Intersectional identities influence Title IX

Title IX has helped millions of people — especially girls and women — deal with sex discrimination in education. You know who it hasn’t helped as much? Girls and women of color or who are ethnic minorities, disabled, immigrants, old, queer, transgender, poor, or have other intersecting identities that increase the likelihood they will be discriminated against.

In this recent video interview with Andrea L. Pino-Silva, co-founder of End Rape on Campus, we talked about some of the ways that intersectionality manifests in education, in Title IX activism, and in our lives:

Since Prof. Kimberle Crenshaw championed the concept of “intersectional discrimination” three decades ago, intersectionality has become a bit of a buzzword in civil rights movements, and for good reason. It’s nearly impossible to separate race and sex discrimination when talking about discrimination against a black woman, for example. Though some still try. Changes to Title IX regulations being pursued by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos would institute different rules for handling federal complaints of sex discrimination or race discrimination. Where will that leave women of color?

The Trump Administration’s proposed changes to Title IX may even be a beachhead for weakening enforcement of all civil rights laws, Barry University Associate Professor of Law Nancy Chi Cantalupo argues.

Which makes sense, historically. Conservatives who oppose civil rights laws for one group tend to oppose them for any group. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 ushered in an era of backpedaling on civil rights wherever it could. His Justice Department refused to fight an anti-Title IX lawsuit (Grove City College v. Bell) that reached the Supreme Court. The court’s decision in 1984 decimated Title IX and all other civil rights laws in education. A grand coalition of advocates for women, racial and ethnic minorities, the aged, and the disabled successfully pressured Congress to pass the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987. They overrode Reagan’s veto in 1988 to get things back on track.

Just last week, some members of Congress made an explicit statement prioritizing consideration of intersectionality in efforts to end sexual violence, a top Title IX issue in recent years. One of the Trump Administration’s first steps was to cancel civil rights protections for transgender students, who face disproportionately high rates of sexual assault. The president keeps escalating his racist commentary about people of color and programmatic attacks on refugees and immigrants — all groups that also get sexually assaulted at disproportionately higher rates. Partly in response to these trends, Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) and her co-sponsors introduced identical bills (House Resolution 514 and Senate Resolution 281) chock full of statistics calling out the intersectional nature of sexual violence. (Photos of Booker, Harris and Coleman from Wikimedia Commons; photo of Booker by Lorie Shaull.)

The bills commit Congress to elevating “the voices, leadership, and needs of communities that face systemic barriers in the effort to end sexual violence.” It would do this in part by rejecting “rollbacks of enforcement and interpretations of protections against harassment” under Title IX or other civil rights laws.

This seems to me a timely roadblock in the path of Trump’s juggernaut against civil rights, if these bills pass. And even if they don’t, it’s refreshing to see the concepts and terminology of intersectionality embodied in legislation.

“We simply do not have the luxury of building social movements that are not intersectional, nor can we believe we are doing intersectional work just by saying words,” Professor Crenshaw wrote in a 2015 article in The Washington Post. Let’s hope the words in these bills lead to actions.

Intersectionality is everywhere, not just in sexual assault. Title IX moved many more women into faculty jobs, but 76% of full-time faculty positions still go to white people — 41% to white men and 35% to white women, federal data show. By 2016 women were 54% of college students but they still got only 44% of opportunities to play sports — and almost all those opportunities went to white women, the National Collegiate Athletics Association reported.

Title IX’s work is far from finished. Even more so when intersecting discriminations interfere. As Title IX’s late godmother, Bernice Sandler, often said, the first step in fixing a problem is “You’ve got to name it to change it.” Intersectional discrimination has been named. Let’s end it.