Interseccionalidade | PATRICIA HILL COLLINS e SIRMA BILGE

M is foreign um [Music] foreign foreign i thank you so much for this invitation i am always thrilled whenever i have an opportunity to either visit brazil or talk with People in brazil it is so exciting it is so um you don't realize how important you are in the world maybe you do and i'll just tell you that so for me thinking about the connection of these two books because i've had the honor of having black feminist thought translated into portuguese and sierma and i have had the honor of having our book intersectionality which We

co-authored translated into portuguese i have felt very strongly for some time that what we need are conversations across the categories that divide us and one of the major categories that divides us is the category of nation and culture very often through language and the barriers that that establishes so we do not know what's going on in other places my work on black feminist thought and on Intersectionality has always been informed by my suspicion that it was difficult to have the kinds of conversations we wanted because those barriers were there i see intersectionality and black feminist

thought both as being intellectual and political journeys they are on a path to deepen their own understanding of what they're trying to do and to find others who were on the same path Now when i started off um it's funny i was sitting here thinking that i found intersectionality within black feminist thought and i can make that case and look at black feminist thought in terms of how it's developed over the years how it's deepened its analysis of race class gender sexuality and religion but i also could argue that i find black feminist thought Within

intersectionality which in some ways is a broader global discourse that emerges when many populations when many different groups of people find one another and make common cause around issues of social justice so it's been an interesting a journey for me to see these parallel streams of intersectionality and black feminist thought that in many ways begin by being Parallel but end up being increasingly intertwining if you were intersectional so let me say a few things about the connections between intersectionality and black feminist thought in brazil and black feminists thought in the us intersectionality as we presented

in our book is a critical it's a discourse it's a Critical it's a form of critical inquiry and practice we focus on ideas and actions together we do not look at intersectionality as just ideas from the academy or that fall from the sky instead we see intersectionality as being a series of ideas that are critical to people in their everyday lives for their survival At the same time critical inquiry and practice that means actions that we take to bring about social change and social justice so this notion of intersectionality as critical inquiry and praxis is

fairly broad it's it offers an invitation for people to enter the discourse and say well what's in there what is it that intersectionality is Actually all about and to me there's some signature ideas that go along with this that are relevant for this connection between intersectionality and black feminist thought one of them is the notion that race class gender sexuality and other systems of power shape one another you cannot just pick One idea race only racism it's all about racism or it's all about sexism or it's all about homophobia or everything can be reduced to

capitalism and argue that any of those one systems explains everything if you look at people's actual experiences you realize that there are intersections in everything sometimes race and gender are more visible other times class is more visible and Sexuality is more visible but they're all there at the same time but not equally we use the term salient so this notion that race class gender and sexuality are there is a deep theme in black feminism beginning in slavery in the u.s beginning in slavery with the intersections of race and gender Knowing that black women could never

be free if it was just a race only or a gender only analysis of enslavement nor would black women ever be free without changes in the economy because once you've been held as property once you are someone else's wealth you recognize the significance of class politics in the class system So that's one thing so let's hold that signature idea of intersectionality because many people think that is the signature contribution of intersectionality but i would like to bring two more to the table that i think are very central to our book a second signature idea is

the notion of problem solving social problem solving one of the ways that people get involved in both Intersectional work or black feminist work is through solving a problem that they have in their everyday lives i would call your attention to the notion of violence now violence is a global social problem but it's not equally a problem for all in fact some people don't see violence as a problem at all nor do they even see violence but if you are female If you are of color if you are poor if you are gay lesbian transgender if

you are in categories where you experience a particular kind of violence it could be state-sanctioned violence it could be intimate partner violence you recognize that this particular social problem that you may enter at one particular intersection is much bigger than your own experiences so what tends to happen is people who Are social problem solving and they're really trying to address a social issue whether it is violence or poverty or bad education or whatever it is environmental degradation recognize quickly that the that the frameworks that they have are insufficient for solving those problems so they become

set on an intersectional pathway and i think you'll see In our book we tackle social problems we don't necessarily try and fit them into a pre-existing intersectional analysis we do justice to the problems themselves by saying there are a lot of people out here who are starting in very different places but they're trying to solve the bigger social problem that they see so i think that's a really important Dimension because there is an act to this dimension to our book that is not in traditional theoretical work in the academy where you can simply write something

and not worry about where it went or who took it there but this leads to my third uh i think theme that is a signature feature of our book is that not just activist problems not just problem solving But looking to the ideas and actions of people who are activists and social movements as a major site for um insight for leadership and for um inspiration about what it will take to solve some of the broader social problems that we encounter so we don't start from the top only and then apply intersectionality from above we start

from the bottom where people Are actually doing this work and we build up on that foundation often using that foundation to criticize those on the top now there are many examples in the book to me that uh sort of reflect that that's what we we did now i'll be honest with you when we began this to do the book that was not even if that was not clear to me that's what we were doing And sarah might disagree and say that's what we did in which case this will be a very interesting conversation but i

honestly think these are some of the things that came out of the process of the kinds of conversations that we had in writing this particular book now interestingly black feminism in brazil and black feminism in the u.s appear throughout this book because i felt it Was very important to acknowledge black women's leadership in a variety of ways in intersectionality you will find that there is a section on black the black women's movement in brazil i'm sure that there are many black women in brazil who say oh collins and bills you got it all wrong oh

my goodness look what they left out look what they emphasized this is a good faith effort to say we're Going to try we are not just going to say someone else should do it and wag our finger and say should should should we're gonna try we are going to try and do the research so that to get it out there as it is if you notice that particular section is in chapter one of the book and how we organize the book we start with black feminism but we don't start with the black Feminism that many

people assume is the foundational black feminism which is black feminism in the united states which has a fair amount of visibility which is a very important discourse and it's a discourse that got at the front of the emergence of intersectionality itself we position specifically black um feminism in brazil earlier in the book To say that there are multiple sites where intersectionality has bubbled up in the world and here are two sites black feminism in the u.s black feminism in brazil black feminism in the diaspora and not just black feminism the book itself is much bigger

than this particular set of experiences because it argues that intersectionality Is bigger than black feminism but you can find black you can find intersectionality in black feminism and it's that creative tension that i think exists in a range of social movements and the history of many many groups of people women of color men of color um i can i mean if i start looking for this impetus toward intersectionality within activist Projects and i start looking for the impetus the ways that intersectionality enables into acts to this projects to talk to one another i am very

very encouraged so i don't know how close that came to my 15 minutes but those are some ideas that are out there and let me just say one more thing this is before serum says something i would like to let everyone know that It would have been impossible for me to write this book without cirma and here's why because when you start doing intersectional work whether it is intellectual work or political work you realize the limits of what you know and can do and what you do not know and what you cannot do because intersectional

work is inherently collaborative it is dialogical it involves Conversations across differences of power that is what the political work is like that aims towards social justice and that is what the intellectual work is like so rather than saying um well one person can write the book on intersectionality and i would be very suspicious of that including myself i felt it was very important to find Someone who was on a similar journey now how do you do that how do you find somebody who's on a similar journey who knows things that you you don't know and

