LVE400 La Verne Intersectionality Beliefs Critical Thinking Assignment Critical thinking is a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive exploration

LVE400 La Verne Intersectionality Beliefs Critical Thinking Assignment Critical
thinking is a habit of mind characterized by the comprehensive
exploration of issues, ideas, and events before accepting or formulating
an opinion or conclusion. Critical thinking is the intellectually
disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing,
applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information
gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection,
reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In this
assignment you will research a social change group/organization in our
society (comtemporary or historical) and analyze the groups/organization
efforts utilizing intersectional analysis to promote a better
understanding of the group/organization, social issue(s), possible
remedies, and practical actions individuals can take to support the
group. Essential to the intersectional analysis is making clear your
position on the group being analyzed. In doing your research on the
group it is important explore critiques of the group/organization’s
efforts, it is also important to be aware of your own biases. Your
analysis should consist of 8 paragraphs, Introduction, one paragraphs
for each component of intersectionality, and a concluding paragraph that
includes reflection on your beliefs and actions now or in the future
relating the issue(s) and organization explored. (Paragraphs should be
100-150 words, and paper should be between 800–1200 words). Intersectionality
is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in
people and in human experience…Intersectionality as an analytical tool
gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of
themselves. (Collins & Bilge 2016, p. 2) Intersectionality
is an intellectual tool of analysis and praxis that can be organized in
six core themes: Social Inequality, Power, Relationality, Social
Context, Complexity, Social Justice. (C&B p. 25-30)
Social Inequality
– Intersectionality supports understanding of the complexity of social
inequalities beyond a single factor or category (i.e. race, gender,
sexuality, citizenship) and encourages exploration interactions among
various identities.
Power
– Intersectionality supports understanding of power relations, as
mutually constructed. Oppression is an interlocking system, where
racism, sexism and classism are in relationship to each other and do not
act in isolation. Power is exercised across four domains: structural
(financial institutions), disciplinary (legal system), cultural
(mass-media) and interpersonal (power and privilege).
Relationality
– Intersectionality employs a both/and frame and rejects binary
either/or constructs. Relationality is supported by inquiry and praxis
that emphasize coalitions, dialogue, and collectives. Instead of
exploring a social problem, through a single lens, relationality gathers
perspectives from the multiplicity of identities and find areas of
convergence.
Social Context
– Intersectionality contextualizes inquiry and praxis by bringing
attention to the ways in which particular historical, cultural,
political, cosmological and intellectual arrangement shape our thinking
and actions.
Complexity
– Intersectionality as a form of analysis is not simple or clean.
Weaving together inequities, power relations and social contexts is
difficult and can be frustrating. As such, collective or collaborative
efforts are encouraged to understand the complexity of the world.

Critical Thinking Is Defined by the Eight Elementshttps://www.criticalthinking.org/ctmodel/logic-model1.htm# –
Intersectionality call attention to the incongruences of the social
ideals of meritocracy, fairness and democracy, given the realities of
global inequalities. Social justice challenges boot-strap,
self-determined narratives citing the societal discrepancies, like
everyone having the right to vote, vs. equal access to voting.Social Justice 1
What is Intersectionality?
In the early twenty-first century, the term “intersectionality” has been widely taken up by
scholars, policy advocates, practitioners, and activists in many places and locations. College
students and faculty in interdisciplinary fields such as women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural
studies, American studies, and media studies, as well as those within sociology, political
science, and history and other traditional disciplines, encounter intersectionality in courses,
books, and scholarly articles. Human rights activists and government officials have also made
intersectionality part of ongoing global public policy discussions. Grassroots organizers look
to varying dimensions of intersectionality to inform their work on reproductive rights, antiviolence initiatives, workers’ rights, and similar social issues. Bloggers use digital and social
media to debate hot topics. Teachers, social workers, high-school students, parents, university
support staff, and school personnel have taken up the ideas of intersectionality with an eye
toward transforming schools of all sorts. Across these different venues, people increasingly
claim and use the term “intersectionality” for their diverse intellectual and political projects.
