a black Haitian woman raised in America, it is clear to see that my identity occupies several spheres. The experiences of being a woman in Haitian culture often conflicts with that in of American culture. In Haitian, there are specific roles and social spaces that women occupy. Traditionally in Haitian culture women are the head of the household but still place their husband’s authority above them. Young Haitian girls must learn many things before they are considered young women in their society. These

Without applying intersectionality in analysis, oppression can only be understood in general terms, which can cause forms of oppression to become undetected (Mattsson, 2014). Instead, intersectionality, demonstrates the complexity of gender, sexuality, class, and race avoiding stereotypes as a whole, rather than simplifying an individual based on one characteristic (Mattsson, 2014). For example, when I was working at a Community Centre in the Jane and Finch area, I had a conversation with my co-worker. He described the barriers and struggles he has faced because of his race and socioeconomic status. It was through this conversation that I realized the pre-conceived notions my co-worker had about me, as a white individual who did not grow-up in the same neighbourhood. More specifically, my co-worker was surprised to hear that I experienced similar barriers as he did in regards to socioeconomic status. In other words, due to my race, my co-worker had perceived notions about my economic class, which conflicted with my actual experience. In this example, my identity was simplified based on my race, while my socioeconomic status was concealed. This is because race and class are structural systems of oppression that are often conflated. Thus, without the use of intersectionality, assumptions were made and forms of oppression became

1.The theory/concept of intersectionality is a theory centered around oppression, domination and discrimination through various mediums from the social and cultural elements of society.

In “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform,” Dean Spade proposes that the United States was founded through “racialization…(which) continues to operate under new guises… that produce, manage, and deploy gender categories and sexuality and family norms” (16). More over, these laws and norms tend to maintain the “status quo,” and employ an inherently flawed justice system that is only equipped to address single-axis discrimination issues (5). Thus, the intersectionality movement is largely dismissed by the social and justice systems, as it utilizes “critical intersectional tools… that are often (too) difficult for legal scholars to comprehend” (17). Interstionality’s progress is also impeded by advocates leaving to support single-axis issues. However, Spade warns that this approach is ineffective, as it fails to protect the most marginalized members of society.

Crenshaw's Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color expands on the multifaceted struggles of women of color and the generalizations ingrained in society that limit women of color and keep them in a box. In this text, Crenshaw builds on the concept of intersectionality which proposes that social categorizations such as gender and race are intertwined and have great influence on one another. She explains how the lack of awareness about intersectionality skews the data behind studies on controversial

One of the main arguments against intersectionality within feminism, is that intersectionality will cause feminism to be more about who to feel the sorriest for instead of improving feminism. I totally disagree with that argument on the ground that I believe intersectionality is rather about the fact that all of us experience events differently therefor it is crucial to listen to everyone’s experiences nevertheless to not place each other´s experiences into a hierarchy of who to emphasize the most.

Introduction and thesis: The topic chosen for this essay concerns the relationship between racial profiling and sentencing. It is relevant to the course material because it concerns the ways someone is treated depending on his or her ethnic origins, and it makes it an interesting sociological and criminological phenomena. This is the reason why I chose to write on this topic, and because I find it an important issue in our society. This essay will demonstrates that visible minorities are more likely to be subjects to harsher sentencing than the majority, and more than them.

Intersectionality describes ways in which certain social identities such as race, ethnicity, gender and class affects an individual’s experience. These same categories are used to reflect systems of oppression and privilege. Intersectionality provides the context for understanding that people’s health cuts across many lived experiences (Bowleg, 2012). Much of public health however does not acknowledge health differences as they speak on each identity independently. Because the term women and minorities has become the centre in public health discourse and research,

Sentencing disparity within the American Judicial system is a problem that exists across the nation. According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, disparity means the markedly distinct in quality or character. Many times, disparity is used in conjunction with discrimination as if the two words mean the same, but they do not. Disparity will include a difference in treatment or outcome but is not based on an opinion, bias or prejudice. Within the United States there are several types of disparity that exist within sentencing and these inconsistencies can vary from state to state, judge to judge, and from individual from individual.

She states that Lafree’s article is a classic example of how social science studies fail to, “Examine the ways in which racism and sexism converge” (Crenshaw, 1993, 1275). Lafree focuses on the face that men of color are prosecuted more harshly depending on the race of the victim, but he fails to really go into detail on the experiences of those victims who were women of color. While he talks about men of color a great deal, he leaves out issues for women of color and makes racism to seem like inequality between men

In her book, The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander who was a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, reveals many of America’s harsh truths regarding race within the criminal justice system. Though the Jim Crow laws have long been abolished, a new form has surfaced, a contemporary system of racial control through mass incarceration. In this book, mass incarceration not only refers to the criminal justice system, but also a bigger picture, which controls criminals both in and out of prison through laws, rules, policies and customs. The New Jim Crow that Alexander speaks of has redesigned the racial caste system, by putting millions of mainly blacks, as well as Hispanics and some whites, behind bars

We live in a society where ethnic minorities are target for every minimal action and/or crimes, which is a cause to be sentenced up to 50 years in jail. African Americans and Latinos are the ethnic minorities with highest policing crimes. In chapter two of Michelle Alexander’s book, The Lockdown, we are exposed to the different “crimes” that affects African American and Latino minorities. The criminal justice system is a topic discussed in this chapter that argues the inequality that people of color as well as other Americans are exposed to not knowing their rights. Incarceration rates, unreasonable suspicions, and pre-texts used by officers are things that play a huge role in encountering the criminal justice system, which affects the way