you know things that he or she doesn't know how do you actually find them if you read our introduction our preface carefully you'll discover that we write about this process and i think it's very important To read that preface because we found each other at a conference on intersectionality in of all places switzerland i mean i've never been i've only been to switzerland once and this was really not what i was expecting to happen but what we discovered by walking around an art museum because sierra is an artist you need to know this doing this

work is Intellectual art that's what we're doing very often when we do this kind of work was that we had a very similar sensibility and commitment to these ideas of the bigger discourse of intersectionality but the distinctive projects that had brought each of us to that shared space of intersectionality in my case it would have been black feminism in serema's case i'll let it let her speak for herself if in fact she Feels that this is how she ended up in this space but i think it's really important to give a sense of the back

story of the ideas that come out the front end this is very sophisticated work that we've done in this book it may appear that it's easy it's not easy at all this is very difficult to do it is difficult to do collaborative work it is difficult to do work where you're Pulling together things from so many different places and so many different people but that's the nature of the world that we're in right now we are all trying to figure out how to talk to each other across these barriers these boundaries that's where we are

so um i for one am very proud of this book which is in the second edition so we had An opportunity to actually go back and say hmm maybe we could polish and fine-tune this section a little better and of course when you publish something you always see what you would say next so that is where we are now so that that i think i'm going to stop there and just see what happens next my portuguese stops there and i am so honored humbled uh to be a part of this conversation i have never Ever

visited i have never been in brazil and i wish i i hope that one day this moment will come and i have a lot of political affinities to what brazilian people uh i mean those who resist live under sonora's regime because i'm from turkey and i find a lot of commonalities between erdogan's i mean far-right populism and what is going on in brazil and when there were resistance student resistance and different Resistance those resisting movements were talking to each other each other across the globe and we have talked about a little bit all these interconnections

in our book um just says that she couldn't write this book without me my god is i'm i'm just like i don't want to say anything else because it's so it i'm so touched it is true that we Have brought so many different intersectional sensibilities we shared something at the base but uh from that base we also had so many differences and be related to each other through difference and writing this book was in self-intersectionality in practices yeah because we always say that intersectionality as praxis requires us not to find Identical situation that we collaborate

because we have lived identical operations and so on or but no just they relate to each other across our differences and making our differences the force of this conversation and as patricia mentioned it is not a book that each of us has written a single chapter well this chapter is yours but this chapter is mine It's a whole book written by two different people who have who are coming to this world and bringing their sensibilities uh and their understandings of intersectionality through different two persons with very different backgrounds and we didn't try to establish a

party line if i can say For intersectionality we didn't want to tell people what intersection should be or how we should practice and uh but we don't think that it is possible or desirable but it doesn't mean that i mean there is an openness to intersectionality open-endedness to intersectionality that should be always kept in a working process but it doesn't mean that anything goes and so there is also and it is very Important that there is this transformative social justice orientation so activist orientation without that when the research as a topic is intersectional without any

consideration of how to you know fight against injustices intersexual injustices it just leaves us very um i don't know i'm not unsatisfied or hungry if i can say that when it i mean a research which Is only intersectional without considering how uh intersectional inequalities can be uh countered it is something at least we put a boundary at that at that moment is saying that no there should be a praxis orientation that's why there is this double intertwined threat across the whole book which is intersectional is a critical inquiry and intersection As a critical practice so

one thing i uh often uh tell people when they ask oh oh i'm sure that you have learned a lot or i'm sure it was a very uh um stimulating process of writing this book what did you learn from patricia i i this question is asked to me uh what did you learn from patricia it's my students ask of course because You have written a book and i'm saying i think the thing i have learned many things across our dialogue and the process but the most important thing for myself was that i patricia made me

realize that i was always orienting what i will do just to answer and shut up those who criticize so those who critique the people like trump people like are donald People who are turfs turf families they were sucking whole my whole energy that i was orienting my research i was orienting what i would write just to replete just to answer them just to and this is not and and she made me realize no if they are good critics at least they deserve a endnote or better of the page note but they do not Deserve that

we orient all our energies whether it's our writing and intellectual priorities or if we are organizations our movements just to shut them up or to answer them because as tony morrison has said i mean the main reason of racism also is to divulge us is to that i wrote us from what we want to do and we and it never ends it never ends if we orient or our intellectual Endeavors and uh inspirations and aspirations just to find an answer to them they will always find another thing to say and it is a never-ending vicious

circle and it was very important for me to say wow i can write and establish my own priorities it and then take into consideration and finding a way of responding to them but which it will not be my main Focus it cannot occupy my life and this was the freedom that i mean i will never ever forget that and every time i teach and i answer this patricia my students are like that and a lot of my students are activists and they are like yes yes we will not orient our feminism this way yes we

will not orient Our movement uh for uh uh you know immigrants this way we will not have our worst critics as our interlocutors as our main audience to whom we speak that's why we should emphasize that intersectionality is not an invention to talk to white feminism it was a way of black feminists talk one of the ways Black feminists talk to each other and to other feminists who were chicana indigenous uh asian-american etc it wasn't and then the black the white feminism has recuperated intersectionality and made intersectionality all about a way of diversifying feminism it

wasn't the main concern of company river collective so when i think about today what is the today what has happened with Covet and what is so important about to think about intersectionality because one covet happened and it's happening and when i have thought about our framework intersectionals have categories of power framework for instance like we say race class gender sexuality nation ethnicity indigeneity disability age religion case and we finish with etc And this etc as you know has been criticized by people powerful people like judith butler and it has been taken on to divide to

dismiss and ridicule intersectionality but today we are living the moment why etc is so important because we have the in the we are in this context of the invention emergence of New divisions and new uh uh basis of discrimination here is a new discrimination that came between vaccinated people and unvaccinated people and because they are talking about having a paper for vaccination that will allow you to take a a flight to travel who will be able to travel those who are vaccinated i have even seen some uh advertisement of Restaurants um offering um you know

promotions um reductions to people to guests who are vaccinated so there will there is another distinction and discrimination which is being made in contemporary discrimination between those who are vaccinated and those who are not vaccinated and we look when we look at this who are vaccinated It's a totally intersectional issue between rich countries and poor countries within the rich countries it is like a rich people try to even if they are young rich people in canada it has happened people are traveling or trying to disguise themselves into old peop you know older people to just

it has happened in florida it has happened With canadian millionaires also billionaires so those are extremely intersectional issues when we look at i mean the huge urgency the emergence of intersections it cannot be more obvious today it's just the question of who gets sick from comet who are the frontline uh workers they're always i mean in canada people who are uh taking care of the elderly Uh are always immigrants racialized immigrants sometimes people without official uh you know uh papers and when also you look at the so-called comorbidity who dies from covet the so-called commodity

it's a matter of intersection of structural injustices intersectional inequalities diminished life sense chances of specific groups and but not only this not only The issue of our responsibilities also the issue of our responsibilities to each other and to our ecosystems to our environment is also a profoundly intersectional matter i think the uh question of what are our responsibilities to one another has become a very important topic around the mask wearing the mask you know protecting others I don't want to wear not just protecting myself by protecting others for protecting the elderly protecting the sick people