If we were to ask them, “What is intersectionality?” we would get varied and sometimes
contradictory answers. Most, however, would probably accept the following general
description:
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Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in
people, and in human experiences. The events and conditions of social and political life and
the self can seldom be understood as shaped by one factor. They are generally shaped by
many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways. When it comes to social inequality,
people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as
being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by
many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytic tool
gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves.
We begin this book by recognizing the tremendous heterogeneity that currently characterizes
how people understand and use intersectionality. Despite debates about the meaning of this
term, or even whether it is the right term to use at all, intersectionality is the term that has stuck.
It is the term that is increasingly used by stakeholders who put their understandings of
intersectionality to a variety of uses. Despite these differences, this general description points
toward a general consensus about how people understand intersectionality.
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool
People generally use intersectionality as an analytic tool to solve problems that they or others
around them face. Most US colleges and universities, for example, face the challenge of
building more inclusive and fair campus communities. The social divisions of class, race,
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gender, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, and ability are especially evident within higher
education. Colleges and universities now include more college students who formerly had no
way to pay for college (class), or students who historically faced discriminatory barriers to
enrollment (race, gender, ethnicity or citizenship status, religion), or students who experience
distinctive barriers and discrimination (sexuality and ability) on college campuses. Colleges
and universities find themselves confronted with students who want fairness, yet who bring
very different experiences and needs to campus. Initially, colleges recruited and served groups
one at a time, offering, for example, special programs for African Americans, Latinos, women,
gays and lesbians, veterans, returning students, and persons with disabilities. As the list grew,
it became clearer that this one-at-a-time approach not only was slow, but that most students fit
into more than one category. First-generation college students could include Latinos, women,
poor whites, returning veterans, grandparents, and transgender individuals. In this context,
intersectionality can be a useful analytic tool for thinking about and developing strategies to
achieve campus equity.
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Ordinary people can draw upon intersectionality as an analytic tool when they recognize that
they need better frameworks to grapple with the complex discriminations that they face. In the
1960s and 1970s, African-American women activists confronted the puzzle of how their needs
simply fell through the cracks of anti-racist social movements, feminism, and unions organizing
for workers’ rights. Each of these social movements elevated one category of analysis and
action above others, for example, race within the civil rights movement, or gender within
feminism or class within the union movement. Because African-American women were
simultaneously black and female and workers, these single-focus lenses on social inequality
left little space to address the complex social problems that they face. Black women’s specific
issues remained subordinated within each movement because no social movement by itself
would, nor could, address the entirety of discriminations they faced. Black women’s use of
intersectionality as an analytic tool emerged in response to these challenges.
Intersectionality as an analytic tool is neither confined to nations of North America and Europe
nor is it a new phenomenon. People in the Global South have used intersectionality as an
analytic tool, often without naming it as such. Consider an unexpected example from
nineteenth-century colonial India in the work of Savitribai Phule (1831−1897), regarded as an
important first-generation modern Indian feminist. In an online article titled “Six Reasons
Every Indian Feminist Must Remember Savitribai Phule,” published in January 2015, Deepika
Sarma suggests:
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Here’s why you should know more about her. She got intersectionality. Savitribai along
with her husband Jyotirao was a staunch advocate of anti-caste ideology and women’s
rights. The Phules’ vision of social equality included fighting against the subjugation of
women, and they also stood for Adivasis and Muslims. She organized a barbers’ strike
against shaving the heads of Hindu widows, fought for widow remarriage and in 1853,
started a shelter for pregnant widows. Other welfare programmes she was involved with
alongside Jyotirao include opening schools for workers and rural people, and providing
famine relief through 52 food centers that also operated as boarding schools. She also cared
for those affected by famine and plague, and died in 1897 after contracting plague from her
patients.
(Sarma 2015)
Phule confronted several axes of social division, namely caste, gender, religion, and economic
disadvantage or class. Her political activism encompassed intersecting categories of social
division − she didn’t just pick one.
