A “monster”? Now this is just getting outright absurd. It’s pure soccer-flopping. Are you really suggesting that mild criticism of your rhetoric is tantamount to calling you a “monster”? I mean, come on.
Claiming that I cannot possibly have any other motive than “domination” is calling me a monster. That is not how humans are. It’s not how anything is, no real creature is motivated only by “domination”. Thus, monster, because it describes something unnatural and imaginary.
And it’s not “mild”, you’ve just internalized the belief that characterizing white males as beings of pure evil is mild.
Yet there were no such caveats here:
Or another example from the video in the OP: since they were trying to appeal to a group of predominantly white male voters, they picked two very popular white male streamers to front the tour, and they were featured prominently on the website advertising it. I don’t think anyone would argue with choosing black women to lead a tour designed primarily to appeal to black female voters, yet here there were people arguing it was somehow giving in to racism to let white men see someone like themselves appealing to them.
There’s this weird attitude that “we’ve had to suffer bad thing X all these years (lack of representation in this case) so now you should too”. It’s also visible in the article @Babale quoted:
It’s bad that women were (and still are in many places) treated that way. We shouldn’t be accepting boys being treated badly either, let alone promoting it! Whatever happened to ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’?
I thought I said it above, but: not only do I think that a poor white man’s experience should take precedence over that of a middle class black queer woman in a discussion on poverty, but I hold that the academic definition of intersectionality agrees.
Only the cudgel variety of intersectionality is incapable of admitting this.
Unfortunately in the wild you’re far more likely to encounter the cudgel than the academic variance, as demonstrated by HMS’s refusal to admit that the guy who experienced poverty is going to be more of an expert on the experience of poverty, just like his hypothetical black queer woman is more of an expert on other forms of prejudice.
How come we take such a nuanced stance to avoid saying “yes” about the white guy, but when you had no idea what the issue at hand was, you felt comfortable saying:
Can you at least admit that, even if we don’t have enough information in the scenario @Alessan raised, that there are at least some scenarios where a white person, or a man, or a cis person, or (gasp) a cishet white man, might actually be the person that has the most relevant experience? Or is that probably never true, or at least vanishingly rare?
Yeah, this is what I was trying to get at.
The difference between the way the same exact hypothetical is treated depending on whether the hypothetical speaker is a white man or not is very telling. But, I guess HMS did admit that there IS a hierarchy, so it’s not really a gotcha.
I’d recommend that the people who believe there is not a hierarchy, or that it doesn’t cause problems, reread HMS’s posts.
Moderating:
This is getting much too personal. Get back to debating and not this weird argument.
Also, this occurred to me after the fact, but I’m genuinely very curious:
Why would you even ask if that’s a sincere question? What about it strikes you as insincere?
If intersectionality is about figuring out who is the person with the most knowledge and understanding of a given situation so we can weigh their perspective most heavily, then great, I think everyone can get behind that.
If intersectionality, or what you called “deference hierarchy”, is instead about figuring out who has Most Oppressed 
status and building a racially discriminatory hierarchy in reverse, I think most people would be opposed to that.
I’m not a mind reader, but @Alessan’s question seems well suited for making that distinction. In the former case, it should be obvious that, yes, sometimes the white person will have the most knowledge or perspective to understand a given issue. In the latter case, the cishet white dude is never gonna be given much consideration.
Why would we assume that a question designed to clarify this would be bad faith?
Intersectionality means many complex, non-contradictory things. One thing it means is that even though I am marginalized in certain ways, I need to keep in mind that I am privileged in many others.
Intersectionality has taught us that our familiarity with oppression and marginalization and inequality may be a limited familiarity. And that we should never assume that someone else is entirely privileged, since they may be marginalized in ways we haven’t noticed or acknowledged.
This can be misread as “everybody is privileged and everybody is marginalized, so don’t make a big whoop-de-doo over it”. That’s why we hear the litany of important structural oppressions — it doesn’t mean “if you ain’t on this list shut the fuck up”, or shouldn’t, but it does mean “here’s a quick rundown of the systemic oppressions that marginalize people; if none of these sound like they include you, and they appear to include people you’re interacting with, keep your privilege and their marginalization, along that axis, in mind”.
Sometimes some people admittedly do act as if the list is unabridged and final. Some people do seem to hold the attitude that “if you aren’t this, that, or this other type of person who is discriminated against and relegated to the edges of society, you’re most likely to be part of the problem and should listen instead of talk”. (In my experience, those most inclined to do this are people who don’t do their own thinking and analyzing and theorizing, but are instead camp followers, people who look to others to tell them what to think and believe). But excluding privileged voices from consideration is not the purpose of the litany. It’s to prevent continued exclusion of the traditionally excluded.