this mutual care it's a very intersectional matter so oh recently there was an indigenous man his name was rafael andre he was an inu man indigenous man in montreal and he died from hypothermia in a portable public toilet you know It's a plastic like a cabin portable public toilet because he took refuge in there he was hiding from the police uh for not be he didn't want to be fined for night not respecting the night curfew in montreal there's in quebec there's a night curfew after 8 p.m because of covet and he was homeless he

was in a homeless situation and his refuge Was closed because of the pandemic of it he was only 51. so it's an it's an avoidable death caused by structural inequalities the condition of indigeneity uh in in an urban environment homelessness covet police brutality the experience the historical legacy of colonialism and ongoing violence from the police so when we want if you want if you want to evolve these kinds of available avoidable premature death We cannot but not look at issues intersectionally and we cannot save the planet by acting on our environment without taking into account

environmental racism the ongoing coloniality deforestation in amazon for instance um and intersectional unequal relations between the global north and the global south and within the regions that are more Developed and who governs and the regions who are more indigenous and we cannot either fight the injustices of global capitalism without also considering its simultaneously gendered sexualized and racialized constitutions so um when uh i mean did i speak 15 minutes maybe i have spoken 15 minutes uh uh the question Maybe i i'm gonna finish with it oriented towards the practices today it's the international women's day and

on my twitter tl i'm just seeing patriarchs patriarchs wishing happy international women's day to the women of their lives you know but the whole point of feminism also was nespa was isn't it like a women shouldn't be defined by their relationship to men Like a wife and daughter and a mother and we are all of this but i mean we are not only this and uh and the turf figures are uh occupying more and more uh important roles uh within feminism um and turf figures turf tran uh trans-exclusionary radical feminists uh which are they create

a relationship with a far right but they were also shaping themselves Fashioning themselves as being progressive left feminism so intersectionality i think cannot it is actually gives us a lot of um elements a lot of ideas and guide posts to create collaborations but some collaborations are not meant to be created and nurtured and i think feminism should take a break from terrorists feminism definitely should not uh be i even have difficulty to call them Feminists and as flag zodan have said few years ago uh she said like my feminism will be intersectional or it will

be so terfs it's not a coincidence that terps are anti-intersectional they are not uh interested in you know understanding uh opening the boundaries of definitions of womenhood and for me uh just Because today is a specific special day i think uh i'm just and as intersectionality is seen a part of feminism now um i would say that it is not possible to you know create coalitions and allyships uh between what is called trans-exclusionary radical feminism um ceramic proposed that we call them just gender conservatives because what they Do is more like a gender conservatism than

anything else uh and it could be for me uh that the mainland is that i think feminist movements needs to distance themselves from turf groups and agenda otherwise uh i mean we must distance ourselves from feminism and to build a new to build a new different feminism um in that regard So i will end here thank you so much [Music] [Music] m is m there i am unmuted now i have figured this out it doesn't happen often but all right um i i'm gonna the past year has been very difficult and not so much because

of the Far right backlash you need to understand that i live in a country that has really had state-sanctioned terrorism against black people for my entire life so in some ways what is i wouldn't call it normal obviously but i think the issue is you simply know that you can expend all of your energy fighting something that will transform and get up tomorrow and you Still have to fight it so it's not a question of giving up but i think for me what i have to do from time to time is revisit my own work

and read myself and say this is what i said i believed in last year do i still believe in this does this argument still hold it's like holding yourself to a higher standard as an intellectual to ask yourself who are you responsible To what are you saying and when i have the time to take a step back and clarify my own thinking and my own reasons and look at my own work i feel pretty good because the issue isn't getting everything correct or being trendy or being anticipating and predicting what's going to happen next it's

really remaining relevant for what's going on in the here and now So for that i would return to an important distinction that we make in this book and sarah you talked about it a little bit which we talk about as the meaning of being critical and the meaning of being critical is to be critical of you never see that territory being critical of racism being critical of heterosexism being critical of because To cede that territory that someone really will be harmed but we don't all do the same work in in this whole process the other

distinction that we make in this book is to be critical for what is our work critical for who is it for and that just takes all that turf war stuff away for me you know the notion of you know who Do we envision doing this incredibly difficult work for now for me i'm you know i'm a former classroom teacher for me it is for the next generation and it has been for the next generation since i was 22 and i was teaching 12 year old children and they were the next generation and i could tell

i knew stuff they didn't know but i wasn't that far ahead of them and i had to be responsible enough to Lead and to lead with ideas so the critical four is crucial to maintaining a clear vision for the future because you may not be able to anticipate the future but what you can do is you can equip the next generation with the right questions the right tools and signposts so that they can imagine where to take It now for me there's this uh movement or intellectual movement called af futurism which seems to mean a

lot to a lot of different people but it is very interesting to hear artists talk about how they envision this whole sense of ideas because they don't want to be restricted just to criticism they want to be able to um create And to be critical through creation of something new that we have a group of people who are talking about afrofuturism who say we know we're grounded in the past we understand the present we see the challenges this is no longer the same issue for us because we have access to information so we really see

how we're gonna have to continue to fight the battle but if all we do Is respond we have not created what can be so that is the task of the generation that has not yet inherited the world i used to teach this class on racial and racial oppression where my students would be so depressed but they said oh dr collins we really understand racial oppression and now we're just really depressed that was not the intent i was aiming for in this class I had to think huh it's the balance between the critical to know exactly

what you're dealing with in terms of these far right people to recognize that they went away for a while in the back again and they can ease flow away again because people struggle to get it but they also aim to create making a contribution to something that is very important that will not end begin with you or end With you now what does that all have to say with uh past year and the launching of intersectionality colvid is profoundly intersectional as cove as um huma mentions you can see layers of inequality all over the place

globally within a country ray age all of it but is it enough simply diagnosed the problem yeah thank you To what was happening through the world so um i think as patricia has said some of us have been living a lot of similar difficulties of not being able to move not being able to do this and that before covet so maybe only the most privileged person have lived covet as a major uh catastrophe in their lives but many social groups when you listen to The indigenous folks indigenous communities in canada uh they're just making a

little foot off it's the end of the world it's there because they have already lived and survived to a bio-war you know just biological wars by settler colonialism and of course it doesn't mean that they are now immune but they have already lived their Apocalypse and they have provided and for many black communities in states and in canada we can also say the same and for people who are political refugees the syrians who have tried to you know for me i i don't want to exaggerate in any way but i know that ever since i

have you know signed a anti-war petition against erdogan in turkey And i have taken a pro-kurdish position with regards to the ongoing colonization in turkey of kurdish population and uh territories uh i am a person who is not welcome back to her country so i cannot travel i cannot go back so uh but at least i was able to travel elsewhere to see my family and that they were you know this kind of thing but everything i mean we been affected Uh what is going uh across the world but it didn't started with covet we

just for many of us it did not start with covet and it will not end post commit i hope that there will be a post code times and uh seeing that it is a global phenomenon and that there are so many commonalities and alliances between uh you know a far right populist And it helps it's for sure it's discouraging but at the same time it helps understanding uh the bigger picture of this new appeal uh of uh the rise the global rise of uh far right populism and fascism um and of course kovit has only

