This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, February 15th, 2020.

I'm Keelip Brown.

Many people are dismissive, even fearful of the notion of intersectionality if only for the ideas

popularity on the academic left, but it's a useful way of looking at the ways in which

individuality is itself created. Historian Anthony Comecta discusses why people who love liberty

should be aware of their own and others intersections. Divorced from all of the connotations

that we modern people would apply to the term intersectionality and I can hear people cringing at the word right now, but what does that what does it actually mean and where does it come from?

So from a social science perspective it comes from an article by Kimberly Crenshaw, a legal scholar back in the early 90s. The title off memory here is

demarginalizing the intersections of race and gender and it's about the differential way that the

legal system treats African American and white women and the basic argument is

that the different elements of a person's identity or personality,

whether chosen by themselves or imposed on them by society, those different elements interact and intersect with each other in unique ways that cause differential treatment for different individuals for a wide variety of reasons.

And in this article, it was focused on how the legal system treats these two categories of women

differently.

And so her point was that we need to recognize this and engage this fact in our

scholarship so that we can produce a more robust feminism that is more deeply considering women of all different

sorts and their advancement as a whole rather than focusing on certain sectors of women. Her argument was that unless

we practice feminism and other social science scholarship intersectionally, then everything essentially comes out white, or it comes out English speaking, or American, or straight, or whatever the other majority viewpoint is.

What's wrong with that?

I mean, where's the, where's the controversy there?

Well, as we libertarians or Austrians or whatever you might want to say,

as we would immediately pipe up, well, we are all

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