There are other hypothetical axes of oppression we haven’t thought about yet, that aren’t on the list. And any of us might be marginalized or privileged with regards to it, whatever it may be. The serious aware person remains aware of that while also embracing the list of inequalities as a starting point, trying to see things from other folks’ perspective when those perspectives may be a lot different (and less cushy) than our own.
I think this is a very good point that deserves further examination.
First, you’re absolutely correct, both the left and right purity test. But the purity testing on the left seems to hurt our ability to work together and be politically viable, while the purity testing on the right does not have this effect. Why?
I think it comes down to the way in which each side purity tests.
When the Right purity tests, they expel you for not falling in line with Trump. All of their purity testing is done in the pursuit of and consolidation of political power.
When the Left purity tests, it is completely uninterested in acquiring and wielding power. We purity test to critique power and criticize how it is being wielded. Often the purity testing is directed at electorally active Democrats, and is coming from people further to the left who don’t even think electoral politics is a viable means to fix our nation’s problems. (In the case cited above, with the Unfuck America Tour, the lady who got the Live criticizing the tour’s organization has repeatedly said that electoral politics is not the answer. In which case, why is she even getting involved with a political event like Unfuck America at all?)
I agree that the left is more prone to disengagement as a result of purity tests.
But what I don’t understand is this.
When Trump or the GOP talk endlessly about how much they hate hispanics, it causes their vote share among hispanics to go up.
When Trump sexually abuses women repeatedly, it doesn’t affect his voter support among women in the slightest. Trump has been convicted of sexual abuse, and has a history of being sexually inappropriate with underage girls.
When Anthony Weiner sent sexually suggestive photos of himself to women other than his wife, including a minor, his political career ended. He barely ranked in the 2013 primary for the democratic mayor of NYC.
And its not just the hardcore base. Trump won 77 million votes in 2024. He has hardcore MAGA supporters, but I’d rank those at about ~40 million voters. The other ~37 million voters are not phased in the slightest by any of Trump’s flaws or failings.
I cannot figure out why the left alienates people and the left becomes disengaged, but there is literally no bottom the right can drop to which will alienate moderates or disengage voters. Trump could literally rape and murder a child on the white house lawn, and he’d win 80 million votes in 2028.
I guess as you said, the far left feel disenfranchised by nature so they are more prone to disengagement, while the right are trying to protect their privilege and status, and are probably more prone to voter engagement no matter how odious the candidates are.
So, I think there are a couple of issues in play here.
For starters, most of the rhetoric of Trump and his party is not directed against “hispanics” but rather against “illegal immigrants”, thus focusing on actions rather than identity. For many Latino voters in the U.S., including those who naturalized or otherwise gained admission through being part of a privileged group (e.g. Cubans), whose families have been in the U.S. for many generations, or who gained legal status thanks to the Reagan amnesty of 1986, they are fine with crackdowns on illegal immigration, which they see as costing them tax money and contributing to lawlessness in their communities. What’s more, “Latino” is not a monolithic group, and actions directed against certain subsets (e.g. Venezuelans, Guatemalans, etc.) are not necessarily considered as attacks on other subgroups of “Latino”. Also, more and more Latinos are identifying religiously as evangelical or Pentecostal rather than Catholic, and are attending churches with conservative theology where many of the issues the Republicans have associated with the Democratic party are anathema.
Many of those women are unaware of Trump’s record on this issue, and many of them who are aware are in support of Trump on other issues. It should also be noted that patriarchal social structures also create spaces for certain women - those who adhere to traditional gender and sexual roles - to be protected and even celebrated. Women in those spaces would typically see Trump’s accusers as being not in the group worthy of protection, and indeed being the types who would bring down the structure that gives them their protection in the first place.
In general, identity is intersectional in its own way, and people with a varied mix of identities will often chose their own idiosyncratic way of reconciling them, when confronted with a binary political choice.
Going back to the OP, I was thinking there are a couple of dynamics that could be contributing in different ways to (the appearance of) the oppression hierarchy:
- The idea that it’s salutary or a good learning experience for members of privileged groups to experience prejudice, eg for men to experience sexism or white people to experience racism, so that they can better understand the experience of the more oppressed groups. In some cases this may extend to the idea they deserve to suffer somewhat, in order to pay for/balance out their prior privilege. This would cause people to be indifferent to or even support this kind of prejudice.
- Fear that criticising a minority group whose members are engaging in bad behaviour will lead to an increase of prejudice against innocent members of that group, and a belief that this will be worse than the original bad behaviour. This would lead people to avoid criticising (members of) oppressed groups even when it’s clearly warranted, while they feel no such restraint about criticising (members of) privileged groups, individually or as a group.
