Ella Harris

“Intersectionality’ – a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to name an idea first articulated by an older generation of feminists from Claudia Jones to Frances M. Beal, the Combahee River Collective, Selma James, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez and Cherríe Moraga – is often reduced, in common understanding, to a due consideration of the various axes of oppression and privilege: race, class, sexuality, disability and so on. But to reduce intersectionality to a mere attention to diference is to forego its power as a theoretical and practical orientation. The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement – feminism, anti-racism, the labour movement – that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of colour, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed. Thus a feminism that deals only with ‘pure’ cases of patriarchal oppression – cases that are ‘uncomplicated’ by factors of caste, race or class – will end up serving the needs of rich white or high-caste women.”
― Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

“Intellectual work in [the black radical tradition] ... is not a ‘‘neutral process,’’ nor one of distant academic reflection, but one of contending ideas—as Stuart Hall maintains—and struggles for social change and human justice”
― Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones

“[Revolutionary] demands set the groundwork for the undoing of a system of domination, [while reformist demands] only secure the grip of that system by relieving its most egregious symptoms.”
― Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

“But to say that a problem is structural does not absolve us from thinking about how we, as individuals, are implicated in it, or what we should do about it.”
― Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century