By Arun Verma

In 2017, I delivered my first ever keynote for Pride month at a university that was about my doctoral research exploring themes of diversity, inclusion and intersectionality. To talk about diversity, is a personal experience for each of us, and I felt I could only talk about intersectionality and inclusion by sharing my story of being treated differently and often unfairly because of my visible ethnicity and the tense relationship this has with the invisible nature of being gay.

These tense relationships between different parts of who we are is what intersectionality captures. It strives to shift the focus on addressing one inequality in isolation, to exploring the impact of multiple inequalities that can be experienced at the same time (Cole, 2019). As part of my intersectionality story, I grew up in a South Asian family who practised Hinduism where being openly gay was strictly not accepted in our working-class home. Outside of the home, I grew up in a predominantly white Christian community, which meant I, with a few others, were the most different. My sense of self was torn between competing identities, environments, cultures and religions, and these internal conflicts persisted throughout my educational transitions from primary to secondary school. It was during this transition I had my first encounter with anxiety and depression.

During my adolescent years, I was ridiculed and received physical threats from my peers. It seemed that I was an easy target because people told me I was gay and brown. These were identities that I had not acknowledged or understood at the time. I wasn’t safe at school and I was hiding at home because I thought I had no safe place. Feeling torn between my intersecting identities was adversely affecting my mental health and wellbeing. I went to counselling to get help with what felt like debilitating anxiety attacks and learn what was happening to me. It gave me confidence and coping tools to change my life and make the leap to university. It was here, my identities finally in synchronicity. I was able to be both gay and a man of colour without fear of becoming a victim of racial and homophobic abuse. I started to build confidence to challenge and resist perpetrators’ abuses. I laughed away this discrimination because I had gained the tools to cope, but I still didn’t fully understand where my internal conflict was coming from. 

It wasn’t until delving into literature about intersectionality during my doctorate where my identities started to become less hazy.  It was here I learned that I had suffered greatly with anxiety and depression, because my identities were never in agreement. 

As I reflected on intersectionality as a concept, I appreciated and acknowledged other people’s intersecting identities and unique experiences. It transformed my approach to friendships with peers as I recognised that no one person’s story is the same. That our life stories are all uniquely different. A recorded discussion from Black feminist scholars illustrate this by saying “all of us live complex lives that require a great deal of juggling for survival [in] that we are actually living at the intersections of overlapping systems of privilege and oppression […] think of an LGBT African-American woman and a heterosexual white woman who are both working class. They ‘do not experience the same levels of discrimination, even when they are working within the same structures that may locate them as poor,’ because one can experience homophobia and racism at the same time. While the other may experience gender or class discrimination, her whiteness will always protect and insulate her from racism. Failing to acknowledge this complexity, scholars of intersectionality argue, is failing to acknowledge reality” (Coleman, 2019).

As we are all juggling competing demands in life, another demand was shared in the report from Public Health England findings that COVID-19 has a disproportionate effect on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. This resurfaced anxieties about mine and my family’s safety and security as I identify as part of that high-risk BAME community. It led me to think more about how my health and ethnicity are frustratingly linked to the lived experience of the many transitions this pandemic has created. When wrapping a pandemic in emotional conversations about racism with colleagues and friends who identify as Black and people of colour, there is yet another social transition which has felt challenging to navigate. 

These dialogues about health and race triggered me to re-consider my intersecting identities as a gay non-Black person of colour. I am asking myself, how can I draw on my position to advocate and conspire with my Black colleagues and peers, to sustain change, for Black lives that continue to be marginalised, failed and deprived by systems and society? 

My identities as a gay man of colour are torn between the intersecting privileges and oppressions that comes with the lived experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also torn when I think about myself as a gay South Asian person in lockdown and being a non-Black person of colour to advocate for Black human rights, which all constitute competing parts of my ongoing intersectionality story through these life transitions. In a strange way, embracing these tensions has empowered me to thrive rather than cope with these internal conflicts that have triggered my anxieties.

Intersectionality is a tool to show the real complexities of our world. It forces us to ask questions like; Who am I really? Who are we in relation to each other? How do mine and our intersecting privileges and oppressions interact with wider issues? It is by ensuring that intersectionality always matters, which empowers us to unpack our wellbeing and disrupt understanding of ourselves and others. Even when we are surrounded by multiple competing transitions. 

If you’re interested in intersectionality from a wellbeing perspective you might be interested in these links: Association of American Colleges and Universities, Gray Matthews Project, Mental Health at Home and the YWCA that speak to thinking about intersectionality and wellbeing.

Reflective questions

When thinking about our own intersectionality story, we can ask ourselves:

1. What are all of my individual identities and what do they mean to me?

2. What privileges and oppressions influence those identities?

3. How do these privileges and oppressions shape my world view when I think about how these identities intersect?

Dr Arun Verma cmpleted his doctorate at the University of Dundee exploring how interesting identities are shaped and lived within the context of gendered environments and has a background in social and clinical applications of psychology. He has led on research embedding intersectional feminism into government commissioning and across the charity sector. He has used participatory research and qualitative modelling to dismantle and re-commission entire domestic abuse and mental health systems, to change the lives of the most marginalised and deprived communities. He has done this influencing the most senior civil servants and leaders in the government and third sector. He holds affiliated positions with Surrey University and University of Dundee and works for Save the Children UK, designing and delivering complex research and evaluation approaches to support the mission to ending child poverty by improving implementation, policy and practice across national and global platforms.

Image copyright: Divya Jindal-Snape

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