Post Reading Questions for Week 6

To me, intersectional theory is a theory about how different categories intersect within one another to make up a whole picture. For example, like often times in math, the idea of a pie being cut up into pieces, regardless if people take a slice of the pie or even a sliver, the pie is not whole unless it has all its parts. Taking it a step further though, when you cut a pie there are different things to look at like the crust, what flavor is it, was it fresh or was it baked a while ago? All these different factors play into how the pie taste, and if you would eat it, right? Well I feel like it is the same concept with the intersectional theory; race, ability, education, etc. make up the whole you. What makes this theory different than understanding racial, gender, or class oppression, is that those are looked at on individual levels, whereas this theory is based on all those combined. In a way, I feel like it can either complicate situations or make them more understandable. Learning this for the first time, I feel the theory of intersectionality to be confusing because you won’t really know what strikes are against you. For example, when applying to college, say you are a good student with a good gpa, good test scores, Latina, and are graduating from a public high school, but you don’t get into the school you want. It’s natural to wonder why you didn’t get in, so with intersectionality, you think was it because I’m latina and they hit their quota, maybe it is because I went to a public high school that is not ranked so high, or maybe my scores weren’t as great as I thought, and finally it could be a combination of all of those.  See before, I used to just think “ok I did not get in,” now it is like “ok I did not get in, but was it because of a,b, or c, or all the above reasons. In retrospect though, another way you could look at intersectionality is that it is better that you look at the overall picture versus pick at the small flaws. I would hate to know that one of the several categories looked at during the college process out weighted all my other achievements, when it came to making that decision of accepting or rejecting me.  

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