Intersectionality and the Irony of Selective Inclusion

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As our group approached this last week of whittling down our curation and intentionally selecting pieces for our narrative display, the irony struck me yet again of the idea of how in displaying "Identity and Inclusion" we had been tasked with making certain exclusive choices in order to fit our narrative structure. With limitations like time, resources, archival availability, and our own personal biases, at some point my group had to concede with the fact that we could only tell so many stories (and so very little of each story at that). I'm thankful to have been met with these roadblocks and challenges, it made us think critically about how stories are told and how they are remembered collectively in a way that can only be learned through tangible practice. Another obstacle was the concept of intersectionality-- how certain identity groups overlap and impact one another. 

One pertinent section of our reading for Monday that stuck with me throughout the week in the archives was the following quote: "Black feminist thought was going mainstream, protesters holding signs with quotes from the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 statement, 'If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.' " (pg. 178, The Struggle for the People's King). I think that while this statement is clearly intentionally provocative, it speaks volumes about the idea of intersectionality and how some marginalized communities carry the weight of several and the burden of remembering. Further down that page features a more current quote from Dani Ayers in 2020: "We are absolutely centering Black women and girls, people of color, queer, trans, disabled folks in our work because we know that solving and interrupting the issue of sexual violence in those communities means ending sexual violence everywhere.” (page 178,  The Struggle for the People's King). 

Change-makers of marginalized communities centering members of varying and overlapping communities as a strategy to explore the true depths and consequences of oppression seems almost completely intuitive nowadays. For a movement like #MeToo, as Yazdiha set out to explore, providing platforms for people representing many communities amplifies the voices of more people in the long run. As we brought our time in the archives to a close, I felt satisfied that to some degree our group had found people that have the potential to be a part of the collective fabric of several identity-based organizations and communities on campus. When faced with the choice of who to portray, I felt validated by the work of Yazdiha that we had at least attempted the right choice and to view Identity and Inclusion from an intersectional perspective.


 Yazdiha, Hajar. 2023. The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.  

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