Andrew Sullivan supplements last week’s discussion of intersectionality in this week’s column in New York Magazine:
It’s also a useful insight, it seems to me, to see “intersectionality” as responding to a practical problem on the “social justice” left: how to prevent each oppressed group fighting the others. If everything is connected, and if you can’t separate out one oppressed identity from all the rest, then we have a chance for a truce: Everyone against white straight men! There’s something perfectly perverse about an anti-sexist and anti-racist movement agreeing on an “enemy” that is defined by sex and race. What’s also revealing is where the intolerance is strongest. Brookings’s Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias have crunched the numbers. The answer is: the most expensive colleges. Specifically:
The average enrollee at a college where students have attempted to restrict free speech comes from a family with an annual income $32,000 higher than that of the average student in America.
What you have here is an elite class paying for their kids to avoid ideas that might make them uncomfortable.
So the act of demonization is the result of coming to a conclusion in the arena of justice, no? A problem is identified and a malefactor, or group thereof, is identified. So far, so good. But then both an intellectual and physical violence is visited upon that malefactor, as discussed last week, Is this really an element of justice? Granted, pacifists are rarely winners, and the Hindu counter-example is really that of tactics, not strategy (or, as an unnamed colleague from 30 years ago said, “What if it hadn’t been the British, but the Nazis?”). However, we are not in the arena of governmentally enforced justice, but that of the pinnacles of higher education, implicitly loyal to the free debate of ideas.
Furthermore, if I were a member of one of these social justice groups, I’d have to be wondering about the leaders of the other groups – who are simply sincere, and which are trying to ride their horse to greater power? Justice should be harmonious; groups fighting each other should not require some overriding, new philosophy to meld them together into some faux-fighting force. If they’re at war with each other, either there’s some bad information out there – or some bad philosophy.
Finally, using force can be a counter-productive strategy. Andrew goes on to note an observation by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar that
Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed.
These are groups already, to some extent, distrustful of the Eastern liberal elite colleges; to visit violence upon them is unconscionable and unworthy of those Eastern elites (although I should point out that recent studies also point at well-educated conservatives as being among the strongest proponents of such groups as climate change denial and creationism). And it’s a betrayal of the principles of those colleges.
In essence, it sounds to me like they continue to be too lazy to work out the differences between the groups, to understand how justice must play into their social justice movement. They invent a new philosophy that justifies short-cuts, and employ it.
Let’s not play into the Marshal Tito fallacy, wherein disparate groups are forcibly bonded together, this time using bad philosophy. We’re already seeing the intellectual failures appear. The followers of intersectionality really need to be better than that.
And if they want to be better – each individual should spend a year in a small, dying town. Work in the diner, and SHUT UP. Listen to what these Americans have to say. Figure out where they’re coming from. Develop some empathy for them. If nothing else, learning your opponents intimately is always a good practice. But you might find out – they’re as sincere as you are. They just may hold different assumptions.
