Ryan Perry, U-M junior, and Jumanah Saadeh, U-M graduate student, discuss what intersectionality means to them and incorporating intersectionality into advocacy work.

 

 

Interview conducted by Keara Kotten
#UMSocial Intern and University of Michigan Class of 2022

 

 

Keara: Hello, my name is Keara, and I have Ryan and Jumanah here today. Can you both introduce yourselves to get us started?

 

Ryan: Hello, my name is Ryan Perry. I’m a junior studying econ at Michigan. I’m a member of the Student Advisory Planning Group or SAPG, and we meet year-round to plan the DEI Summit. The DEI Summit this year is October 26, 2020. It’s a virtual event, so make sure you tune in to that.

 

Jumanah: Hi, I’m Jumanah Saadeh, and I am a graduate student in the Business School doing my MBA. And I am also a part of the SAPG with Ryan to help plan the DEI Summit, which you guys should totally tune into. It’ll be really great.

 

Keara: What does intersectionality mean to you?

 

Ryan: So, I saw Kimberly Crenshaw speak two years ago and describe intersectionality. For those who don’t know, Kimberly Crenshaw is the woman who coined the term intersectionality in the ’80s. And she described intersectionality as quite literally a road intersection. So, you have one street where you have one identity, another street where you have another identity, the intersection of where those identities meet is where intersectionality happens. So, that really helped me, especially being an African American woman, I can apply both those identities to an intersection. And so, the middle of where all those intersect, for me, is what intersectionality is.

 

Jumanah: The only thing I would add onto that is: it really is an understanding of communities and how individuals are impacted by societal issues, and how the community at large is impacted by different things.

Embedded social issues and discrimination can only be understood with the framework of intersectionality. Intersectionality is the essence of how our identities intersect.

And so, that explains how we relate to each other and how those things come into play at a community level, from the micro to the macro. In my own life, I’m pretty much perceived by my visible identities. I’m a Muslim woman. As you start to get to know me, I’m very obviously someone who is from the Midwest, and I have strong Palestinian roots. I identify as a woman of color, specifically as an Arab woman.

 

Ryan Perry

Ryan Perry

Ryan: You don’t have to necessarily be a minority or an oppressed group to have an intersectional identity. It’s not limited to certain groups of people. There are also identities that are not visible. I don’t personally have a disability, but there are many people who do have disabilities that are invisible. I think that’s a really interesting distinction to make, almost like you can call intersectionality a vertical, in that when you first meet me, I’m an African American woman, and I’m from this place and I do these things. But then later in life, you learn more things about me along the way, if I do have any hidden identities or anyone else’s any other hidden identities.

 

So, I think in intersectionality, having to pick your battles about what identity is most prevalent to you. I’m black and a woman. I think of myself as a black person before I think of myself as a woman in a lot of cases. And there are other cases where I think of myself as a woman before a black person. You have to really sit down and think about how all these things that make you you are coming together, not necessarily how to prioritize one over the other in a particular situation.

 

Jumanah: We’re not static. I think a lot of times, when we talk about things like identity, people feel like it has to be this one thing that they talk about all the time or how they identify or whatever. And we’re not static. So, I think you hit a really key point when you say, in some situations, you identify more as black, and in other cases, you might primarily identify as a woman. And I think that is a very real lived experience for people. Depending on what situation you’re in, different things are going to be happening, and so you’ll be responding to them in different ways.

 

Keara: And it’s interesting too, the conversation about visible identities, because it might force people to pick and choose and that’s not always fair. You want to bring all your identities that are important to you to the table, but sometimes the given situation makes you feel like you need to choose one or the other, just based on the context of it. And yeah, it sometimes can be hard to make sure that you are bringing all of yourself, and it can be kind of exhausting too.

 

Ryan: I think it’s also really interesting too, going back to the visibility point of it. When we see the civil rights movement, everyone automatically thinks black liberation, black people, black freedom, which is good. But at the same time, we have to also realize that other people were involved in the civil rights movement also. Civil rights also set the tone for how Asian Americans were treated in America, how poor white people were treated in America, how LGBTQ+ community was treated. Things like Stonewall, I consider that kind of a part of the civil rights movement, but we never really learned about all that holistically. We learned about it almost in an anti-intersectional way, not on purpose, but just by how society is organized.