intensified this fascistic orientations that because of politic you know just the sanity measures uh Certain sanity measures can be over applied uh in ways that ratio that certain neighborhoods racialized neighborhood uh face more police policing regarding to covet this the same way the racialized racial profiling of police before covet now it is sustained through covet measures And the question of hope and it is i have i had sometimes divested from hope in order to be able to when i was feeling hopeless i just tried to read through and people who are uh trying to understand

and act on injustices uh beyond hope that hope is not the only language and hope is not the only way of uh continuing to fight For justice and i have to take taken a break from hope but at other times uh and it is um a nice coincidence that uh patricia told about afrofuturism i have survived my win in my summer here without moving without going to my family going to turkey or elsewhere my my lock down somewhere here by reading Uh octavia butler by rereading everything octavia butler so the uh you know science fiction

uh black uh science fiction and the parable of sour is really octania butler knew she just really knew what you are reading the parable of this of the sour and it's like a sore and the parable of talents but somewhere more than any Anyone any other book is like wow she knew and at the same time the afrofuturism and indigenous science fiction science fiction written written by folks by people who have really lived oppressions it's incredible because they are imagining lives beyond now and here and now as patricia said when we do not balance uh

what we give to students it can really lead to a Collective depression uh just a very quick example this semester my undergrad class is doing uh i'm teaching online so i have to find new methodologies a lot of investment so one of the class assignments is to analyze image analysis image like advertisement analysis and a lot of students have found very shocking Advertisement very racist racist stereotypes and it's a big class it's more than 80 students and when you look at on the website the images they have found it's like wow it's a collective depression

i'm also saying to them why you don't find advertisements or the vandalization of the subversion of the advertisement to resist you know because the image the Arts is also in a resistance so we are doing also other other assignments like finding songs of resistance songs of emancipation the way art is used when everything is forbidden in as in fascist societies sometimes just the comic books in turkey it was like that the comic books become a subtle mean Of criticizing the regime and it's so important to just focus uh in order to be able to not

to critique off but we are critiquing also for you know will enable not to deconstructing but also to construct something giving to the next generation and and recognizing as angela davis also said that revolution is not a one-time event and often we know that We would not see the fruits of the revolution in our lifetimes but building intergenerationally so i am also trying to practice this internet intergenerational building of cultivating of not not a superficial not an artificial hope well i think for me the issue is if you don't have hope that your contributions make

a difference in some way Why would you do it at all i mean to me it's really all of them women who are raising children under very difficult situations and hope things will be better for their children why would they get up every day and do that hard hard hard work without something that is beyond what they can see and that is i mean when i was writing black feminist thought i really tried very hard not to center My book on the privilege privileged discourses we don't realize how much time we spend that gets stolen

from us just trying to protect ourselves or somehow the the illusion that we're going to reform um oppressive people you know i mean that that's kind of what a lot of education convinces us if we really try hard enough they can be better we can train them out of racism and sexism and all that Well i think if people want to learn obviously they can they can change i'm not saying that's the case but i think putting the burden on those who are dispossessed or those who are subordinated to actually take the lead in this

kind of social change for everybody is is simply there's not enough fear now i think the real i think intersectionality is politically Very threatening and i think that's one of the reasons it's getting such pushback in our book we're actually inviting people in come on we want to help you read more about intersectionality we want you to know what other people are doing we want to affirm what you are already doing that's really it's critical what we do there we criticize things But we're also issuing an invitation to people to enter into this discourse and

this vocabulary because it might help them now i think this is very threatening to systems of power very simple simple model divide and conquer black and white divides and conquers indigenous and black if we're fighting each other divide and conquer women and men divide and conquer where Everybody's worried about the term you used earlier their turf whether it's male privileged turf or whether it is you know white privileged turf or whether it is rich turf whatever it is that's a very colonial mentality that fundamentally says we can divide up the world in all these little

packets some of which belong to me most of which belong to me if i'm the colonizer And very little belonging to you if you're not and woe the day if those of you who are on the bottom actually stop looking at everything through me and begin to analyze things for yourself you start talking to each other in conversations that you were not able to have until now that's what intersectionality is doing it's pulling All of these people from turkey our case turkey and black women and we've got indigenous folks we've got really dedicated white feminists

who aren't those turf people who really annoy me to death because they what they want to do is they want to take intersectionality and sort of incorporate it as theirs and de-radicalize it and turn it into Something else so i just think we have this really unruly thing called intersectionality that kind of came from the bottom up thereby making it very difficult to kill it off because you can't find its leaders and when you find its leaders and you chop them off then i suppose the movement's supposed to go away but what i think we've

been arguing is If you're doing things from the bottom up people are doing things that they care about they're going to commit to something for their entire if somebody kills my child for example like when i last time i was in brazil i had an opportunity to hear this woman who was from the mothers of murdered children and she was very passionate and she s it was a life Long commitment for her all right she wasn't gonna change her mind next week because it was no longer trendy to be doing this or because she couldn't

get it published in the right journal this was a lifelong through story for her that was not going to end with her because in some ways the worst thing that could have happened to her had already happened now there are a lot of People who are committed to social justice work with just that degree of certainty but they don't up until now we haven't been able to find each other talk to each other recognize each other that's the divide and conquer but within these various stories there really are there really to me is a lot

of hope and when i look at the hope i want to cultivate i don't want people to cultivate my hope I'm like i've had my shot i think it's really important to look at people who are 12 13 14 15 years old and the type of in the u.s activism we are seeing from young people who recognize how these issues have affected their lives whether they're entering through the door of schooling and their schools are closed uh and they can't get on the internet or they're entering through the door of Their grandma died you know

from covet and they didn't get a chance to say goodbye because there was no funeral i mean there are a lot of people who are now saying what is this and i think it's it's academics like myself we have to not we have to look beyond what we can see and try and look at what we don't see yet and try and imagine the conditions that That are being created and then i'll i'll say this quickly and then i'll move on this is what i'm thinking about now we have this category in the u.s called

essential workers that has come out of the the discussions around coving now prior to covet i mean it was like hard-wired how people looked at the labor market if you were making lots of money if you were an executive Somehow you were the essential worker because you got paid a lot we really measured the value of work based on your salary and your working conditions covert turn all that upside down in terms of who is really doing the essential work in society now feminists have said for many many years disproportionately women have been doing the

essential work And not been getting paid for it it's called care work all right but now with covid that was stripped back in terms of who is taking care of people who's in the hospital who's driving the bus who's doing the food service and we're seeing a parallel trend that i think is i'm seeing it now i don't know who the we is this would be me seeing this trend of for the first time energy around utilization in quite some Time in the us now for brazil this is old hat you i mean brazil you

have a whole history of class analysis and capitalist and analyzing capitalism you know that um and but in the u.s that has been suppressed to the point where class discussions occur through race this is what race is such a powerful concept in the us it's not just race it's also race and class Class through race and that's fundamentally intersectional and has been so slavery for black people and for indigenous people so i mean you know this is a time when things are shifting in some interesting ways now i have to admit a year ago i

