16
in fact may serve to further marginalize critics of de facto racial segregation in public
schools.
At the time Crenshaw published her first articles on intersectionality, any critical position
associated with “identity politics” faced the charge of undermining the egalitarianism
widely proclaimed to lie at the heart of the modern liberal project, even if this potential
had yet to be fully achieved in societies, like the United States, which are strongly
identified with the liberal tradition. Against those who dismissed identity politics as
divisive and narrow-minded, Crenshaw insisted that “the problem with identity politics is
not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—
that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.”
30
A generation later, the
intellectual and political climate is profoundly different. Today, state officials and much
of the public unself-consciously deploy the rhetoric of group identity, and public policy
proclaims “cultural-sensitivity” and “gender-responsiveness” to be guiding ideals for
reforms in areas ranging from public health and welfare to prisons. In this environment,
intersectionality as a critical perspective faces the risk of cooptation, whereby the
acknowledgement of group differences becomes an occasion for reinscribing stereotypes.
In the above discussion of single-sex public education initiatives, I underscore the need to
move beyond an emphasis on identity to an analysis of power—nothing short of this will
do in the struggle to break free from a matrix of domination that continues to define the
social and political geography of the United States.
30
Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1242.
Convention