 

Keara: Our world doesn’t exist in little vacuums, it’s all existing together all the time. And it makes it difficult when we’re taught at such a young age to break things into specific categories and try to understand it from individual points of view, instead of trying to understand things as interconnected. So, no wonder we do that to people too, and do that to people’s identities. We want to try to understand them individually, instead of thinking of them together and interconnected. It definitely makes it hard when you’re trying to have intersectional conversations and understandings, to learn to bring that new perspective or a way of thinking to the table.

 

Ryan: And I really think it’s about listening. It’s all about listening. It’s [getting to know someone] over time. If you don’t connect with someone on one level, you will connect on something else, then you can understand a little bit more about their experience. It’s just about finding the thing that you have in common with someone and expanding on that. We’re all people. We all have something in common at some point.

 

Jumanah Saadeh

Jumanah Saadeh

Jumanah: That is why I think it’s super important to talk about intersectionality when we’re talking about community, because they feed into each other. It becomes really difficult to understand where someone’s coming from if we’re always going to look at things in individual snapshot moments.

 

Keara: What is the importance, and maybe even some of the challenges, with incorporating intersectionality into advocacy work, especially for diversity, equity, and inclusion? The goal is to make the world a better, more comfortable, more accepting place for people of all identities, but that can sometimes be really challenging, as we’ve been talking about. Sometimes people have to pick which identities they advocate for at a given time.

 

Ryan: When I was a junior in high school, I talked with my English teacher, who was our diversity coordinator at the school. And we tried to plan our ideal America. It was right after Trump got elected. And so, I was like, “if I had to build Ryan-topia, what would it look like?” I think I’d start with a council of people who each represented their own identities. So, I’d have one black person, one Latinx person, one white person, whatever. And then as conversations arose where you need different points of view, you’d add people with those points of view onto the board.

 

But then after thinking about this and talking about this, I realized the board would have to be infinitely big. It’d have to include all 7 billion+ people on the earth. So, I think that we have to realize that if we try to advocate for something or make something happen, we will not make everyone happy. And that’s just how it’s going to be, because you can’t possibly advocate for every single issue that every single person experiences all at the same time, it’s just not possible. It’s not productive.

 

So, if you think about our society in America, the default is just white? And the default is white male. And so, when you try to do something that’s outside of that, it’s almost like you can’t name everything at once because you have to get one thing at a time. Civil rights movement, in a sense, set the tone for black people in America. But it was mainly for black people. And that’s why I think today the conversation is so black and white. But I think the conversation is starting to shift to include other people as well.

 

It definitely takes time. It takes progress, and it takes not making everyone happy.

 

I was one of four or five kids, in a school of 80 kids, who were black, so I thought about this every day. Talking to my teachers about it and turning that uncomfortableness of being in that space to taking this experience and learning from it and doing something about it.

 

Same thing in this space at Michigan, I can name so many times where I’ve walked into an econ lecture and it’s been me and three other black kids. And you just have to take that and you have to let yourself feel those emotions first. And then you have to learn from it, because you know you’re not the only one going through it. You’re not the only person feeling this way.

You’ve got to make sure that you do the best you can in that space to make sure that other people don’t feel alone—whether that’s today, whether that’s tomorrow, whether that’s 30 years from now, whether that’s a hundred years from now. right? You have to do something with that. You can’t just sit there and take it.

Jumanah: It’s the more that we form connections across communities. The civil rights movement was super powerful because it did focus on the black males, but it also focused on black families. And so, you saw the entire community coming out. The women’s march, you saw the same thing. We’re learning to actually talk across communities, work with each other to make our vision. So, Ryan hit the nail on the head when she said we can’t ask all 7 billion+ people to be involved in that conversation. It’s then important to have leaders within communities who are going back to their communities and are listening to those people, to the most vulnerable.

 

Ryan: I think if there’s anything during COVID that we’ve learned, it’s that everyone’s experience of this is very different. It’s interesting how those different identities are still coming out, even though COVID is very new in the conversation of intersectionality and how we respond to it.

 

Keara: I feel like I’ve heard almost a competing narrative of COVID as this big equalizer. We all have to deal with this together, but I don’t know. I’d almost argue the opposite. That it, in fact, brings out some of the biggest disparities that now we’re really forced to look at and deal with.

