Nice work. It’s a relief to read a well-considered examination of a concept so widely accepted on one side of the scrum and so reviled on the other. Your unique position affords an illuminating POV and you’ve proven more than equal to the task of laying the cards on the table. It’s deeply ironic that we all have to live with the burden of determining how to live with our individuality while disparate forces drag us toward group identities in a time when we have greater freedom of affiliation than ever and the resulting emptiness and confusion felt by so many begs to be filled by something or anything. For some of us whose family roots were conservative and who migrated leftward years ago for various reasons, the emergence of authoritarian impulses on the left, fortified by half-baked, trendy academicism, has been seriously confounding. It’s a relief to know there are others out there who know better.
If intersectionality wanted to offer a richer look at an individual by expanding the field of view to more than just a single identity label, then we already have that: it’s individualism.
To me intersectionality had always been this corrupted version of individualism: “individualism, but with heavily gerrymandered categories.”
Like a lot of modern progressive thought, this seems to be a motte-and-bailey. On the hill, there's "people experience things differently," and down here in reality, it's...well, whatever schizogeneric hot takes are coming out recently. (Hamas are anti-colonial freedom fighters!) The issue isn't the sociology it's the reinvented Manicheism where everyone (and everything) is either good or evil, not based so much on their actions as on their tribal membership and their (assumed) level of power. It's every bit as hierarchical as traditional society, but with the "good" and "evil" axes switched.
Most people I know (~ on the "anti-woke side of the centre-left") are derisive of intersectionality; but in my eyes it's trivially true (in close to the sam sense that e.g. modus tollens is true). I wish people who disagree with what they call "intersectionality" will say that they disagree with the analysis as done by specific academics, or alternatively, on the policy decisions by people who vibe with intersectionality, than the literal thing itself.
I also disagree with your article here, for different reasons. I agree with your assessment that it a) simplifies and distorts narratives and b) seeing intersections primarily in the sense of oppression rather than the richness of different identities in how nourishing etc they can be is somewhat limiting. But I don't think this is necessarily a flaw with academic studies of intersectionality.* Suppose I'm trying to craft policies that try to reduce systemic racism in hiring**. It might be useful to understand how e.g. the policies may affect Black Muslim women and Black Christian men differently, as they face different forms of discrimination. From that lens, it doesn't that useful, comparatively, to understand the rich tapestry of life experience that being simultaneously Black and Muslim may offer someone, if it's not relevant to the specific policies I want to enact. Like I see how what you talk about can be a valuable sociology/anthropology question and maybe it's worthwhile for *somebody* to study them, but it's not obvious to me why academics studying discrimination*** should necessarily study them.
*If I were to offer my own critique of the academics, and bear in mind that I've not very well-read on the subject, 'll be more worried that the academics a) don't seem to know much math/stats, and b) don't fully appreciate just how limiting analysis without statistical literacy + good measurements are.
** assume for now that there is systemic racism in hiring for the specific focus in question.
*** I'm agnostic about whether or not more or less taxpayer dollars should go into studies of discrimination in practice, to be clear. But it's at least really obvious to mean why there's a good *theoretical* case for spending taxpayer or philanthropic money on studying discrimination, in a way that I feel is much more straightforward than the case for spending taxpayer dollars on studying the rich tapestry of how different identities can intersect in forming someone's life.
The main point we should focus on is less on the intellectual merits of intersectionality and more on the political aims of the ideology:
It is adopted for the same reason class strugge was positive for the communists: it provides members with the holy reason to destroy the out-group and have no piety towards it.
And, as happened with Communism, it will disappear only when the ideology that sustain it, feminism, is vanquished.
Because i do not see, for now, the end of the ever strongee feminism, intersectionality will go on unabated until a reactionary force arise to destroy it.
When I lost my faith I said I wouldn't wish the experience on my worst enemy, and when I read your phrase "heartbreakingly false common purpose" it really resonated. A beautiful way to put it. ❤️
Nice post and I agree with you that intersectionality is no good at describing the complexity of people's lives and the traditions they inherit. But was that the intention? As I understand it, Crenshaw's original paper was about employment discrimination and how group membership can produce add-on disparate impacts. I find that example quite convincing and I'm curious what you think. I agree with you that the spread of the term has made it analytically toothless.
