Intersectionalism: The Great Divider and Mirror Image of White Supremacy

Like democracy, capitalism, socialism, communism, and a whole host of “on paper” good ideas, the concept of intersectionality has become weaponized as a power grab.

Democracy is a tool to boost the voices of those governed to fully reflect the will of its citizens. In the best cases, it does just that. In the worst cases, it is used by one party or another to limit the voices of some citizens, tearing them down and excluding them as a power grab. See the GOP Voter Restrictions in Southern States or anything even tenuously attached to Texas Governor Abbot for examples of these worst cases.

On January 21, 2017, the March for Women was among the largest mass protest in history. It was historic, it was wide reaching, it was Democracy in the best case. Two years later, not so much so. Was it that Trump had grown into the presidency, had walked back his previous statements concerning the treatment of women, become the head of state that women could stomach?

No. It was a fracturing of purpose and personnel at the very top of the sudden national organization and an allegiance to intersectional thought that did it in. A friend of mine was in the early organizing of the Chicago march. She nearly had a nervous breakdown and eventually gave up as The March for Women underwent online attacks from increasingly marginalized groups and individuals claiming that without “space” and “control” from black women and queer women and disabled women and trans women and obese women and anti-cop women then the march was not legit. Plainly stated, the idea of an overarching movement for women became a power grab from every intersectional ideology in existence.

The summer of 2020 saw an even larger mass protest over police abuse and sparked by the murder of George Floyd. The synergy of the moment joined activists from all over the world and they formed #BlackLivesMatter. Less than two years later, as grassroots organizers fight with one another over financing and the leaders grift cash donated to pay rent and buy million dollar homes, the steam that powered the most massive civil rights protest in history now splinters under the weight of the greed for power and money. Instead of focusing on police violence, infighting over whether black men are overtaking a movement created by black women and whether the stereotypical misogyny eclipses inclusion of black queer and transgender leaders cripples the forward momentum previously garnered.

Prof. Kimberlé Crenshaw's work in the late 1980's introduced the term intersectionality. Intersectionality meant that the experience of a person who belongs to multiple identity groups cannot be captured simply by focusing on subordination based on one or the other identity, or even by adding them together.

According to her 1993 Stanford Law Review article, "Experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and... these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism." One of Crenshaw's examples is an immigrant woman whose legal status depends on her relationship to a battering husband does not simply experience anti-immigrant prejudice or sexist battering. Her statuses (as an immigrant and a woman) intersect to create a distinctive vulnerability.

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

This is a solid idea and has merit. In the face of a limited false ideology based on the supremacy of one race over others, it had the potential to begin the process of evening the playing field.

But like democracy, capitalism, socialism, communism, and a whole host of “on paper” good ideas, the concept of intersectionality has become weaponized as a power grab. As the marginalized continue to grow in grievances, the intersections in the traffic analogy become overwhelming with the idea that the more intersections of discrimination, the more worthy the victim of attention and deference. Try to turn left on Milwaukee, North and Damen in Chicago and now imagine that clusterfuck multiplied by six more directions and you get the idea.

Thus begins two notions of intersectionality: that of discrimination and that of oppression. The first is helpful, a tool used to identify and legislate to help the most marginalized among us, the second begets the Olympiad of Victim Status. With discrimination, we see intersecting barriers to progress; with oppression, we assign value to those most maligned and create a simplified picture of the oppressor and the oppressed.

A white woman is not as valued in this contest as a black woman. A black woman is less worthy than a queer black woman. A queer black woman has less right to speak than a queer, black transgender woman. Add a disability or weight problem and the number of intersections increase in her oppression. The tool is being used to create a new hierarchy rather than merely dismantling the old.

The root of the idea of intersectionality was both specific and complex but the newer, popular version centers on a single villainous umbrella that all subordination can point a finger to as its cause. That cause? White dudes over the age of thirty-five.

Modern feminism becomes less about working to change the systemic inequities women face daily and more about centering outrage on white men who "man spread" and "mansplain," and proliferating the notion that white men are all predators.

Modern civil rights becomes less about working to change the systemic and institutional racism baked into the American experiment and more on exaggerating the harm of microaggressions and the separatist need for safe spaces.

In the best cases, the concept of intersectionality is a tool to boost those who have multiple identifiers and expand our notions of who is sitting at the Big Table of Society. In the worst cases, it is a tool to tear down those deemed culturally inferior. In either case, it is a tool rather than an ideology. As it has evolved from an academic theory to a weapon, Intersectionality has become a mirror image of another ideology that claims the superiority of one race over another supplanting race with oppression.

And we pretty much already know how fealty to that historic false supremacy and the resulting ideology turned out.