 

Ryan: When are we going to forget about all of the disparities? For example, after the George Floyd murder over the summer, then we got back to school and it wasn’t really a conversation. It really wasn’t. COVID took over again, understandably. It is a pandemic. But at the same time, you have to realize that it’s almost the same tone of intersectionality there. There are different University of Michigans, in my opinion. There’s one for students who hold certain identities, there’s another for students who hold other identities, there’s another for students who those identities intersect for them.

 

When the Breonna Taylor verdict came out I couldn’t do my schoolwork. How I’m supposed to just pick up like everything is okay and keep doing work? I had three exams that week, and the case came out about a week before.

I had to, in that moment, split my black female identity and my academic identity. And no one should ever have to do that.

In any circumstance, no one should ever have to do that. And so, I think that raises a good point about intersectionality and how it can be painful for people at points. It definitely can, no matter if you have minority identities or if you have majority identities, it can be painful in lots of ways.

 

Jumanah: Thank you for that, Ryan. I can only imagine what that does when it hits so close to home, and when it is that deeply felt. I am hopeful because I hear people having more conversations about it. But I also know that from my own identities and from being involved in a lot of social justice circles, that everyone just wants to know what we are going to do about it. We’ve had these conversations over and over and over. BLM is not new, and BLM needs to be a part of every single conversation, but beyond conversation, what sort of action [will we take]? So, we’re not just like, “2020 was really sad, and we had a lot of police brutality and it was really hard and we had a conversation about it.” We actually have to do something about it in order to have these conversations about intersectionality, otherwise we’re just talking in circles.

 

Ryan: Just important that we understand that intersectionality is not just about what one person’s individual identities are, but as a community and as a country, how those identities overlap.

 

Keara: And as we’re here on this podcast, Conversations For Societal Change, obviously we’re hoping to make a difference and make people feel more comfortable having these difficult conversations, but there needs to be action taken also. Because yes, we are having these really great productive conversations, but it’s not going to do much if there isn’t action taken from them.

 

Jumanah: Being in social justice circles right now is this push for, at the end of every conversation, we’re like, “Okay, what next?” What groups do you follow? Or who are leaders in this? What organizations should we keep track of? Who is doing cutting-edge work on this? What books should we read? Because it can be seen as pretty small to read about something or be educated, but that is one

Calling all students, faculty and staff

more informed citizen who cares. That is one more informed citizen who understands how anti-blackness is permeating every single part of our society and how it impacts people’s actual lives. It’s a life and death thing that we have just, we have to address.

 

Ryan: Very true. I think you raise a great point in also that the call to action happened during a pandemic. The largest civil rights movement in history happened during a pandemic. I mean, that says a lot. And the fact, it really hit me when I saw on Instagram or something, people put red dots wherever protests happened or marches happened, and it was worldwide. That also gives you hope as well. That whole thing about you don’t talk about sex, politics, and religion at the dinner table is thrown out the window. And I think that’s a huge step forward for our generation.

 

Keara: With COVID, it speaks to the magnitude of how much people are calling for and needing this change. We’re stuck in our houses, forced to take classes online, but we’re like, “No, we’re still dedicating time to this because we need to talk about these things.”

 

Ryan: I think one thing that I wish someone would’ve told me in high school is you’ll never have all the answers. You can read all the books you want, you can listen to all the talks that you want and you can listen to the podcasts you want.

You’ll never have the answer to solve racism, sexism, homophobia, all the things that people go through. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. So, continue to strive, continue to learn.

Jumanah: Intersectionality is not a buzzword. It’s literally what ties us all together. It’s what allows us to understand the world in its complexity, as well as on an individual level and see how we all relate to each other. So, it allows us to unravel issues and speak to root causes, but then also allows us to address issues on multiple levels. Like Ryan was saying about listening to people and learning: it’s a journey. We’re going to keep learning. We’re going to keep growing. But look up to mentors, reach out to communities and learn and listen to them.

 

And it’s a community effort. If you come across a great read, share it. Even if only three people read it, those are three more people in your community who are educated might reshare as well. And when people are willing to share their experiences, that is a great learning opportunity for all of us. So, really, really, really listening and empathy are two skills that every single one of us, as a human, as a citizen of this world, needs for the recipe for success.