From what little I understand the original concept of intersectionality is that these things interact in complex ways and actually don't boil down into toting up Ds and Ps the way you claim. That is the way it tends to wind up working out in left-wing internet comment sections and diversity recruiting initiatives, though.
The catch with intersectionality as a political organizing principle is that people can identify with the 'privileged' part of their identity--look at Latino men, wealthy white gay men, or white women voting for Trump, for instance. (Or they may see that identity as less salient than, say, their Christianity or owning a business.) Also the interaction term is sometimes negative--it may be better to be a black woman than a black man in many cases, and European/North American culture is actually among the least homophobic, as any glance at a map of LGBT rights around the world will show.
I've just never seen anybody who employs the concept in earnest to suggest it should be boiled down in such a black and white oppressor/oppressed way. The whole point is that things don't play out exactly like that in given circumstances because there are so many different layers at play. Your additional experiences that you claim cannot be explained within the construct absolutely can be. Actually maybe that's exactly what you did, but I am not going to do that close of a read at the mo'
It seems to me that intersectionality was all but made for the social media era, and/or that social media would have been the perfect platform for its mainstreaming. I've often reflected on the now-classic saying that goes, “If it's free, you're the product.” From the public's perspective, the product is the platform and the interactions it enables and facilitates—but as we know, social media, at its core, is in fact an data-mining/advertising machine that churns out bottomless, unimaginably specific data sets.
People so often accept their environments' projections without question. Many eventually start to behave according to the role in which they've been cast. In the 20-odd years since Facebook took the world by storm, social media has successfully made avatars of us all. (That's what it does: It's not free; you're the product. More specifically, a *data-manufactured virtual facsimile which you come to mistake as being YOU* is the product. Your intersectional identity is the product. It's easily digestible by the big machine.)
Years on, here we are treating each other not like uniquely complex individuals, but as elaborate yet still impossibly reductive set of data points stored in a black box whose machinations are classified. Personally, I don't see the systemic avatarization of humanity as being any less destructive or dehumanizing than the systemic discrimination decried by intersectionality faithfuls... but hey, what do I know?
I have similar feelings, in that I think intersectionality could be useful, but not as typically deployed. One of the biggest things missing in most intersectionality discussion is that the experience of every identity is highly contextual, which is to me the key thing that makes it impossible to make bright line distinctions like “X is always oppressed, Y is always privileged”.
You’re a gay man. That was a disadvantage in the LDS community. On the other hand it would have been neutral to downright positive if you were born into a family of Broadway players.
You’re white - makes you fit in better in LDS and in CS. But not great if you aspire to be in the NBA.
A black woman might face discrimination in some communities. Applying for the top job at Harvard? Definite advantage.
Black and gay in academia? Double Oppression Bonus Score! Black and gay in a lower class urban community? Buckle up for some hardcore homophobia white academics never want to talk about.
And so on. Even within an individual, we aren’t the same person all the time. Work, home, clubs, family, community, we play different roles. And our identities can be benefits or detriments differently in each one. You’d think people that talk about “code-switching” would get this.
I think you basically hit the nail on the head with a single phrase: "True and useful." The premise of "True Intersectionality" can be easily explained to a five year old, "Players have very little say in some traits from character creation but those traits can greatly influence gameplay."
This is true! So obviously true it doesn't make sense to argue against it. You don't need social theory.
Intersectionality (TM) and the attendant theorists, attempt to make this truth maximally useful. To me this is the great sin. I have seen this do enormous damage to the people I know across nearly every spectrum of things that Intersectionality (TM) cares about. It encourages agreeable "dominant" people to surrender their usefulness, while creating self-doubt in the "oppressed" people who feel they aren't useful enough. It creates institution-sized holes in understandings of usefulness that only geniuses and con artists can fill.
The resulting advice of the Intersectionality (TM) is so obviously attenuated to usefulness that it is distinctly different from, say, someone who is actually attenuated to sub-culture. "Travel more, meet new people, etc. etc." is a huge aesthetic and cultural gain that is left on the table! Maybe only a handful of people have the tact and talent to bring us the goods, but Intersectionality (TM) is on the margin clearly a deterrent to these people.
