Today we are going to be talking about social justice and intersectionality…two really broad topics, I know, but let’s just kick this off with a little summary of what these things are. Social justice issues are divided into two broad categories: • inter-social treatment (so how we treat each other) and • unequal government regulations (how the government applies laws to people). Inter-social treatment can be based on a variety of factors: race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, education, economic status, or mental or physical ability. The unequal government regulation category deals with how the government uses these factors to create conditions that obstruct, limit, or deny groups access to the same opportunities and resources, relative to the rest of society. This type of regulation can lead to intentional and unintentional social injustice. Some examples of these areas are voting law, policing, environmental laws, healthcare regulation, education, and labor laws. Intersectionality is a framework that attempts to analyze the interconnected nature of social categorizations like race, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc., how they overlap to describe interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage for more complex social categories, and how those are impacted through unequal government regulation. So, for example, it seeks to explain how the experiences of a gay, white, non-religious woman from a poor family differ from that of a straight, black, Christian man from a middle class family and shows how the social and legal system impacts them or is applied to them differently so that we, as a society, can better pinpoint our problem points and fix them more effectively. These are fairly complex topics and breaking them down into a quick summary hardly does them justice

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