Live, Learn, Laugh “Intersectionality”

Thankfully, one never gets too old to learn new things. Recently, I learned two new things and relearned another. The first was an invented word, a thoughtful analysis of which revealed the second new thing.

According to orthodox American left-wing identity politics, everyone is somehow oppressed — except for older, white heterosexual males, of course. The left established and enforces a de facto hierarchy of supposedly-marginalized, oppressed groups which accepts that some groups have it worse than others. When identity groups’ hair-trigger senses of grievance conflict, progressives are obligated to favor the “more oppressed.”

First lesson: Such conflicts of interests are known as “intersectionality.” Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director of the African American Policy Forum and law professor at Columbia and UCLA, credits herself for inventing the term. It’s defined as ”the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”

Whatever its genesis or original intent, today, think of “intersectionality” as a system of inverse oppression “superiority.” In “intersectionality,” oppressed identity groups ranked higher on the “oppression” scale, i.e., the less-oppressed, are considered oppressors of those lower in the hierarchy.

How does it work? in June, Black Lives Matter halted the Toronto gay pride parade to air some grievances:

“’We are calling you out!’ Alexandria Williams, co-founder of the group’s Toronto chapter, shouted through a megaphone… Amid rainbow-colored smoke bombs, she accused event organizers of harboring “a historical and current culture of anti-blackness’ — a curious claim considering…the festival welcomed Black Lives Matter as ‘guests of honor.’

“Black Lives Matter refused to budge unless pride organizers acquiesced to a list of demands [of course], which included increased funding for black-related pride events, ‘prioritizing black trans women” in hiring, and “a commitment to more black deaf & hearing ASL interpreters. […] It took only 30 minutes for festival organizers to surrender…”

There were no pre-parade discussions, but that’s not how BLM operates. They know that threats and the identity-driven, non-evidential, always-undisputed subjective feelings of “more-oppressed” identity groups always intimidate “less-oppressed” progressives. Intersectionality, you know.

Even more weird, on the same day, in the Washington, DC, parade, “…members of No Justice No Pride, an ad-hoc coalition of local organizers, brought the [Gay Pride] parade to a halt, offering a different vision for what LGBTQ Pride looks like and demanding that the Capital Pride board bar the participation of institutions that harm LGBTQ2S communities, specifically naming metropolitan police as well as corporations who profit from pipelines and war.”

(One wonders: Should LGBTQ v. LGBTQ intersectionality be called “intra-intersectionality?”)

The second and, perhaps, more practical lesson: Left-wing identity groups clearly don’t like each other very much. In that context, it’s no mystery why none of them like conservatives at all.

Finally, the silliness of these and other, similar, episodes reminds one that the American left never runs out of unproductive ways to trivialize and embarrass themselves while entertaining normal Americans.

http://www.ldnews.com/story/opinion/2017/07/12/live-learn-laugh-intersectionality/472624001/