If you haven't seen it, I cannot recommend Jerrod Carmichael's "8" enough:
Nice work. It’s a relief to read a well-considered examination of a concept so widely accepted on one side of the scrum and so reviled on the other. Your unique position affords an illuminating POV and you’ve proven more than equal to the task of laying the cards on the table. It’s deeply ironic that we all have to live with the burden of determining how to live with our individuality while disparate forces drag us toward group identities in a time when we have greater freedom of affiliation than ever and the resulting emptiness and confusion felt by so many begs to be filled by something or anything. For some of us whose family roots were conservative and who migrated leftward years ago for various reasons, the emergence of authoritarian impulses on the left, fortified by half-baked, trendy academicism, has been seriously confounding. It’s a relief to know there are others out there who know better.
Thanks for sharing this one
If intersectionality wanted to offer a richer look at an individual by expanding the field of view to more than just a single identity label, then we already have that: it’s individualism.
To me intersectionality had always been this corrupted version of individualism: “individualism, but with heavily gerrymandered categories.”
🔥🔥🔥
Like a lot of modern progressive thought, this seems to be a motte-and-bailey. On the hill, there's "people experience things differently," and down here in reality, it's...well, whatever schizogeneric hot takes are coming out recently. (Hamas are anti-colonial freedom fighters!) The issue isn't the sociology it's the reinvented Manicheism where everyone (and everything) is either good or evil, not based so much on their actions as on their tribal membership and their (assumed) level of power. It's every bit as hierarchical as traditional society, but with the "good" and "evil" axes switched.
Thanks for the shout-out! I’m really chuffed. Of course, now I have to try to live up to the compliment, but that’s not a bad problem to have :)
Most people I know (~ on the "anti-woke side of the centre-left") are derisive of intersectionality; but in my eyes it's trivially true (in close to the sam sense that e.g. modus tollens is true). I wish people who disagree with what they call "intersectionality" will say that they disagree with the analysis as done by specific academics, or alternatively, on the policy decisions by people who vibe with intersectionality, than the literal thing itself.
I also disagree with your article here, for different reasons. I agree with your assessment that it a) simplifies and distorts narratives and b) seeing intersections primarily in the sense of oppression rather than the richness of different identities in how nourishing etc they can be is somewhat limiting. But I don't think this is necessarily a flaw with academic studies of intersectionality.* Suppose I'm trying to craft policies that try to reduce systemic racism in hiring**. It might be useful to understand how e.g. the policies may affect Black Muslim women and Black Christian men differently, as they face different forms of discrimination. From that lens, it doesn't that useful, comparatively, to understand the rich tapestry of life experience that being simultaneously Black and Muslim may offer someone, if it's not relevant to the specific policies I want to enact. Like I see how what you talk about can be a valuable sociology/anthropology question and maybe it's worthwhile for *somebody* to study them, but it's not obvious to me why academics studying discrimination*** should necessarily study them.
*If I were to offer my own critique of the academics, and bear in mind that I've not very well-read on the subject, 'll be more worried that the academics a) don't seem to know much math/stats, and b) don't fully appreciate just how limiting analysis without statistical literacy + good measurements are.
** assume for now that there is systemic racism in hiring for the specific focus in question.
*** I'm agnostic about whether or not more or less taxpayer dollars should go into studies of discrimination in practice, to be clear. But it's at least really obvious to mean why there's a good *theoretical* case for spending taxpayer or philanthropic money on studying discrimination, in a way that I feel is much more straightforward than the case for spending taxpayer dollars on studying the rich tapestry of how different identities can intersect in forming someone's life.
The main point we should focus on is less on the intellectual merits of intersectionality and more on the political aims of the ideology:
It is adopted for the same reason class strugge was positive for the communists: it provides members with the holy reason to destroy the out-group and have no piety towards it.
And, as happened with Communism, it will disappear only when the ideology that sustain it, feminism, is vanquished.
Because i do not see, for now, the end of the ever strongee feminism, intersectionality will go on unabated until a reactionary force arise to destroy it.
When I lost my faith I said I wouldn't wish the experience on my worst enemy, and when I read your phrase "heartbreakingly false common purpose" it really resonated. A beautiful way to put it. ❤️
Nice post and I agree with you that intersectionality is no good at describing the complexity of people's lives and the traditions they inherit. But was that the intention? As I understand it, Crenshaw's original paper was about employment discrimination and how group membership can produce add-on disparate impacts. I find that example quite convincing and I'm curious what you think. I agree with you that the spread of the term has made it analytically toothless.
From what little I understand the original concept of intersectionality is that these things interact in complex ways and actually don't boil down into toting up Ds and Ps the way you claim. That is the way it tends to wind up working out in left-wing internet comment sections and diversity recruiting initiatives, though.
