Woke Identity Politics Contaminates Everything

Let’s say you’re a gay, white woman. Your opinion matters, but less than that of a gay, black woman. Why? Because while all women are oppressed by the patriarchy, and all gays are oppressed by the heterosexual majority, blacks have a victim status that whites obviously don’t.

Of course, a gay black woman’s victim status is less than that of a black trans woman, who ranks below a black, Muslim trans woman, and so on. The more memberships you can claim in “oppressed” groups, the more aggrieved you are, and the higher you rank.

Get it? Good, because it’s about to get even more complicated.

Intersectionality takes your victim status and uses it as the basis for creating alliances with other victim groups. Thirty or forty years ago, activists encouraged racial solidarity among blacks to combat oppression. But today, that’s not enough. Today’s activists demand blacks make common cause with other allegedly “oppressed” people—gays, lesbians, transgenders, Palestinians, Native Americans, whomever.

Here’s the logic:

A black gay and a Hispanic gay may not belong to the same victim group racially, but they do belong to the same victim group on the basis of their sexuality. By focusing on the places where various victim identities intersect, intersectionality creates a united “us” versus “them” paradigm:  righteous victims rising up together to fight the oppressor, those dreaded straight, white men.

This explains why at a rally protesting the treatment of Palestinians by Israel, you might see a contingent of lesbian activists. That’s intersectionality at work. They’re so united by their victim status that it doesn’t matter if Islamists throw gays off of buildings or murder female family members who defy their father’s wishes. Victim solidarity trumps all other considerations.

The term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia University.