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The Disconnectionality of Intersectionality
When I first heard about intersectionality, a word adopted and promoted by Critical Race Theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, I was conflicted. I hated the term because it was a fancy way to talk about the obvious—who doesn’t know that black women and gay Jews and handicapped trans people face more than one form of prejudice? But I also loved the term because I thought it gave a way to talk about class with people who focus on social identities like race and gender.
But I completely misunderstood how identitarians use “intersectionality”.
Crenshaw originally used the word to talk about race and sex—her focus was on legal cases where black men and white women were treated well enough that rules about racism or sexism did not apply, yet black women were being excluded. Intersectionality was quickly adopted by people who wanted to discuss interactions involving all forms of social identity. Crenshaw’s term works well when talking about groups that want acceptance and respect, which explains why the umbrella of intersectionality eventually covered “classism”, aka snobbery, the prejudice of richer people against poorer people.
But intersectionality fails when discussing class because economic class is about what we have and social identity is about who we are. We all want respect for our social identities, but, as Matt Breunig…