The catch with intersectionality as a political organizing principle is that people can identify with the 'privileged' part of their identity--look at Latino men, wealthy white gay men, or white women voting for Trump, for instance. (Or they may see that identity as less salient than, say, their Christianity or owning a business.) Also the interaction term is sometimes negative--it may be better to be a black woman than a black man in many cases, and European/North American culture is actually among the least homophobic, as any glance at a map of LGBT rights around the world will show.
Well said, thank you
I think you have an extremely limited understanding of intersectionality.
That may be, but this comment doesn't give me much to chew on on that front. Say more?
I've just never seen anybody who employs the concept in earnest to suggest it should be boiled down in such a black and white oppressor/oppressed way. The whole point is that things don't play out exactly like that in given circumstances because there are so many different layers at play. Your additional experiences that you claim cannot be explained within the construct absolutely can be. Actually maybe that's exactly what you did, but I am not going to do that close of a read at the mo'
Love it. Thanks for the re-publish.
It seems to me that intersectionality was all but made for the social media era, and/or that social media would have been the perfect platform for its mainstreaming. I've often reflected on the now-classic saying that goes, “If it's free, you're the product.” From the public's perspective, the product is the platform and the interactions it enables and facilitates—but as we know, social media, at its core, is in fact an data-mining/advertising machine that churns out bottomless, unimaginably specific data sets.
People so often accept their environments' projections without question. Many eventually start to behave according to the role in which they've been cast. In the 20-odd years since Facebook took the world by storm, social media has successfully made avatars of us all. (That's what it does: It's not free; you're the product. More specifically, a *data-manufactured virtual facsimile which you come to mistake as being YOU* is the product. Your intersectional identity is the product. It's easily digestible by the big machine.)
Years on, here we are treating each other not like uniquely complex individuals, but as elaborate yet still impossibly reductive set of data points stored in a black box whose machinations are classified. Personally, I don't see the systemic avatarization of humanity as being any less destructive or dehumanizing than the systemic discrimination decried by intersectionality faithfuls... but hey, what do I know?
I have similar feelings, in that I think intersectionality could be useful, but not as typically deployed. One of the biggest things missing in most intersectionality discussion is that the experience of every identity is highly contextual, which is to me the key thing that makes it impossible to make bright line distinctions like “X is always oppressed, Y is always privileged”.
You’re a gay man. That was a disadvantage in the LDS community. On the other hand it would have been neutral to downright positive if you were born into a family of Broadway players.
You’re white - makes you fit in better in LDS and in CS. But not great if you aspire to be in the NBA.
A black woman might face discrimination in some communities. Applying for the top job at Harvard? Definite advantage.
Black and gay in academia? Double Oppression Bonus Score! Black and gay in a lower class urban community? Buckle up for some hardcore homophobia white academics never want to talk about.
And so on. Even within an individual, we aren’t the same person all the time. Work, home, clubs, family, community, we play different roles. And our identities can be benefits or detriments differently in each one. You’d think people that talk about “code-switching” would get this.
I think you basically hit the nail on the head with a single phrase: "True and useful." The premise of "True Intersectionality" can be easily explained to a five year old, "Players have very little say in some traits from character creation but those traits can greatly influence gameplay."
This is true! So obviously true it doesn't make sense to argue against it. You don't need social theory.
Intersectionality (TM) and the attendant theorists, attempt to make this truth maximally useful. To me this is the great sin. I have seen this do enormous damage to the people I know across nearly every spectrum of things that Intersectionality (TM) cares about. It encourages agreeable "dominant" people to surrender their usefulness, while creating self-doubt in the "oppressed" people who feel they aren't useful enough. It creates institution-sized holes in understandings of usefulness that only geniuses and con artists can fill.
The resulting advice of the Intersectionality (TM) is so obviously attenuated to usefulness that it is distinctly different from, say, someone who is actually attenuated to sub-culture. "Travel more, meet new people, etc. etc." is a huge aesthetic and cultural gain that is left on the table! Maybe only a handful of people have the tact and talent to bring us the goods, but Intersectionality (TM) is on the margin clearly a deterrent to these people.
If you haven't seen it, I cannot recommend Jerrod Carmichael's "8" enough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whd1eheF-nE . Easily one of the best examples of True Intersectionality in the past 20 years, by someone who knows what he is doing.