4. Race and Crime
4.6 Intersectionality
Dr. Michael Ma
Race is also often understood in the context of a multi-dimensional structure of race, class and gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Intersectionality —as a concept of analysis (see 11.7 Treatment in the Criminal Justice System)—is designed to show how these categories and their social effects are interlinked or interlocked in a way that makes them difficult to pull apart and analyse as separate entities. That is, race, class and gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability are understood to act together to produce social effects such as social division, oppression, and entitlement. Critical legal theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw and others have used the concept of “intersectionality” to describe how race intersects with social and economic class, gender and sexual expression, nationality, and other institutional markers of identity (Crenshaw, 1989).
Intersectionality research attempts to reveal that racial bias is not just a feeling or belief held by a single person, as racism and racist practices exist in symbiotic relationships with other social factors. Intersectionality—as a concept—allows us to see that people do not just act alone in their bias or that racial bias simply exists by itself; rather, race is intersected with other social institutions, practices, and actions. It is interlocked and interdependent on other social traits and/or social conditions. For example, in the case of Shereen Hassan, the way she is understood at the border is not just as a non-White person, as she may be also interpreted or judged as a middle-class, non-White, cis-gendered, female Muslim immigrant. Her race does not exist nor act alone.
Through a lens of intersectionality, it is possible to examine race and how it is jointly expressed as economic wage disparity, housing disparity, health disparity, education disparity, and/or as overt acts of violence and aggression. Race is intersected and interlocked with other forms of oppression to such a degree that it may be a misnomer to simply name it and reify it as something called “race.” Maybe it should be renamed something like “race-class-gender-sexuality-(dis)ability and how they are interlocked in their social operation and history.” The framework of intersectionality reminds us that the concept of race or racism should only be used as a term of analysis and investigation and not as a “thing” in itself. That is, when we use the term “race”, it only serves to allow us to focus on the specific ways racialisation operates (i.e., racial bias or racism). Scholarly use of the term “race” does not imply that racial categorisation is a correct or natural way to understand people; rather, it recognises that it is a significant mode of categorisation that, along with others, can produce social effects for individuals and groups. For example, the class of a person and whether they are rich or poor has a powerful modifying effect on how a person is understood, judged, reward