was just so don't know i don't know just thrown off my game by covet it was really Upsetting we've had like the most deaths in the world in our country this makes no sense in terms of the wealth of this country eleven 511 five hundred and five hundred and eleven thousand people died one year that's a lot of people one at a time that's how they died they didn't die altogether it wasn't a war one at a time all right that's the way to look at it mourned by people who they left behind So i

don't know how what the wounds from covid will be or what the um vision will come out of it but i can tell you right now that kids have paid attention because this is their lived experience now so i'm i didn't need to get started on that but you know i've sort of been talking to myself a lot for the last year it's a little weird so it's nice to have Other people to talk to other than myself in my own house i could say a few things about that i could say i could say

a few things but not a whole lot i really think it's important for discussions about latin american feminism to be initiated and led by latin american feminists right what i can say is that to me any um Political initiative has to organize around a common cause common causes and not necessarily common identities so i think that while identities are important like a feminist identity a feminist collective we're all feminists together here in the room clearly that's a dimension of organization but the reason people are in the room together is they've made common cause Around one

issue or a series of issues that have brought them together and remaining focused on that issue even in a group that is a kind of a mono categorical group all women all black all whatever homogeneous that's the word i'm looking for is what holds the group together because that's how you can actually manage power relations within a group So for example i was sitting here thinking um you know intersectionality before the term intersectionality what brought people together well they made common cause around common experiences and those common experiences were often uh experiences with oppression there

were experiences whether it was and i started and i said well what are The issues that are very specific to feminist agendas globally they are issues like reproductive justice they are issues like violence against women they are issues of concern with family and children their issues of health access health issues of education is a major one in terms of the education of girls all right in around the world Issues of housing and and having your house and land grabbed from you and where do you live so we we often don't see these as quote feminist

issues but to me they lie at the heart of feminism and if they're not at the heart of feminism if it becomes something else entirely then i would wonder where the common cause is because often what is happening there is One group is subordinated to another but if you really are making common cause around a feminist issue for example reproductive justice and you realize that this is something that affects women and girls across the globe differently that is something that an intersectional analysis can inform in ways that are really useful to all of the people

who are involved in that Issue and who enter it from very different places so i think that's the spirit of intersectionality that we see now and that we have a term for it but if you look at the origins it always starts small it starts within a group it starts with a with a somebody that says we need a better way of thinking about this and doing something about this Thing that we're dealing with so that's where i would start the answer to that one yes i can jump in perhaps uh with regards to latin

american feminism um it is not my area of knowledge experience and unfortunately not even language so everything i read from latin american feminists are either translated to french or to english So there is some obviously in translation because when i think of the writing of people like gloria anzaldua borderlands she uses indigenous language spanish and english in very creative ways and the language is very important the access to language and not making everything translatable you know we need to we need to gain Fluency as audrey lord said into each other's languages uh into each other's

because language is the worldview and everything cannot be translated and even we are very happy to do to those translations we know that translation cannot cover the entirety so acquiring languages and gaining fluency or aspiring to be fluent into each other's World worlds is a very important ethic of relationality and a basis of equitable and ethical relationships um when i think about when i meet um a term like latin american feminism or south asian feminism um my first reaction is what discover what is not said in a category like this you know when we say

latin american feminism the concept even of the latinidad Uh is criticized uh from the inside by saying that latinidad is a multiracial category it is can be you know it can in in united states there is this uh census category of hispanics but we all know that i mean jesus is in the category but at the same time uh mariella franco and you know this very different person keep people coming from uh different communities um so it's a Multiracial category latinidad and within it uh when we say latin american feminism maybe we do not pay

enough attention to what is going on with indigenous feminism uh rural feminism you know feminism from villages like you know those collectives uh uh um and sometimes the indigeneity and rurality go together and also afrofeminism so From latino feminism latina feminism at the same time when we look at the south asian feminism we see case cast differences dalit and adivasi lowercast feminists will call savannah feminism it's a term akin to white feminism to uppercase feminists and then there are muslims so there are uh when when we look at these categories i think we can Homogeneous

we risk homogenizing them and that's why i need to i prefer not to talk about those feminism but listen to people who are from those movements bringing us how they collaborate around which kind of issues and struggles when they make common cause why and how and where around because they don't have all common experiences as there are there are case differences there are Region urban class many differences within those categories uh so when they do make common cause uh how they achieve those common causes and how they make uh common causes around what kind of

experiences and when they do not make common causes uh how these things are shaped are they excluded in multiple minoritized feminist collectives Uh are excluded or they find enough uh they do they find space to organize and gain some kind of autonomy uh political autonomy in municipal level i mean in local level maybe not in national level so how they organize when they cannot be they cannot create questions and those kind of questions comes to my mind and also when i have i look at these Big figures uh of those movements latin american feminism um

i'm thinking of of of course in brazil lelia gonzalez and the writings i'm thinking of bolivian indigenous feminist sylvia sekongi and santa grande grande ken keshua and of course we have at least recently she passed away maria lugones of from the group of modernity and coloniality and Her work on the coloniality of gender so there are many authors uh available in english or in french that i love to integrate into my teaching so that students do not learn uh racialized feminisms only from the uh racialization experiences around the global north but also you know how

you know indigenous indigenous feminism and the global stuff that have afro feminism in the global South so um i think uh my comments will uh will end here it's because uh because of the basically uh the necessity of listening to the groups who are the first concerned about latin american uh feminism so i i don't find myself entitled to you know um talk about this issue but rather very happy to be learning and to be listening from from you I have a question um sirma do you think as you were talking i was wondering whether

the word feminism status movements were much smaller when they were more localized when they were focused on the state um and that isn't to say that the global hasn't been important in terms of in terms of uh it says it's unstable can i'm still going all right how we're using the term that's where you started your comments And i thought well absolutely what work does that turn latin american feminism or feminism with all these qualifiers now added to it has that enriched the understanding of feminism or is that still part of what's being worked out

under that umbrella you know i mean that's kind of the intersectional space churning in feminism about what kind of Social justice project it can be now or where is it going uh and you know this is a very very big tent when we think about women um and also feminism is for men it's not like it's just women all these feminist men who are trying to figure out where they go you know so i'm just saying um this to me is a process just as Intersectionality is a process that continues to get defined by how

it's used that's how i look at it it's not like you can get a dictionary and here's the definitive intersectionality feminism may be a similar term that um we understand it by how it's used and um so i don't know these are just reflections as you were mentioning the Richness that is affiliated with this that you can affiliate with the term feminism which i i suspect that many others cannot and also if i can add when we look at the women's movements and struggles very very important women organizations um across many countries in africa there

is a explicit avoidance of the term feminism because of the negative Connotations uh it is assigned um and also assigned to colonizer to white women etc so we also need to look at what is going on in terms of women organizing and struggles for different rights and equality issues that are not carried out under the label this is the really important issue for me personally because one of my trips to Brazil someone asked me she said what do you think of the term mormonism and i hadn't thought about it for a while and i said

