Joan Acker’s Inequality Regimes Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations

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MEMO 2
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What question(s) is the author in each reading trying to answer? What evidence do they rely on to support their argument? What are one or two important weaknesses or flaws in one (or more) of the assigned readings?
Joan Acker’s Inequality regimes Gender, class, and race in organizations
Acker focuses on intersectionality in the workplace and inequality regimes where there gender, class, and race assumptions and rules that are harmful and discriminatory. . There is a focus on the interplay of class, gender, and racial relations in explaining inequality and how power relations affect organizations. She uses the evidence of organizations where inequality is persistent in explaining the persistence of inequality. Inequality regimes reflect the practices and processes associated with continuing inequalities in the workplace, and by extension, inequalities in a society are linked to the work organizations.
Question: How do we aptly to define intersectionality and identifies the barriers to equality in the workplace?
Weakness: Acker focuses on inequality in the workplace and mostly uses organizations in the US. However, there are different gender stereotypes and rules in organizations, which explain the different forms of discrimination and abuse in the workplace. Considering different forms of social exclusion in diverse contexts would have provided more information on how gender intersects with different factors in different settings.
Patricia Hill Collins’ Black feminist thought in the matrix of domination
Collins (2004) writes on the “the Matrix of Domination” about intersectionality to explain gender inequality. The Afrocentric feminist writer focuses on Black women’s experiences and considering the interaction of race, gender, and class oppression as evidence on intersectionality to explain oppression.
Question: How does the interaction of race, class, and gender explain oppression and disenfranchisement?
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color
To Crenshaw (1994), research on feminism and antiracism failure to address the intersections of racism and patriarchy meant that experiences of women of color, and especially black women, were often ignored. The feminist was one of the first to highlight the compounded oppression that women of color faced even in the feminist movement.
Question: How identity politics and violence against women of color are relevant to understanding intersectionality?
Angela Davis’ Woman Suffrage at the Turn of the Century: The Rising Influence of Racism
Angela Davis focuses on racism in the suffragist movement. To address how racism affected the suffrage movement, she focuses on the conflicts between Susan B. Anthony and the Black suffragist like Ida B. Wells. Davis’s evidence is the words, writings, and actions of different suffragists. While Wells support Anthony’s position on antiracism, she fel...