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These examples suggest that people use intersectionality as an analytic tool in many different
ways to address a range of issues and social problems. They find intersectionality’s core
insight to be useful: namely, that major axes of social divisions in a given society at a given
time, for example, race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and age operate not as discrete and
mutually exclusive entities, but build on each other and work together. Many people typically
use intersectionality as a heuristic, a problem-solving or analytic tool, much in the way that
students on college campuses developed a shared interest in diversity, or African-American
women used it to address their status within social movement politics, or Savitribai Phule
advanced women’s rights. Even though those who use intersectional frameworks all seem to be
situated under the same big umbrella, using intersectionality as a heuristic device means that
intersectionality can assume many different forms.
In this book, we examine the perspectives, definitions, and controversies that characterize
intersectionality but, for now, we want to show three uses of intersectionality as an analytic
tool. As Cho et al. point out (2013: 795), “what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use
of the term ‘intersectionality,’ nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on
lists of standard citations.” Instead, they argue, “what intersectionality does rather than what
intersectionality is” lies at the at the heart of intersectionality (ibid.; our italics). In the
remainder of this section, we demonstrate three uses of intersectionality as an analytic tool that
were inspired by important global events that took place in 2014.
Power plays: the FIFA World Cup
Brazil’s international reputation as a football (soccer) powerhouse raised high hopes for its
winning the 2014 FIFA World Cup. As one of the most successful national teams in the history
of the World Cup, Brazil was the only country whose teams had qualified for and attended
every World Cup tournament. Brazil had also produced some of the greatest players in the
history of world football. The legendary Pelé remains Brazil’s highest goal-scorer of all time.
Italy, Germany, and Argentina are all football powerhouses, yet, in terms of star power and
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status, they were no match for Brazil.
Because the 2014 tournament was held in Brazil, the stakes were especially high. The potential
payoff for a winning Brazilian team in Brazil could be huge. Hosting the FIFA World Cup
would enable Brazil to shed vestiges of its troubled history of being ruled by a military
dictatorship (1964−1985), as well as signal its arrival as a major economic player. Brazil’s
victory, both on the field and via its hosting, would attract global attention. The World Cup was
the most widely watched and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the
Olympic Games. From the perspective of Brazil’s policy makers and financiers, the
possibilities of reaching a massive global market were endless. For example, the cumulative
audience for all matches during the 2006 World Cup was estimated to be 26.29 billion people,
with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the final match in Berlin, an astonishing oneninth of the entire population of the planet.
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So how did the 2014 FIFA World Cup games go? The challenges associated with hosting the
games began well before the athletes arrived on the playing fields. Brazil estimated a figure of
US$11.3 billion in public works-spending for the event. The initial plan presented to the public
emphasized that the majority of the spending on infrastructure for the World Cup would
highlight general transportation, security, and communications. Less than 25 percent of total
spending would go toward the twelve new or refurbished stadiums. Yet, as the games grew
nearer, cost overruns increased stadium costs by at least 75 percent, with public resources
reallocated from general infrastructure projects. The FIFA cost overruns aggravated ongoing
public demonstrations in several Brazilian cities against the increase in public transportation
fares and political corruption. For example, on June 20, 2013, one and a half million people
demonstrated in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest metropolitan area with a population of 18 million
people. In this context, the exorbitant cost of stadiums, the displacement of urban dwellers for
construction, and the embezzlement of public funds became a new theme at the forefront of
public protests (Castells 2015: 232). As the countdown to the kickoff began, Brazilians took to
the streets with banners against the World Cup. “FIFA go home!” and “We want hospitals up to
FIFA’s standards!” were common slogans in protests throughout more than a hundred cities.
“The World Cup steals money from healthcare, education and the poor. The homeless are being
forced from the streets. This is not for Brazil, it’s for the tourists,” reported a Guardian article
(Watts 2014).
The games began as this social unrest intensified. Of the thirty-two teams that qualified for the
World Cup, Brazil was one of four that reached the semifinals, facing an undefeated Germany.
The match wasn’t even close. Germany led 5−0 at half time, scoring an unheard of four goals in
a span of six minutes, and went on to win the World Cup. For its stunned fans in the stadium, as
well as for the massive global audience, Brazil’s loss was shocking. The media depicted the
match as a national disgrace, with Brazilian newspapers carrying headlines such as “The
Biggest Shame in History,” “A Historical Humiliation!,” and “Brazil is Slain.” Global media
joined in with headlines that described the defeat as the “ultimate embarrassment” and the
“most humiliating World Cup host nation defeat of all time.”
