What's so bad about Pandora's Box?

Kimberle Crenshaw's "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" from 1989 is sometimes identified as the ur-text of Critical Race Theory. Obviously people writing critically about race goes back further, but a classmate this winter made the point that one should read this.  The core idea, there in the title, is intersectionality.  Crenshaw's a legal scholar, which gives her a particular focus on how discrimination is defined when the chips are down in a legal proceeding.  And there she saw a consistent pattern of one-dimensional analysis in which one could make a claim of race discrimination or sex discrimination, but not both. Which had the effect of emphasizing the experience of the most privileged group within the discriminated group--white women and black men.  She argues that justice requires that you start from the least privileged subgroup, and build up law and social practice from there.  

A lot of analysis and problem-solving involves simplifying things, reducing the dimensions.  In my current project, developed a conceptual framework on a three dimensions, but then focused on two dimensions, making the case that these are the key dimensional relationships we want to address in this context in this project.  But the third dimension of the context remains, and truth be told, it influences how you really want to think about the two dimensions I focused on.  Crenshaw pushes against that simplification and seeks to "embrace the complexities of compoundedness" (p 166). 

One of the decisions she cites (DeGraffenreid v General Motors) explicitly raises the specter of this compoundedness: "'The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box'" (p 142). Pandora's Box. It is always a problem. It is an instant end to an argument.  Too much complexity, or just too much period.  What if you turn the tables.  Pandora's Box is just fine.  It represents the richness of experience.  What if the task is to live in a world overfilling with all that is released.  Well, actually not released.  It's always there.  My two-dimensional and three-dimensional axes just tame it momentarily. 

Obviously, one needs these simplifications in order to even have coherent language, let alone make a decision or take an action.  But what if one's attitude is that the fine axial dimensions of analysis are a temporary step out of the flurry of Pandoran reality, into which you need to step back in, to experience more and learn more. As I've started thinking about CRT, as you deal with the issues of justice and restoration that it entails, the exciting part is how it blows open the rigidity of any categorization and universalization.  The compounds keep permutating. 

Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989:1, 139-167