What do you all think? Are these real and common phenomena? Do they play a role in the double standards that we’ve been discussing?
In the minds of hispanics, the rhetoric isn’t directed at hispanics as a whole. But in the eyes of his white supremacist base, it is.
Among hispanics there are hierarchies. The native born feel superior to the naturalized. The naturalized feel superior to the illegal immigrants. The illegal immigrants feel superior to the criminal illegal immigrants. Plus from what little I know, different regions feel superior. The cubans feel superior, the Venezuelans feel superior. Supposedly the mexicans feel superior to the central Americans, etc.
There seems to be a lot of rhetoric among hispanics that ony those ‘inferior hispanics’ will be deported. They themselves will be fine. Even among the illegal immigrants, many seemed to feel Trump would only go after the illegal immigrants who were criminals.
But again, Trump’s base is the white supremacists. they hate anyone who isn’t white. And now Venezuelans are having their amnesty taken away, native born citizens are being deported, non-criminal immigrants are being deported. Hispanics who voted for Trump are seeing their law abiding illegal family members be deported.
Hispanics are not a monolith, and neither are white people. White people in Vermont do not vote the way white people in Mississippi do. But overall, there is a national trend of white people supporting the republican candidate.
My point is that hispanics seem to break themselves into groups of superior and inferior hispanics, and convince themselves that Trump will only oppress and deport the inferior hispanics. I feel this does tie into the OP since we’re talking about intersectionality. But again, in the eyes of Trump’s white supremacist base, all hispanics are bad. the hispanics who have been in America for 6 generations are bad, just like the illegal immigrants are bad.
I really don’t think you can claim that people are oblivious to Trump’s sexual abuses at this point, seeing how Trump has been a public figure for so long.
This article dives into how racial resentment and hostile sexism played out among various racial groups of women and their support of Trump.
The findings showed significant variation in how racial and gender attitudes influenced voting preferences among the groups of women surveyed, differentiated by race. For white women, racial resentment was a strong predictor of support for Trump. White women who scored higher on the racial resentment scale were much more likely to vote for the Republican candidate, suggesting that racial attitudes were a central factor in their voting decisions.
For Latina voters, racial resentment was associated with a moderate increase in Trump support, suggesting that for some in this group, negative views about other racial groups may have influenced their alignment with conservative positions. Similarly, a subset of Asian American women with higher racial resentment scores also showed slightly greater likelihood of supporting Trump, though this effect was less pronounced than among white women.
In contrast, Black women showed much lower levels of racial resentment, which corresponded with their strong support for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The findings imply that Black women, whose political choices are often shaped by experiences of racial inequality, were more unified in their voting patterns and less influenced by racial resentment in their decisions.
The study also found that hostile sexism played a unique role among Latina and Asian American women, who were more likely to support Trump if they scored high on the hostile sexism scale. This suggests that attitudes toward traditional gender roles influenced voting behavior within these groups.
These findings indicate that Latina and Asian American women’s voting choices may have been shaped by distinct social expectations related to gender, which differed from the factors that influenced Black women voters. For Black women, racial identity appeared to be a more cohesive and influential factor in voting decisions, while Latina and Asian American women’s choices were influenced by a mix of racial and gender attitudes.
Interestingly, the effect of hostile sexism on voting choice was less pronounced among both Black women and white women. While racial resentment significantly correlated with Trump support among white women, hostile sexism did not have the same strong effect. This difference implies that race, more than gender, influenced white women’s voting decisions, with many prioritizing racial attitudes over gender-based beliefs.
Basically, women aren’t a monolith either. White women who support Trump do so more because they identify with their race and find Trump’s racism very appealing. Meanwhile asian and latina women are motivated by racism, but not as much as white women. Also asian and latina women find Trump’s hostile sexism more appealing than white women find it. Asian and latina women intentionally voted for their own gender oppression, which apparently white women did not. Black women, being on the bottom of the racial totem pole, do not find Trump’s racism appealing at all for obvious reasons.
Black women voted more based on race, while asian and latina women voted on a mix of race and gender, while white women voted mostly based on race.
But yes, in a social hierarchy, a lot of white women feel that as long as they are subservient to white men, that they will enjoy a lot of privilege and status that will be denied to other racial groups.
The problem here is that what you likely did not notice is that the discussion was being dominated by some of the boys, while other boys were just as quiet or more so than the girls.
What then happens is when one of these quiet boys tries to speak up, to make their voice heard, they are told that they are already dominating the conversation, that their position is already being represented. The problem is that it is not, they do not agree with the boys that are dominating the conversation, they have their own opinions, but they are unable to share them, and find themselves even more on the outside. Just because they share one characteristic, they are assumed to be monolithic.