On the surface, intersectionality seems far removed from Brazil’s 2014 FIFA World Cup
Hill, Collins, Patricia, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality, Polity Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ulaverne-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4698012.
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experience. Because many people enjoy sporting events or play sports themselves, sports seem
distant from intersectionality’s concern with social inequality. Yet using intersectionality as an
analytic tool to examine the FIFA World Cup sheds light on the organization of power.
Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and
mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and
age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are
also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and
class exploitation.
One way of describing the organization of power identifies four distinctive yet interconnected
domains of power: interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural. These four dimensions
of the organization of power provide opportunities for using intersectionality as an analytic
tool to better understand the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
The interpersonal domain of power
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First, power relations are about people’s lives, how people relate to one another, and who is
advantaged or disadvantaged within social interactions. Without the athletes, there would be no
World Cup. The athletes are individuals and, whether famous or not, their actions shape power
relations just as much as the policy makers who bid on the games, the media that covered the
Brazilian national team’s defeat, or the activists who took to the street to protest cost overruns.
As a people’s sport, football can be played almost anywhere by almost anyone. Each team is
composed of a constellation of individuals who, on some level, love football and have chosen
to play. One does not need expensive lessons, or a carefully manicured playing field, or even
shoes. It requires no special equipment or training, only a ball and enough players to field two
teams. Compared with ice skating, tennis, skiing, or American football, soccer has far fewer
barriers between athletic talent and the means to develop that talent. Across the globe, there is
no way of knowing exactly how many people play football. Yet FIFA’s surveys provide a good
guess: an estimated 270 million people are involved in football as professional soccer players,
recreational players, registered players both over and under age 18, futsal and beach football
players, referees, and officials. This is a vast pool of potential elite athletes and a massive
audience reaching across categories of social class, age, gender, ethnicity, and nation. When
one adds the children and youth who play football but who are not involved in any kind of
organized activity detectable by FIFA, the number swells greatly.
The fanfare granted to the World Cup is a small tip of the iceberg of the everyday social
interactions that shape people’s relationships with one another in regard to football. From elite
athletes to poor kids, football players want to play on a fair playing field. It doesn’t matter how
you got to the field: all that matters once you are on the field is what you do on the field. The
sports metaphor of a level playing field speaks to the desire for fairness. Whether winners or
losers, this team sport rewards individual talent yet also highlights the collective team nature
of achievement. When played well and unimpeded by suspect officiating, football rewards
individual talent. In a world that is characterized by so much unfairness, competitive sports
such as football become important venues for seeing how things should be. The backgrounds of
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the players should not matter when they hit the playing field. What matters is how well they
play. The cries of anguish from the losing 2014 Brazil team may have made the news, but few
people questioned the outcome of the game. Fair play ruled.
Football is a people’s sport, but not all people get to play. One important rule of football, and
of most sports for that matter, is that men and women do not compete directly against one
another. The rules of fair play may apply within gender categories, yet how fair are those
categories? Sports generally, and professional sports in particular, routinely provide
opportunities for men that are denied to women. By this rule of gender segregation, the 2014
World Cup showed that the kind of football that counts for FIFA and fans alike is played by
men.
Using intersectionality as an analytic lens highlights the multiple nature of individual identities
and how varying combinations of class, gender, race, sexuality, and citizenship categories
differentially position each individual. Regardless of the love of soccer, these axes of social
division work together and influence one another to shape each individual biography.
The disciplinary domain of power
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When it comes to the organization of power, different people find themselves encountering
different treatment regarding which rules apply to them and how those rules will be
implemented. Within football’s disciplinary domain, some people are told they lack talent and
are discouraged from playing, whereas others may receive extra coaching to cultivate the talent
they have. Many are simply told that they are out of luck because they are the wrong gender or
age to play at all. In essence, power operates by disciplining people in ways that put people’s
lives on paths that make some options seem viable and others out of reach.
For example, South Africa’s 2010 hosting of the World Cup helped highlight the disciplinary
practices that African boys faced wh…
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