well let me think about that but since that time i have been really paying attention to how different black women drive their political involvement and the tendency to talk about black feminism Strikes me as being secular right it's very much political activism focused on the state very often or corporations or clearly the inequities that we can see in the legal system whereas womanism is also a political state political project but seems much more focused on providing meaning in everyday life it's often associated with religion or somehow to a less political form of Black feminism i

mean it's almost as if we've got these sites of um black women's activism that may not even who may not call themselves activists who are making contributions to a broader what i would call black feminist project without um acknowledging that texture those kind of political differences there that aren't Ideological we're used to thinking about politics as ideological you're on the right on the left and to ask where's the texture of all those feminisms or expressions of feminism or expressions of women's empowerment if you want to use a different language or a womanism if that's the

language and i have really been challenged by brazil because i understand it has this very strong History of african-oriented um african survivalist ideas in religion and culture that so it's it's a really very interesting who claims it on what conditions you know is it always progressive i mean those kinds of things in terms of what are we asking our language to do so that's what i was thinking while you were you were commenting on this Real important question by the way specifically is summer you can you can talk about this a bit i mean because

this is something we basically i wouldn't say we argued over but it was basically a struggle to figure out how to talk about neoliberalism yes without wanting to just give up Writing the book um and i think we settled on [Music] really focusing on it but also i like the fact that we focused on global social movements that that we sort of uh stayed true to intersectionality to really look at the ways in which global social movements in responding to some of the issues of Neoliberalism were moving toward intersectionality if not inherently intersectional you know

sort of opened the door for those kinds of conversations for people who are involved in those movements uh now to take a step back and then really say intersectionality and its analysis of neoliberalism i think there's a lot there so i'm just Gonna that would be my start that okay so i can jump in and uh if i say my my current research which will be a book deals about the neoliberal university and the issues of what i call the minoritized knowledge fields such as intersectionality but indigenous studies lgbtq studies and you know ethnic studies

black studies Whatever this kind of knowledge fields who came into the university to contest its organization but some somehow who have found themselves being incorporated and a little bit deep politicized but they could create spaces of change but limited change much more like a you know small reforms of diversifying the curricula for instance but not big changes of uh Systemic changes of course how can we change an institution like university uh separately from the other institutions of the society right is the question of can you really radically change an institution without touching other institutions so

we gave in our book a little a small taste of about what intersectionality can impact um in terms of understanding uh different Social struggles against liberalism but at the same time also social movements going uh in line with neoliberalism because we have this understanding that intersectionality is not the monopoly of progressive movements and social justice movements intersectional there are intersectional organizing and intersectional thinking uh behind White nationalism behind trumpism so there is a book that needs to be written maybe someone is writing that we have in recent years we had a lot of exciting publications

books came out to approach the world analyzing uh from modi's india to bolsonaro's uh brazil and erdogan's turkey and different you know what is happening in uk uh under trump Etc um so in terms of uh right wing extreme right pupilism the appeal of fascism uh and how this goes this is articulated within neoliberalism and so there is there is a book to be written uh to about um conservative movements uh reactionary conservative movements and how they are intersectional too and how they use intersectionality How how um white nationalism uh uses intersectionality uh to reframe

the narrative by talking about anti-white racism and then whites being you know threatened by the minorities etc but i think what intersectionality gives us as two is that neoliberalism is not only conservative neoliberalism canada is a progressive neoliberalism on The one hand we can you know uh at the top of the state we can have uh you know a prime minister which is the champion which is champion who is championing you know women's rights and etc on the other other hand uh canada will uh be the biggest um arm seller to saudi arabia and then

canada can be is the biggest Country or for a mining you know global mining disaster polluting the planet you know just so um it is a neoliberalism can it's very plastic can have conservative masks a progressive mask neoliberalism doesn't have a a um in relationship if you want uh it's a bit uh this plasticity And i love that the idea uh lana you said how intersectionality and feminism changes and i loved when you said absorb they absorb they multiply they grow but it but neoliberalism is like that also it's very plastic it it absorbs you

know neoliberalism can be very plastically orient itself to south africa after apartheid you know and then in turkey uh when there was the Islamic turn and then the groups the social groups who uh were behind uh erdogan and islamic term where also there were socialists they have thought and iran we can think they were thinking that there will be a kind of islamic shift but it will be more socialist islam islamic but then it has become a very Conservative country but economically now liberal so there is this absorbing what was before the hierarchies and the

you know what was before and then multiplying and growing so here we are in the face of forces multiple shapes shape-shifting forces who absorb and multiply and neoliberalism is one of them And i think intersectionality is a very important tool to demystify and unpack behind this world like neoliberalism just it is very it might be especially from students i hear when i when we use this term for many of them it is a kind of nebulous uh um shapeless and hyper a hyper abstract concept and Intersectionality helps i think uh to situate and to contextualize

which neoliberalism are we talking about in which country what are the historical antecedents how neoliberalism came to brazil how neolibism came to turkey it is uh it is related in turkey's case to military pooch and the united states so intervention indirect intervention of cia and united states in many countries it came like that And the laboratory of neoliberalism was shitty so i i guess i have two responses to this on the one hand it's really important to use intersectionality to criticize neoliberalism and to get a nuanced analysis of neoliberalism but i wonder what questions we're

not asking if we do that too For example i would argue that there is easily a conceptual blind spot in the middle of intersectionality because it assumes that it is a social justice discourse as opposed to having to test that to what it stands for what would be i talked about common cause it's easier to talk a common cause if you're talking about a shared social issue Or if you're talking about shared lived experiences let's say you're from a dispossessed group but when you have to build con cause across differences of power and ask what

do we all commit that we believe in that we're act that pulls us together i wonder if there's something at the center of functionality that we're looking at An ethical core of some kind a line in the sand that because it is so plastic it means people don't have to make those commitments and i would also wonder whether the right recognizes the power of intersectionality and like other discourses like feminism and and ethnic studies when you talk about the The radical what happens to radical ideas when they move into conservative settings right which are always

seductive because that's where your paycheck may be um is intersectionality on the same course so and without attending to what's at its core we know what it can do critically i mean we really it's great i mean it's really but what will be the there there that's left Um if it continues to just go in many directions let a thousand flowers bloom do you kick people out of intersectionality because they're not socially just enough do you um weird i mean where are the borders because so much of intersectionality thematically has been about blurring borders and

sort of that's the nature of the world that we're in we you Know we can now cross these to live in the borderline so i would say it might it recognizes the power of this discourse and if you know so for me you know elsewhere i've attached it to a discourse nobody would ever think of as being social justice and that's eugenics and i argue that eugenics is actually very effective because it is intersectional it relies on intersectional thinking Without a social justice core so we have to look for the counter factual in the times

that we're in particularly when we're facing uh far-right challenges like white nationalism that we are but i think this is the question for somebody else's book that maybe someone else will write all these books we want to read let's hope we've written a book that People who are reading our book want to read so i may say some i have i really liked your question patricia do you kick people um out from intersectionality because they are not what they do as not social justice oriented enough what do we do and uh yes there is this

