Hi! First thread aside from my introduction one in. As someone who’s instigating in politics more than ever before, I am still trying to understand the big deal with intersectionality…
Where would I belong in a intersectionality pyramid???
I’m not sure why you feel only the left cares about it. The right has been running on racial, religious and ethnic tension, anti-feminism, classism, nativism, etc. for centuries. Read up on the southern strategy.
As a general rule of thumb the left is socially egalitarian, the right believes in social hierarchies. Both sides place value on identity politics.
I consider myself reasonably conversant in politics (at least in the US), and I’m a liberal. I have never even heard the term “intersectionality” before.
- I’m not see any obsession with intersectionality on the left.
- We don’t know anything about you or which of many triangles you are referring to, so your guess is as good as mine. Up and a little to the left?
Well I am newbie so I am still trying to understand
I have autism[supposedly], struggle with weight issues and I am a Mexican dude of Argentine descent
As far bullying goes, 4th grade was the worst year in that case.
I guess that’s a data point in how out of touch traditional liberals are with the postmodern academic left. It doesn’t really surprise me though. Most older liberals simply don’t believe that (say) the events at Evergreen are not just a fringe aberration. Identity politics rule; anyone who grew up with rights-based liberalism in the 20th century would not recognize the modern academic left as liberalism at all. Indeed, it’s not.
Wikipedia covers the issue:
The concept is trendy among the multicultural left. It has its critics, many of them on the left.
(FTR, this liberal first heard of it and looked it up in Wikipedia last Summer/Fall. The underlying concept was a familiar one though, and I heard echoes of it from 1970s and 1980s writings.)
Because it attempts to address a person’s entire self and tries to be a comprehensive in addressing the ways different combinations of identities might affect the way various aspects of that person might interact with society at large. I guess people like it because it tries to be thorough.
What do you think about it?
Is an interesting, yet stupid concept at the same time.
Because you don’t always have to obsess over implying you can get all advantages at once. Look at black men, you can’t say black men have it better than their female counterparts.
-Incarceration rate
-Too much pressure to be tough
-Less likely to attend college
-Highest infant mortality rate
-Worst stereotype of all time yet
- Black men were also always the biggest targets of racists, to this day they still are technically…
Moved from Elections to IMHO.
[/moderating]
I think the underlying point is you have to look at race, gender, class, sexual preferences, gender conforming, this, that, and the other at the same time.
It doesn’t necessarily say one or another combo invariably has it the roughest.
That’s not a defense btw - my gut responses vary from, “No kidding”, to “Needless complication”, depending upon the underlying question.
Still, the obsession is migraine-inducing
Which is interesting because the reaction here is mainly a collective shrug. This feels like the “Obama as Messiah” thing where what I’m constantly told I’m obsessed with (per the conservative media) isn’t remotely what I think about.
My sole dip into hearing the term used was while listening to The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell where Bell relates how he used to tell a bit about a little white girl kissing everyone except him as a child and ending with the joke “And that little bitch was racist!” A few female friends told him that they didn’t like how he attacked her gender as part of his comments on racism. He reflected on it and decided that they were right: when you’re trying to end one form of social injustice, you don’t do it by propagating another form and changed the ending. Which makes sense to me although I’m sure you can stretch that into things I’m less agreeable about.
Obsession would be a strong word even for modern run-of-the-mill liberals. I hang out with mostly (California) liberals and the topic has never come up. As Riemann says, I think it’s pretty much limited to the academic left, though it leaks out a bit.
I think it’s fairly silly but also self limiting, and the trend in thinking may ultimately be a good one. If you extend intersectionality to its logical conclusion, then every person on Earth becomes their own unique intersection of groups. In that case, the very concept of group membership becomes meaningless. There are no inferences to be made about an intersection with exactly one member, and so the exercise is worthless. Maybe then we can treat people as individuals and not as stereotypical members of whatever label they claim to be.
But that’s a question of the audience. The typical older liberal on here isn’t obsessed with identity politics. The academic left, and thus many “progressive” students and younger people, are obsessed with identity politics to the detriment of traditional rights-based liberal values. Free speech is under attack on college campuses. The phenomenon is widespread, and worth more than a shrug.
You obviously don’t read all of the sites that I do, because I see the term eleventy bazillion times a day. (For instance, on TheMarySue.)
There has, of course, been a laudable movement in the past few decades to give a voice to the experiences of oppressed groups, to tell those in privileged groups to shut up and listen.
However, this has been taken to severe and highly problematic extremes, confusing social identity with virtue, either in the sense of quality of character or quality of ideas. Listening to the subjective narrative of the oppressed, “naming one’s own reality”, is extremely important for social progress; but it goes too far when it completely displaces any dialog of ideas. To a postmodern leftist, the notion of testing ideas in the crucible of debate is of no value when all of reality is a social construct. Dissenting voices have no place in this scheme, with words deemed literal violence, so free speech comes under attack in the guise of protecting the oppressed: “safe spaces” and Orwellian “no-platforming”.
All that matters in this worldview is intersectionality and the hierarchy of oppression, not principles or rights. Thus we see (for example) the bizarre phenomenon of LGBT groups uncritically supporting Islamic groups, because Muslims are seen oppressed allies, even if those groups are pro-Sharia and vehemently (or even violently) anti-LGBT; and bitter hostility toward Israel, a socially progressive and liberal nation, because Israel is deemed an oppressor.
At its worst, intersectionality is just another way of saying, “Everyone on my side is good, and can do no evil; everyone on the other side is evil, and can do no good.” Of course, this attitude is hardly limited to the Left - in fact, I’d say it is one of the few beliefs shared by human beings of every conceivable group or background. It’s tribalism, pure and simple; the only thing the Left does new is dress it with a postgraduate degree.
While I can easily understand how annoying this concept might be if forced to listen to an hour-long interview on NPR with a deadly earnest proponent who had zero sense of humor, that’s not to say that the notion is useless.
It sounds to me like a kind of triangulation. Or possibly triangulation cubed. Surely if you are trying to picture someone else’s perspective, the more data points, the better.
For instance, I am:
female/ poor/ white/ hetero/ middle-aged
A few things I have noticed about this combination is that everything’s a lot easier when you’re young and cute. And poverty definitely can make a big difference in whether you “look your age.”
Also, people tend to assume I’m a Trump voter, even though you’d think either the punk gear or the Rick & Morty gear would be a tipoff otherwise.
As for the OP, Luciano700, since you asked about your own intersectionality, all I can say is that because we have a long-standing tradition of terrible puns here, I tried really hard to think of a clever one for you as a Mexican of Argentinian descent (possibly involving pampas and pupusas) but I’m pretty awkward myself and I did not succeed. Welcome to the Boards, though, and don’t worry too much about the formal parsing of your identity experience. As someone else here said, once you factor in all those data points, it pretty much results in everyone’s personal perspective being unique.
:^)