Why Intersectionality is Baloney and How Victim Culture is Destroying America
The leftists and the feminists have their own dictionary, and recently it feels like new words are being added daily. Words like “passing,” “fascist,” and “cis-gender” come to mind. In recent weeks, it’s been words like “solidarity, “systemic,” or “ally”. But no word is full of more meaningless jargon than this: Intersectionality.
According to Dictionary.com, intersectionality is: The theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual.
The theory was developed in the 1970s by black feminist activists, both straight and lesbian, whose goal was to broaden the definition of feminism. They shed light on the various nuances of the lives of women based on race and sexuality. Kimberle Crenshaw popularized the term in a 1991 article titled, “Mapping the Margins” and goes on to highlight that “both women and people of color” are marginalized by “discourses that are shaped to respond to one [identity] or the other,” rather than both.
Confused? Don’t worry, Crenshaw is, too. In fact, in 2009 she stated that she is “amazed at how [intersectionality] gets over- and under-used; sometimes I can’t even recognize it in the literature any more.” While the initial definition may have been somewhat straightforward, the term has been maimed and mutilated beyond recognition. What once looked like 2 roads intersecting and coming together now resembles a ball of yarn that your cat has gotten ahold of.
But the original intent has remained the same: It’s all about racking up the victimhood points, and stacking them up against the straight, or should I say, cis-gender, white male.
The progressives now rally around the idea that racism, classism, sexism, age-ism homo/transphobia, etc. are separate but related incidences. The problem with being too open-minded is that your brains fall out, yet the social justice crowd treats all of these issues as equally important and demands action on them NOW.
While there may be some merit in intersectionality, and watching Crenshaw’s 2016 Ted Talk does provide additional context, it does not come without major blindspots. One of the most glaring examples was during the 2019 Women’s March, where leaders Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez blamed Jewish people for exploiting people of color, and refused to condemn Louis Farrakhan, a blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-gay advocate because he had close ties to the March’s founder, Linda Sarsour.
In fact, Mallory stated that Farrakhan was the, “greatest of all time because of what he has done for black communities.” Forget the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center considers (and rightly so) the Nation of Islam to be an organized hate group. But I digress.
Another big blindspot in intersectionality is that it’s solely rooted in “isms” and victimhood.
Since our lackluster public education system hasn’t taught us any usable life skills — like critical thinking, logic, philosophy — or even the simpler things like how to make a budget or basic personal finance (by the way, I don’t blame the teachers 100% for this — it falls much higher up on the totem pole, like, with the Department of Education) it is no wonder that victimhood culture is thriving.
From Jussie Smollet, to Charlie Rogers, a lesbian who committed fake hate crimes against herself, to Sabrina Erdeley’s debunked “A Rape on Campus” story, it makes one wonder why people loudly (and proudly) wear their victim badge. Victimhood is the new protected class, so people are using, exaggerating, and in the aforementioned cases, downright lying about their victimization.
Trigger warnings, while a nice idea, and perhaps respectful to those who have gone through trauma, also bring their own set of issues. Should a student triggered by something such as rape or domestic violence be allowed to opt out of an assignment that may touch on those sensitive topics? Is it good for them? Is it fair to the other students? Is allowing said student to stay a victim beneficial to their education and growth?
People respond to incentives, and if we keep rewarding victimhood, it just creates the desire for more people to be seen as victims. The long-term goal should be to get people to move forward with their lives without emotional armor and trigger warnings. Life is painful, and inherently unfair. Yet intersectionality runs rampant with victimhood incentives.
The white female is more oppressed than the white male. But not as oppressed as the hispanic lesbian, and neither is as oppressed as the trans muslim who is in a wheelchair. And the points just continue to rack up. The more victim boxes you check, the more your voice matters and the more you are celebrated.
Interestingly enough, the very thing that intersectionality is supposed to be fighting is exactly what it promotes. Generalizing large groups of people based on unchangeable, visual factors and then immediately throwing them into some victim camp completely ignores the fact that we are all individuals who have made various choices, who have our own lives and stories, who may see the world differently, and who may not want to be thrust into a collective of victim-people for some sort of deranged progressive power grab.
Intersectionality is intellectually lazy. It’s also racist, ageist, classist, and homophobic because it automatically assumes that if “Person A” has a certain set of characteristics, he or she must be somehow less than. This person must be oppressed. They must have opinions or beliefs or have been through situations that are not their fault because of some sort of systemic, systematic, or institutional bias. And the “less than” is compared to the straight, white male.
The actual “institution” in institutional anything (racism, sexism, classism, etc.) is, of course, the government, yet progressives repeatedly turn to the very people who caused the problems in the first place to… solve the problems.
But the biggest blind spot of intersectionality is when an individual in one of the “oppressed” groups tries to speak his or her truth against the proposed and supported agenda. They are quickly shamed, silenced, called every name in the book, and are labeled “traitors” because they are challenging a narrative that has been forced on them. Cue: all the black conservatives/republicans/libertarians, the trans folks who speak against sex changes for children, Democrats who support the 2nd Amendment, and so on and so forth.
In my own life I’ve heard variations of, “You’re not black enough. You’re not white enough. You have white parents. You went to private school. You have a college degree. You hate black people. You hate yourself.” Blah blah blah.
The new rallying cry is, “You don’t know what it’s like to be black.” Correction — you don’t know what it’s like to be ANYONE but you. You don’t know what it’s like to be another race, another gender, another age, another class, etc. All you know is the life you’ve lived, the experiences you’ve lived through, and the body you’re occupying.
And the biggest problem with intersectionality, in my opinion, is that it’s white, progressive-ish men and women who are controlling a majority of the narrative. They disregard the stories of others who don’t toe the ideology, and the very people who are supposedly hoarding all the power are dictating exactly where you fall on the victim scale — meaning that they do, in fact, have all the power.
I don’t know about you, but I want to live in an America where the individual matters. Where I matter as a person, and not as a collective.
I don’t want to live in a society where my choices don’t matter, where I don’t face consequences for my actions, or where I’m judged on my skin color or my gender. I don’t want to be seen as a victim, or that I’m somehow oppressed. I do not want to be crammed inside the little box that someone is trying to put me so that they can be comfortable and relish in the spoon-fed narrative that has been crammed down their throats by the media, their professors, or their echo chamber.
I want an America that’s full of the 3 E’s — Equality, Equity and Empowerment. Intersectionality is division. It’s segregation. It’s full of conflict and pain and strife. It’s not making us any better, and it certainly isn’t making us smarter. I want to live in an America where I am judged by the content of my character — and intersectionality will ensure that this will never be a reality.