kind of tendency of uh academics especially academic Tendency of kind of not navel gazing but maybe posing the boundaries of the uh over field or subfield uh and it is not just proper to intersectionality like many uh in the coloniality and indigenous studies also i see this tendency what they do is it this is it that is it intersectional enough is it queer enough is it indigenous enough and it's You know this kind of policing the boundaries a certain kind of maybe not policing but vigilance or maybe attention needs to be paid otherwise people can

do because of the situation of the market-oriented uh academia who that pushes grad students as early as first-year grad students to just brand themselves branding their Thought proposing a new concept as if in every publication in every article that one writes one should propose a new concept intersectionality post-intersectionality post-post intersectionality or you know just continues this and it it it is it needs to be um like a stop no just stop take and also returning to the classics when I say classics black feminists you know of the 60s and 70s and reading them and um

i think uh we cannot uh uh just focus and um our energies to police the boundaries of what is good intersectionality and who practice good intersectionality and who practice bad intersectionality i'm i'm with you on this we can but But when we teach and and in may i'm starting again my my seminar or my teaching on intersection to my grad uh students but i need to give to my students a certain um understanding of intersectionality how we have understood it but other people can understand and practices it that way but it seems important to um

give them a sense of so that its plasticity Doesn't it doesn't become everything and anything as you said intersectionality maybe has a soft core maybe i it should have ethically a harder core like hard it doesn't have it has a soft core and that's why it can be it can it can be too plastic and this this can work against conceptual goals because at the end of the day what is Important at least for me it is not intersectionality it's emancipation so if it is yeah we have to be willing to let go of words

that no longer do the work that they were intended to do originally now the other quote the other side is quite comfortable with that it will let go of a word or it will redefine a word so it doesn't mean Anything like what you it used to mean an example in the us would be peacekeeper doesn't that sound like a wonderful thing to be a peacekeeper they really meant missile weapon anti-ballistic weapon as a peacekeeper that you could shoot and kill people because you thought they might send something to kill you preemptively this was like

so when you start seeing the sense of Language shift under your feet like that you really have to say and be very attentive to when we say certain things about intersectionality what do we mean how are we using it how will we test that this is the kind of term that has traveled that is not connected to specific social movements when i think about black feminism in the us there is a long line of accountability Where people will start naming you know it's andy louhamer they'll name you know ida wells barnett they will go back

to very prominent black women who contributed to black feminism as an ongoing intergenerational struggle that you can trace from origins in enslavement uh and and sort of the beginnings of that kind of intersectionality race and gender To where we are now with black lives matter which is really a continuation of very similar struggles with a much broader sense of political community all right to include people who are included in black community who were and important to put in the in the front of the agenda that were not there before the people were always there I

can see how this works the grounding of a progressive discourse in that case but i think we have to be and even there you've got people concerned about people who belong to black people or black women but who are spies or who work for the fbi or those kinds of things you have to monitor who is speaking for you even if they Look like you like this whole notion of i want someone who looks like me no i don't i want somebody who who thinks like we would agree in terms of what we think now

intersectionality to me because it is so it's a language of connecting people across differences who may not know each other particularly well or who may not be Cognizant of each other's shared circumstances faces the danger of being a faces danger of being defined by people uh who can appropriate the term travel it somewhere else and change its meaning that to me is the danger of now it's not like it's gonna happen it just means if you're smart enough to see that coming you get out in front of it and you say Aha i know you're

a gang buddy we're not going to fall we fell for it once but we're not going to fall for it again so i think we're at a really important moment here around this and i'm very happy we wrote this book the way we wrote it because i think it really puts a firewall up around people who are trying to Do a variety of projects and um but that doesn't mean we can just throw a party and say wow we have arrived [Music] um um this is a huge question that is very heartfelt and usually when

people ask a question like this they are thinking about particular Children and young people it's not the kind of question that drops from the sky as an abstract question it really comes from the specifics of knowing that you're trying to raise children in a world that may hate them that's a difficult thing to do to raise children with hope for their future but to equip them to have the tools to Go into battle that's the best of parenting when parents can do that that is great but here's the reality of now until we begin to

see all children as our children not the capitalist version of children that's the one you own and this is the one i own and we basically are only going to pay for the ones we own That's a neoliberal agenda that we have bought into it's going to be very difficult for people who fear for their children and who want to make things better and intersectionality is a tool to help you understand the world that you're in it doesn't tell you how to build that world but it will give you some tools for that so until

we see this as a collective effort Coming in many different places without knowing that what we do makes it might make a difference let me tell you why i'm optimistic and why i'm saying to this person there are no easy answers to that question only small answers in everyday life what we each do all right and i know that's just not exciting but that's the saving of Children one at a time and as groups as a small group three weeks ago i went to this an organization in the united states called teaching for change and

it is an organization that organizes teachers many of whom are in public schools they are ordinary everyday teachers that we who are from in situations that are underfunded And what organization teaching for change sponsored this year was a weekend symposium for teachers black lives matter in schools to bring together material from progressive education and black lives matter into schools as initiated by teachers who wanted to do that there was one teacher who presented uh his school In a fairly progressive area of the united states that he and his colleagues wanted to have a black lives

matter day in their school elementary school small children and the backlash against the day was so much calling them racist calling them how can you do this don't all lives matter why just black lives matter i mean that kind of thing That they had to cancel the event out of fear because of that now these teachers could have said whoa i didn't sign up for that i didn't see that coming but because they picked one small part of a very big problem and challenge they did not quit so they rescheduled their black lives matter school

day and many members in the broader Community were so offended by that reaction that people would go after children that way that they had a groundswell of support along with the people who opposed it black lives matter day in schools in that one school is continuing to grow there's now this i believe this year there's a black lives matter in school week They're up to a whole week and it's national this is a grassroots movement that comes from people who care about children very much using these materials of intersectionality that we talk about in curriculum

materials who say enough i'm going to do what i can now when i hear a question like this i think we have to recognize not everybody can be heroic not Everybody can go to a social movement meeting not everyone has but people who have children if we can do everything we can to help them care for those children that's where the revolution is it's not in the ideology it's there in those relationships that are not fully developed yet that's how i would describe it refusing to be who People expect you to be crazy stupid whatever

because you're black because you're gay because you this because you're that i am this is why you know it's here when i you know we we go back and forth i'm the hopeful one and she's the one that says wait but if i just step back and i think about i look for all the small moments that Have grown into mass movements um as long as we're looking to the youth not just black youth but certainly black youth we're going to be okay intersectionality will be okay may not be called intersectionality but those ideas are

going to be okay when we sell our soul to the institutions and i'll use the term of neoliberalism They write a check that is so big we basically say you know what i used to believe in little justice but i'm gonna go buy some shoes all right then we're in a whole different situation so um yeah that's kind of what i would say to that question i'm gonna mute myself because i need to just stop talking I'm not i'm not hopeless big news i couldn't have uh i mean survived the past year i mean we

don't have the luxury to be hopeless hopelessness can be like already a luxury and um although we know that revolution is not a one-day affair and then we might not see and we will probably not see the fruits of what we are trying to uh The seeds that we are trying to put uh it is there are things that can be done for immediate change not even short-term immediate change and maybe i'm gonna give it give an example of um when we were doing this um analysis of image analysis and analysis of stereotypes um children

