Identity, diversity and intersectionality at every level

Key ideas

Intersectionality

Multiple social categories, such as race, gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status, intersect in individual experience and reflect interlocking systems of privilege and oppression such as racism, sexism and heterosexism. The term comes from Crenshaw's legal scholarship on how discrimination against Black women was overlooked.

Layered ecological model

APA's 2017 Multicultural Guidelines take intersectionality as their primary focus and present a layered ecological model in which identity develops within nested contexts over time. The ten guidelines apply to work with clients, students and research participants, and to practice, education, research and consultation.

Self-definition and within-group difference

The guidelines use broad reference group identities that acknowledge differences within groups and the role of self-definition. Cole asks three questions: who is included in a category, what role inequality plays, and where groups thought to be very different share common ground.

Ethnic and racial identity

Ethnic identity, a person's sense of belonging to an ethnic group and the meaning they give it, is central to psychological functioning for members of ethnic and racial minority groups, though the uniqueness of each group makes general conclusions difficult, according to Phinney's review.

Acculturation

Acculturation is change through contact with another culture. Berry's four strategies cross keeping one's heritage culture with taking part in the new one: integration, assimilation, separation and marginalization. A meta-analysis of 325 studies found integration the strategy most favorable to mental health.

Worked example

Cody, 20, is the first in his family to attend college. He grew up in a small mining town and is White and gay. At his urban university he feels classmates assume his race has given him every advantage and do not see his family's money worries; at home, his sexual orientation is the part of himself he keeps hidden.

1. Intrapersonal level: ask Cody which identities feel most important to him and when, rather than ranking them for him, since salience shifts with setting.
2. Interpersonal level: notice that classmates see his race and miss his class, while people at home see his class and town and miss his sexual orientation, so each setting sees part of him.
3. Group and systems levels: ask where he finds belonging, such as groups for gay or first-generation students, and how financial aid rules and his hometown's norms shape his choices.
4. Apply Cole's questions: who is included in each category he belongs to, what role inequality plays, and where he shares ground with students who seem unlike him.

Advantage on one dimension and disadvantage on another can coexist, so identities are understood together, in context and as the person defines them.