making new connections, moving forward
Finally, we ask, what can we do? After all, every one of us has some privilege, and every one of us is marginalized in some way. Can we develop a language to talk through our differences instead of talking past each other?
All the essays in this section suggest that we need to think in new ways. For example, Carol Mukhopadhyay advises that we get rid of the word Caucasian, since it is inaccurate and creates a false origin of “whiteness.” M. E. Lee suggests we rethink notions of mobility when it comes to class, since it is the only status that we think of as a continuum rather than a fixed status. Perhaps we can use the emerging understanding of a gender continuum to understand class positioning and changes.
Abby Ferber cautions against false solutions such as color-blindness or “postfeminism” that suggest one could simply transcend or surpass the influence of gender or race on social life as an act of individual will.
And finally, Patricia Hill Collins, Mark Warren, and Caitlin Deen Fair describe the politics that might emerge from an understanding of the intersections of privilege and marginality, subordination and superordination. Such awareness of these intersections need not place us in ever-shrinking silos of marginality, in which we end up feeling despairing, hopeless, and isolated. Rather, seeing these intersections creates new possibilities for new political coalitions across all these divides. That, it seems to us, is the promise of a genuine intersectional politics of multiculturalism.