literature and children books are a big size where there are horrendous stereotypes Uh still and during stereotypes uh about uh africa okay there are lots of books talking children books talking about africa and um black people black children indigenous children um they um not images uh words uh that shouldn't be in our local uh libraries okay and we can do something and we are doing something uh maybe covet is interrupted Us but one of the assignments uh is community library in involvement everybody can go and check the children books available in in their neighborhood library

and then if they think then take pictures and show and share and social media is doing on social media we are finding all the time these kinds of things and um of course there there is a reaction by saying that oh you are Trying is a censorship it's not freedom etc but we have a right to uh make sure that uh the books that our kids are reading uh are not racist books and you know and homophobic not discriminatory books and when those books we can also write to newspapers we can ask to uh um

libraries and they They just talk those books and they they just retrieve those books from the um available books and we can suggest new uh purchases you know just because there are lots of books who are written who are not this way they're they're talking about um intersectionality there's representation there are nice stories uh minority kids and communities are not Only there for to decorate a white story those are those are the immediate change and immediate things uh so the idea of commun communal parenting communal responsibility we do not i we i mean we may

not have kids no i don't know we live in a neighborhood and then there is a library we can go and check the kids Book available there and do something about it it's like can i just take you back on this for one second um not only that i think people are writing books and what's interesting to me is that there are black women in the u.s who are writing children's books because this this very issue concerns them and i think it parallels What we've seen as the first wave in the u.s of black women

who have become filmmakers and who are producing things from mass media that are not like what's been out there before and i'm thinking of someone like ava duvernay whose um film on 13th was really really important around thinking about the 13th amendment and educating people but she's also had quite a bit of Television work that doesn't have to have a label of um you know progressive or whatever but the impact of it is quite powerful she had a series called queen sugar that looked at the south you know and a black family that was really

holding on to the land and what was involved with that so the whole question of creating books to replace those is crucial but here's the story of the week that really Stood out for me because we had a a chris scuffle around dr seuss books i don't know if dr seuss books um have made it in translation into brazil or into portuguese or into french the cat in the hat these are children's books that are very popular and have had a long history in the u.s The author has since died years ago but several books

in his estate are quite racist in terms of the graphics that are in the book but the books that are most beloved and that are read by children do not the cat in the hat is just a cat in a hat honestly you know you really have to you have to hunt to find stuff in others of his books his estate was bothered by this And said this is his estate said we will no longer sell those racist books we're going to pull those books from production that have that racist imagery in it but we

don't feel that it is um necessary to censor if you were or to remove everything that this author has ever done we want to model the fact that we can actually look at our actions and Take responsibility for what we've done that's wrong and have people have a discussion about this whole process but we don't want these books in the hands of children perhaps when you're an adult you can have that kind of eye so i think it's a very interesting period of time around this thing of cancel culture which is basically the right getting

really upset about stuff that you know somebody tells them they Can't do everything they're used to doing cancel them cancel them i mean come on this is no i'm not going down that road but this this example i think these examples are quite significant because i think there is a recognition that children are seeing things and reading things that are unheard of you need to watch disney there there is more intersectionality on disney Than any place princesses of all different colors and backgrounds princes who do not run things but who are following the princesses around

and you know i mean there's a whole lot of gender uh tips and and racial shifts so it's very interesting the creative work that's being done for children i say this because i have grandchildren this is the only reason i know this because i have little grandchildren and um Times are changing so i think there's a recognition there that of that so anyhow but i just wanted to add that because it's the cultural discussion we didn't have because very often people want to talk about the media and we haven't talked about the media at all

in this particular conversation so we've kind of pulled it in at the back end of our of our time together today Thank you so much for watching if you want patricia i say my final words and you will be closing and it's better i would prefer to yeah so i am humbled and uh touched and uh i'm so happy to be to have been with you and entered this conversation um i really want to thank er boy tampo uh lana adriana kim obrigada obrigado And i hope that i will come to brazil and i will

meet you in person and i'll be able to exchange few words i hope in portuguese so thank you so much i am i am as patricia said uh intersectionality is a language uh for us to enter into conversation with people we didn't um know uh and who do not share the same language and this conversation was was really an Illustration of that that across our differences intersectionality allowed us to enter into conversation and what a terrific conversation thank you so much uh ciao ciao is it am i saying it's correct [Music] okay so um this

what we share just as sarah and i have not Talked to each other in quite some time because she is working so hard i always feel guilty you know asking her because she's always working so hard with teaching but i think the thing that we share despite the differences is i think you're pretty fierce and committed and i'm pretty fierce and committed and if you start off in a place like that the things that outrage you Or the things that you simply are not going to stand for you may have to today but not forever

um that is sort of the emotional core which we often don't talk about in scholarship the emotional core of doing social justice work and i'll use the term social justice work because that's the term we're using now so this is not work that has a beginning or an end This project has a beginning and an end but the work itself is collaborative it's shared it's democratic and it goes all kinds of places i never thought i would go i mean i knew nothing about turkey growing up i grew up in the united states they keep

us so stupid if you really knew what the educational system was like we speak one language english i mean and they pressure people who speak more than One to not do that which strikes me as why would you do that um it's just amazing when you when i realized the sort of the parochial nature of my education when it was supposed to be universal and a beacon to the world so it's been a it's been very um i'm humbled by the people i've been able to meet and work with Because once you realize what you

don't know you can either stay home and and you know wallow in feeling stupid or you can say well do you want to stay stupid is there another can you possibly learn the things that you don't know and that involves taking the risk of trusting other people to teach you what you don't know and that's what you need to know so this Isn't just a an intellectual kind of work this is also emotional work and political work it's fully human work where you cannot just slice off a part of yourself and the rest of you

just goes home the people who've been most effective and passionate about intersectionality this is really how they've been as i've come across people like this so i'd like to finish By saying uh where i began which is how much i and i'm using the word in a very robust way how much i love brazil and i love the people who i've met in brazil because there is a spirit there i don't care what kind of leader leaders you get there is a spirit that is i would if i were betting money i don't bet money

but if i were betting I would bet on the people even those who are problematic misguided doing horrible things to each other i would bet on the people in brazil and that's why i keep trying to get back kofi has thrown a roadblock but um that's what i would say so for me it is an honor to have my work translated and for us both to have our work translated Into portuguese because i consider brazil and portuguese to be a very very important and large group of people who often get folded into latin america which

means spanish to everybody else and i don't think that's the case at all so um i would like to thank my temple i'd like to thank lana i'd like to thank anyone who contributed To this project obrigada patricia i i want you to i want us to go together one day to meet in brazil okay i think we would you would love spending time with the boy temple people know how to party too they are just saying they are my people once i i i insisted on going samba dancing with them and i tell you

it was quite quite a marvelosa so um yeah no a wonderful press We we should be pleased very pleased that we're with this press because you know not all presses are the same so anyhow i hope to meet you in person one day you are in zamballo yes rio de janeiro oh that works as well we will come we will come we will come there will be a brazil trip okay all right we've invited ourselves so i guess that puts boy tempo On notice you