Question

1. Why are Latin American immigrants the most likely to be deported?

2. Explain what Andersen and Collins mean by intersectionality and the matrix of domination? How can you relate their point of departure to what Audrey Lorde calls the mythical norm and hetronormativity?

Answer 1

Ans1)

You can’t deport a U.S. citizen,” said a friend recently. My friend is correct on the law.

But that doesn’t stop millions of U.S. citizens from fearing deportation anyway.

In a study published on April 6, I found Latino U.S. citizens’ deportation fears to be on the rise. Whereas 41% worried about deportation in 2007, 48% did in 2018. This amounts to about 13.6 million Latino U.S. citizens fearing deportation.

My research, and that of several other scholars, outlines several reasons why Latino U.S. citizens might increasingly fear a form of punishment thought to be reserved for people who lack citizenship.

Deportation fears

The Pew Research Center regularly surveys Latino adults who are U.S. citizens and noncitizens. Six times between 2007 and 2018, they asked different survey participants the same question: “Regardless of your own legal status, how much, if at all, do you worry that you, a family member, or a close friend could be deported? Would you say that you worry a lot, some, not much, or not at all?”

My analysis of these people’s answers reveals a surprising pattern. Latino noncitizens, encompassing undocumented and documented immigrants vulnerable to deportation, report a high, but stable, level of fear.

But U.S. citizens, including naturalized immigrants and those born in the country who are ostensibly immune to deportation, report increasing fears.

These changes don’t reflect increasing deportation rates nationwide, which are lower now than they were for much of the Obama administration. Instead, U.S. citizens’ growing fears reflect heightened national attention to deportation policy and practice since the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Deportable family members

Deportation touches U.S. citizens through deportable family members and loved ones. An analysis I received from the University of Southern California’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration reveals to what extent.

Almost 9 million U.S. citizens, most of them children, have at least one undocumented family member. Four out of five of these U.S. citizens are Latino.

But this count captures only a fraction of U.S. citizens with deportable relatives. Millions more have household members with provisional statuses like a visa or green card. Some 20.5 million U.S. citizens – or one of every 13 U.S. citizens – have a relative who is deportable. Sixty percent of these U.S. citizens are Latino.

These Americans are not immune to the effects of the laws and policies targeting their families and communities. When U.S. citizens fear for their loved ones’ safety, they are less likely to go to school, to get routine medical care and to call the police in an emergency.

Mistaken as deportable

Immigration law does not mention race, but the way it is enforced has racially unequal consequences.

A disproportionate share of Latino U.S. citizens have deportable relatives. Latin American noncitizens represent more than 90% of all deportations, even though they account for 57% of all noncitizens.

When laws primarily affect a single racial group, federal immigration officials and everyday people can mistakenly recognize U.S. citizens as deportable. For example, the federal government deported about 200,000 U.S. citizens of Mexican descent during the Great Depression, under the assumption they were undocumented.

This mistaken recognition is happening today too. Between 2007 and 2015, more than 1,500 U.S. citizens – many Latino – were unlawfully detained for their suspected deportability. In a 2018 study, researchers found that white Americans most suspected Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants of being undocumented – and least suspected Italians and Canadians. Media reports continue to depict cases of Latino U.S. citizens unlawfully detained for suspected immigration violations.

U.S. citizens are not deportable by law. But they still worry about being misrecognized as deportable, given the racially unequal enforcement of contemporary immigration laws and policies.

Ans2)

Anderson and Collins Intersectionality and the matrix of domination

The matrix of domination looks at the overall organization of power in society while intersectionality is used to understand a specific social location of an identity using mutually constructing features of oppression

The matrix of domination or matrix of oppression is a sociological paradigm that explains issues of oppression that deal with race, class, and gender, which, though recognized as different social classifications, are all interconnected. Other forms of classification, such as sexual orientation, religion, or age, apply to this theory as well. Patricia Hill Collins is credited with introducing the theory in her work entitled Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.^[1] As the term implies, there are many different ways one might experience domination, facing many different challenges in which one obstacle, such as race, may overlap with other sociological features. Characteristics such as race, age, and sex, may affect an individual in extremely different ways, in such simple cases as varying geography, socioeconomic status, or simply throughout time. Other scholars such as Kimberle Crenshaw's Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color are credited with expanding Collins' work.^[2] The matrix of domination is a way for people to acknowledge their privileges in society. How one is able to interact, what social groups one is in, and the networks one establishes is all based on different interconnected classifications.^[3]

Matrix of domination compared to intersectionalityEdit

Historical background on the matrix of dominationEdit

In Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, she first describes the concept of matrix thinking within the context of how black women in America encounter institutional discrimination based upon their race and gender.^[9] A prominent example of this in the 1990s was racial segregation, especially as it related to housing, education, and employment. At the time, there was very little encouraged interaction between whites and blacks in these common sectors of society. Collins argues that this demonstrates how being black and female in America continues to perpetuate certain common experiences for African-American women. As such, African-American women live in a different world than those who are not black and female.^[9] Collins notes how this shared social struggle can actually result in the formation of a group-based collective effort, citing how the high concentration of African-American women in the domestic labor sector in combination with racial segregation in housing and schooling contributed directly to the organization of the black feminist movement.^[9] The collective wisdom shared by black women that held these specific experiences constituted a distinct viewpoint for African-American women concerning correlations between their race and gender and the resulting economic consequences.

Moolman points out the main issue concerning matrix thinking is how one accounts for the power dynamics between varying identifying categories that are ingrained in both oppression and domination instead of the traditional approach, reducing experiences to a single identity.^[10] For instance, black women's experiences with society are used to illustrate how even though white scholars have attempted to use intersectionality in their research, they may still be inclined to default towards single-identity thinking that often fails to address all aspects of black women's experiences, thus ignoring the organization the matrix objectively offers.^[11]

The matrix of domination in the colonial era and white society has also been carefully examined. The societal hierarchy determined by race and implemented under apartheid locates different racial populations in regards to their privilege, with African Americans usually at the bottom of the ladder. Dhamoon argues that on a global scale, the spot occupied by African Americans in such context is interchangeable with indigenous populations, as marginalized peoples are systematically working both within and across a matrix of interrelated axes of "penalty and privilege".^[12] The interconnectivity of different identities in regards to power in racial structures in post-colonial era societies help illustrate what changes make a difference. The framework setup of the matrix of domination connects its origin theory and thought to existing struggles in the political and social spheres of society. A closer look at both specific and broader aspects of matrix thought will shed more light on the inner-workings and mechanisms that determine how different relationship dynamics influence matrix categorizations.^[12]

May cites that an important implication that matrix thinking inspires is that it directly goes against what is often described as the socially inclusive ‘add and stir’ approach.^[11] This is often used when describing the addition of one or more identity group to existing epistemological approaches, political strategies or research methodologies. This accounts for the proper weighing of power dynamics and their impact on different groups of people. Intersectionality centers power in a multi-pronged way as shifting across different sites and scales at the same time. Therefore, it is not neutral but evolved out of histories of struggle that pursue multidimensional forms of justice.^[11]