So, in general, people tend to understand and researchers tend to deploy intersectionality as depicted in the images attached. In these models, categories of difference/identity (race, gender, etc.) are thought to "intersect" to produce a unique social location.
@Much2Blaq Or, in the second graphic, categories of oppression (patriarchy, homophobia, etc.) are thought to intersection to produce a unique social location. By unique social location I mean a significant category of difference (like "working class immigrant man").
@Much2Blaq Referring back to the original tweet, these models are those "additive models of domination" or "interlocking oppressions." Class (or classism) + national origin (or xenohobia) + gender (or patriarchy) = how we should understand the life of a working class immigrant man.
@Much2Blaq Saidiya Hartman's critique (highlighted in the OP) is that these are "the ingredients of a recipe for the social." An additive model for understanding oppression and identity is misleading and it reinforces the idea that the "ingredients" are real and able to be isolated.
@Much2Blaq In essence, she's saying if we analyze race as something "distinctive" or "separate" from gender, class, sexuality, etc., 1) we falsely model each of these categories as existing prior to the oppression that produces them and...
@Much2Blaq 2) in doing so, we obscure the fact that, in the modern world defined by the eventful moment of the Middle Passage, for example, that patriarchy is always racism, sexist, and classist; racism is always patriarchal, sexist, and classist, etc.
@Much2Blaq Historically, oppression operates in different ways and different political economies (e.g., slavery is a different political economy from Jim Crow), and so the meaning of the categories (e.g., gender/woman/man) are not fixed.
@Much2Blaq One implication is this, then: historically, some black folks thought if they could move closer to whiteness or manhood or womanhood as they are normatively defined, they would become eligible for the democratic rights...
@Much2Blaq ...because those rights were thought to be predicated upon these categories as fixed categories.
@Much2Blaq But the definition of whiteness changed (e.g., with Plessy v Ferguson and Korematsu v US) and the word "woman," while it afforded white women some legal redress for rape, did not afford black women any legal redress for the same.
@Much2Blaq In short, an additive model leads us toward a liberal understanding of equality: we should all be made equal to white men. Hartman says this "leaves the framework of liberalism unexamined."
@Much2Blaq That framework treats individual sovereignty as the sacred principle on which all political philosophy rests and the right to and security of property as the most basic right.
@Much2Blaq However, this framework and those assumptions ignore that white men's individual sovereignty and right to property have always been attained "through black bondage."
@Much2Blaq So, what we need are not appeals to normative man/womanhood, not investments in individualist notions of property, not the pretense of colorblindness; we need to re-imagine liberation as "revolution" not as "equality with."
@Much2Blaq Re: the highlighted sections in the most recent tweet: abandoning an additive model helps us see that universal categories (such as "liberty," "manhood," "rights") are not universal at all, and so trying to attain them is like pushing a boulder up an endless hill.
@Much2Blaq "Freedom" after the Civil War for newly emancipated black folks burdened them with the "universal" assertion of "individual responsibility," and so these "free" people could now be criminalized and re-enslaved for being vagrants/not working.
@Much2Blaq "Freedom" made them vulnerable to a different manifestation of slavery.
@Much2Blaq An additive model of the social tends to make us think of oppression as the lack of equality with well-off white men. This alternative tells us that there is no such thing as equality with such men; they become well-off and white and men via black subjugation.
@Much2Blaq So, black liberation should not be predicated on the values of liberalism nor on liberalism's analytics (in this case, the idea of the individual subject constituted by race, gender, etc.).
I find this particularly compelling on the lowercase side of things, but I have no issues with the capital B (and when I'm writing with others who use it, I don't put up a fuss):
I can't say I understand (and perhaps it is not a matter of understanding, per se), but I do recognize and feel the affective and political motivations for using the capital, expressed in tweets like this: