Racism, inequalities, and discrimination take different forms in contemporary, plural societies. These social phenomena occur across various and intersecting lines that shape individual and groups’ lived experiences. At the individual level, human beings identify themselves with numerous personal characteristics, they have multiple affiliations and senses of belonging, and they play several roles in society. These identities are not fixed, and self-identification may change over time, in different contexts and life experiences. Groups perceived as homogeneous by outsiders are indeed multifaceted.
This is particularly true when it comes to youth, which is per se a blurred category, “a legal category without definition” (Mahidi 2010); it encompasses young people at different life stages in their transition to adulthood and in planning life projects, aged between their teens and 40, depending on context (Bello 2020). Furthermore, the category cuts across socio-economic conditions, gender identities, sexual orientation, ethnicity, health and (dis)ability. This implies that many young people can experience racism, inequalities and discrimination through the intersections of multiple grounds. Consequently, law and policy makers, institutions and NGOs that adopt a one-size-fits-all approach will predictably leave many specific instances unaddressed.
Why intersectionality (also) matters in the youth field
Since the end of the 1990s, it has become increasingly acknowledged that an intersectional perspective should be integrated into law, policy, and activities in order to tackle specific forms of discrimination in Europe. The question is: why?
In order to answer this question and to put intersectionality effectively in practice, as well as to avoid the risk of it becoming just another “buzzword”, it is necessary to explore this concept fully. The term ‘intersectionality’ was first introduced by Kimberé W. Crenshaw, with the purpose of addressing the invisibility of Black women’s specific experiences of discrimination before the US courts. Judicial decisions were prone to consider separately discrimination based on race, and discrimination based on gender,rather than on the intersection between race and gender. This “either/or” approach was criticised by Crenshaw. However, her aim was more ambitious than just creating a new category in law, that of Black Women. She criticised the prevailing, mono-categorical approach that considered different grounds of discrimination as mutually exclusive. In her approach, intersectional racism occurs when two or more characteristics interact in a way that makes individual experiences’ “qualitatively different from those based on any sole basis of discrimination”. (1991: 1245).
The metaphor used by Crenshaw to represent the concept of intersectionality is the traffic collision occurring at the crossroad caused by cars – each one representing a different dimension of identity – flowing from various directions.[2] Only by looking at the intersection of the “cars” is it possible to identify the dynamics leading to the “accident” and the specific “damages” suffered by the victim. Thinking in this way, from the position of the intersectionally marginalised person’s standpoint, it is possible to unveil gaps in law, policy, NGO activities and social practices. By identifying the “blind spots”, as Nina Lykke puts it, and by mainstreaming intersectionality in these and other arenas, gaps can be filled. However, practices are needed to identify and tackle individual, societal and structural dynamics that create and reproduce racism, inequalities and discrimination.
Mari Matsuda suggests two useful methods to put intersectionality into practice. The first is a critical orientation:
[T]he way I try to understand the interconnection of all forms of subordination is through a method I call “ask the other question”. When I see something that looks racist, I ask, “Where is the patriarchy in this?” When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, “Where is the heterosexism in this?” When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, “Where are the class interests in this?” (1991: 1189)
“Asking the other question” recognises that if no system of subordination ever stands alone, then working in coalition is necessary. The second method interrogates “who is missing in the room and why is [s/]he not here?” (Matsuda 1990: 1765). The room is the place of power, be it knowledge production, research, policy-making, decision-taking and so forth, and missing is more than physical absence; it is also the intellectual contribution and standpoint that would enrich the debate if everyone was included.
Structural, political and representational intersectionality
When it comes to thinking about power and discrimination, individual and systemic levels are dynamically linked and work across different levels and dimensions of social and political life. One way to examine the systemic nature of racisms, inequalities and discrimination is through Crenshaw’s discussion of structural, political and representational intersectionality.
Structural intersectionality
Structural intersectionality concerns the ways in which the specific social location of people, and the intersectional dimensions of their identity, make their experience “qualitatively different”. As far as young people are concerned, they are differently located, and youth-related policy, legislations, programmes, and services rarely take into consideration the specificities of these needs. The example of young unemployed people in the Italian context can help explain this structural intersectionality.
The Youth Guarantee of 2013 is the EU member states’ commitment “to ensure that all young people under the age of 30 years receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, apprenticeship, traineeship”.[3] This policy focuses more on fostering young people’s access to the labour market than their permanence in it. Moreover, the national implementation of such a general policy on tackling youth unemployment interconnects with national welfare systems, as well as labour, antidiscrimination and migration laws, in ways that might discriminate against many unemployed young people.
In Italy, the Youth Guarantee has been used to try to reach young people, the problem is that, in 2014 and 2015, the same Italian Government that implemented it also adopted the so-called Jobs Act. This was advertised as a legislative instrument to tackle unemployment, but worsened the protection against dismissal in the private sector for newly appointed employees. It created a double standard: those appointed to jobs before March 2015 are more protected against dismissal than those employed after this date, leaving very many young people in the vicious circle of precariousness. Young migrants, whose residence permit depends on a stable employment, are even more impacted by these effects in a country with one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in Europe.