If a male voice is dominating the conversation, then address that with that individual. If men want to speak on topics that concern them, then they should be allowed to do so, even if other men have also spoken on that topic. The idea that they have already been spoken for is an extreme generalization.
Not everyone grows up being able to speak and be listened to their peers, some do have trouble speaking up, and are generally not listened to, even if they do happen to possess a penis.
It was a long time ago. My impression was that many boys spoke. But yes, there were probably some quiet boys, too.
It was certainly not a boy. Voices came from all around the circle. But i agree that it’s better to encourage the quiet to speak up than to silence anyone based on group membership.
Point is that it was not all the boys. Maybe it was a handful, maybe it was most, but I guarantee it was not all. But all of them are broadbrushed in these statements.
And the problem that is faced quite often is exactly that. Those who are quiet that finally find a reason to speak up are silenced based on their group membership. I see it, and experience it all the time.
Sure, but when you ask (from your previous post)
you really have to answer that question in terms of “how do Hispanics see this message?” rather than “how do white supremacist Trumpers see this message?” The former probably aren’t going to get pure, mainlined hate straight from the latter; and even if they did, they might well engage in wishful thinking and figure that the guy in charge is going to marginalize the latter and protect the former.
But yes, I agree its very much OP-relevant.
Would you agree that some are likely to be dismissive of them? “It’s all just he-said/she-said, some feminists trying to bring a great president down, nothing ever really proven, even E. Jean Carroll doesn’t remember exactly when she claimed it happened so how can you trust her?” I mean, motivated reasoning is a helluva drug…
I think some of it is, “of course he does. He’s a very powerful man, so he can get away with that. I admire really powerful men.”
I agree they are dismissive of them, but many of these people are the same people who froth at the mouth about made up pedophile rings that (unsurprisingly) only involve democrats.
My point is that, there are hardcore Trump supporters who lack critical thinking skills. But not all women are like that.
53% of voters in 2024 were women, and 45% of women voted for Trump. That is about 36 million women (of all races) who voted for Trump. Yes a good number of them are MAGA heads. But probably only half.
The other half of women still happily voted for Trump despite his long record of sex crimes against women and children. Like that article I posted mentioned, white women find Trump’s racism appealing, but not his sexism. So why did so many women place their racial privilege above their vulnerabilities as women? Maybe because women saw Trump as a threat to women in his personal life, but not to his voters as individuals, while they see Trumps racial policies benefiting them directly.
Gender solidarity is a myth. For both genders; if you find some non-gender-conforming man being beaten up for being gay, a crossdresser or whatever, it’s very unlikely for women to be the ones doing it. And divide-and-conquer very much applies, one of the most common and effective means of oppressing both genders is to split them into factions and convince one faction to hate the others.
It’s only surprising in the case of women because there’s been so much rhetoric about gender solidarity among women over the years that people tend to overlook that there’s never been much in reality. It’s just sort of assumed that women will all be on the same side.
While I agree gender solidarity is a myth, its interesting how women view themselves differently based on race.
White women, according to that study, don’t find Trump’s hostile sexism appealing, however they find his racism deeply appealing. Meanwhile latina women and asian women find Trump’s racism appealing, but less than white women. I guess I can understand that, because while latina and asian women view themseves as superior to black people, they also realize that in the US’s social hierarchy, they are seen as inferior to white people. So the appeal of racism probably isn’t as strong.
But its interesting how latina and asian women find hostile sexism appealing, but white women do not.
I could understand some women finding benevolent sexism desirable, studies have shown some women prefer men with benevolent sexism. But hostile sexism, what do latina and asian women get out of that? Benevolent sexism is about the abuse and domination of women. perhaps its because feminism isn’t as ingrained in the cultures where latinas and asians come from, or if their second generation immigrants they pick up those cultural values from community.
Benevolent sexism (BS) has detrimental effects on women, yet women prefer men with BS attitudes over those without. The predominant explanation for this paradox is that women respond to the superficially positive appearance of BS without being aware of its subtly harmful effects. We propose an alternative explanation drawn from evolutionary and sociocultural theories on mate preferences: Women find BS men attractive because BS attitudes and behaviors signal that a man is willing to invest. Five studies showed that women prefer men with BS attitudes (Studies 1a, 1b, and 3) and behaviors (Studies 2a and 2b), especially in mating contexts, because BS mates are perceived as willing to invest (protect, provide, and commit). Women preferred BS men despite also perceiving them as patronizing and undermining. These findings extend understanding of women’s motives for endorsing BS and suggest that women prefer BS men despite having awareness of the harmful consequences.