a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by aidrocsid
aidrocsid  ·  3453 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Explaining white privilege to a broke white person

That seems to be the problem with intersectionality in general. People pay lipservice to class, but in practice they're mostly focusing on other forms of identity politics. Instead of focusing primarily on the most unifying vector of intersectional privilege the more divisive demographics are emphasized, even those that don't have the same impact. Especially gender.

I always find it mind-blowing that the same exact statistics we use to demonstrate that black people are oppressed or at least disproportionately impoverished, when viewed in terms of gender, are portrayed to mean exactly the opposite. Increased incarceration rates and prison sentences for men indicates inherent or socially imposed male violence rather than a system that discriminates against men, but when they're black it's the opposite. This is clearly insane because they're for the most part literally the same people. So a black man is discriminated against as a black person but not as a man? Even though it's mostly black men that wind up in prison or get shot by the police or turn to crime because of lack of other prospects, that demographic conveniently disappears from the narrative.

I can't help but suspect ulterior motives when the same people that ignore class completely in their arguments also insist on moving the goalposts for what constitutes oppression based on what fits the proposed axis of privilege that the model is based around. Personally, I would think that an increased focus on class would be more beneficial to racial equality than focusing more on race. Having racially biased categories for permissible activity, behavior, and expression is what got us into this whole mess in the first place.