Political intersectionality
Political intersectionality occurs when political or movement agendas concerned with one struggle or issue end up marginalising the needs and voices of those located at the intersection between different forms of oppression. Crenshaw provides readers with an insightful example, the lack of representation of Black women in the US civil rights movements, noting that:
“racism as experienced by people of color who are of a particular gender – male – tends to determine the parameters of antiracist strategies, just as sexism as experienced by women who are of a particular race – white – tends to ground the women’s movement.” (1991: 1252)
As a consequence, Black women founded their own collectives and movements, such as the Black and lesbian Combahee River Collective in Boston in 1974. Its manifesto, issued in 1977, became a reference point for many Black women who were at the margins in both anti-racist male-dominated movements and in White women’s feminist ones. Looking at the youth kaleidoscope in the European context, Roma LGBTQI+ young people often have low access to Roma NGOs because of their sexual orientation or gender identity and, at the same time, to LGBTQI+ ones because of their Roma origin in some countries (Fremlova & Georgescu 2014). The same can happen to many other young people: LGBTQI+ young people belonging to religious minorities, with disabilities or refugees;young refugees with disabilities. The socio-economic disadvantage and living in rural or peripheral areas is another intersecting ground preventing many young people from being represented in NGOs and movements in this context, and digital participation cannot meaningfully replace offline engagement.
As Matsuda notes, building coalitions also exposes human beings to “the frustration that comes from trying to explain the most important aspects of one’s life and creed to listeners who are ill-prepared to understand” (1991: 1187). Despite the difficulties that might arise, “[w]hen we work in coalition […] we compare our struggles and challenge one another’s assumptions. We learn of the gaps and absences in our knowledge. […] We learn that while all forms of oppression are not the same, certain predictable patterns emerge” (ibid.). In youth work, we also further reflect on how forms of subordination are interlocking and that we need to move out of “identity silos” to build a more just society.
Representational intersectionality
Representational intersectionality relates to the social construction of individuals because of the intersection between two or more identity dimensions. Stereotypes and prejudices attached to identity categories can lead, for example, to the hypervisibility of many young people that is reproduced and even normalised by institutions and the media, in discourses and in daily practices. This hypervisibility can lead to being targeted with hate speech.
There is a vast array of specific stereotyped representations, and many of them are rooted in the history. In the case of Black women, since the times of slavery they have been “hypersexualised” and described as lascivious and tempting or, on the contrary, portrayed as “masculinized sub-human creatures” (Hooks 1982). As far as young people in Europe are concerned, for example, the social construction of the “Muslim terrorist man”, and racial profiling against Muslim young people, have increased since the ‘war on terror’ declared after the 11 September 2001 attacks. The intersection between (young) age, (male) gender, Muslim religion, and national origin have played a role in shaping this label and profiling policies. Another recently revived stereotype, particularly after the significant movement of people seeking asylum in 2015, portrays young male migrants or refugees as “rapists” of young – white – women. Counter-narratives and deconstruction work are needed to tackle these and other specific forms of “representational intersectionality”.
Conclusion: Each voice counts, no-one behind
Intersectionality can be a powerful perspective to make youth policies, programmes and projects work for all young people. To take intersectionality seriously requires paying attention to “the obvious and non-obvious relationships of domination… helping us to realize that no form of subordination ever stands alone”; (Matsuda 1991: 1189) it means asking “who is missing” from a project, from its design to its evaluation. It ultimately means preventing young people from needing to “pluck out some one aspect of [themselves]” in order to be considered, as Audre Lorde taught us (1984b: 120), by defining herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”.
References
Bello B.G. (2020), ‘European Youth Policy and Young People: So Far, So Close?’, Materiales de filosofía del derecho, (5) pp. 1-94.
hooks, bell, (1982), Ain’t I a Woman. Black Women and Feminism, London, Pluto Press.
Lorde A. (1984), ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’, Lorde, A. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley, CA, Crossing Press.
Matsuda, M. J. (1990), ‘Pragmatism Modified and the False Consciousness Problem’, Southern California Law Review, 63, pp. 1763-1782.
Matsuda M. J. (1991), ‘Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition’, Stanford Law Review, 43, (6), pp. 1183-1192.
[1] The metaphor of the kaleidoscope was first introduced by Joan Z. Spade and Catherine G. Valentine to look at gender. However, it can be applied to other identity characteristics (e.g. youth) as well, in order to grasp the complexity and fluidity of the interactions between social categories in shaping and changing “complex patterns”. Each prism of the kaleidoscope represents a social category, which, through multiple reflections, interacts with other prisms.
[2] See Marlies Poeschl’s moving image illustration to ‘A Beginner’s guide to multiple discrimination’ by Barbara Giovanna Bello & Mark E. Taylor, Coyote Magazine, Issue 22, 2014, here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=beDfBYH2RxE.
