A Brief History of Intersectionality
Navigating the complexities of woke ideology
By Corrie Mooney
Beginnings
A core concept behind the ideologies that form wokeism is intersectionality. It is frequently used alongside feminism, but it extends through every aspect of identity politics and can even be used as a synonym. Our prime minister has used it in a number of public speeches, including in the 2020 Speech from the throne. What does it mean and how does it apply to wokeness?
The term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, in 1989. She is one of the founders of Critical Race Theory, a framework for the understanding of “the relationship among race, racism and power”1, (It is not a ‘complex legal theory’, though it evolved in part out of legal studies). Crenshaw noted a legal case at General Motors in the mid 1970s2, which saw that, while GM had a reasonable amount of black male employees, and a fair amount of women, they had hired almost no black women. GM was cleared as they were neither discriminating on the basis of race, nor sex. She realized that oppressed identities could ‘intersect’ and add up to form a higher level of disadvantage. The concept of Intersectionality was born.
Over the following decade intersectionality made its way through the various grievance studies disciplines, from feminism to CRT, to post-colonial theory, gender studies and beyond. It provided the activist-academics within those disciplines with a useful framework to effectively evaluate between the different levels of oppression - as they saw it. Most normal people remained blissfully ignorant of the concept, until around ten years ago when those of us with far-left connections noticed it cropping up on social media platforms. This would typically take the form of intersectional tables, which assigned points, pluses or minuses, to various fixed identities.
You can try your own personal intersectionality test here.
An out-of-date intersectionality table
(kudos for those who can identify HOW it is out-of-date)
So, if there is evidence to support it, what is wrong with intersectionality?
Troubles
The first problem that is immediately evident to people who do not believe in judging people by the colour of their skin, is that it is judging people based on the colour of their skin. It is providing a value-judgement based on fixed identities. This is discrimination on prohibited grounds, and it violates the moral basis for why racism (sexism, homophobia, etc.) is wrong to begin with. Even worse, it can be used to create a hierarchy of values for how oppressed (or privileged) a human being is without knowing anything about who individuals actually are. More on this below.
The second problem is that Kimberlé’s study is based on environments where Affirmative Action has already been applied. Thus any insight it seems to offer is based on a biased dataset - discrimination based on identity has already been applied.
However, intersectionality becomes an even bigger problem when teamed up with other woke ideas.
Standpoint Epistemology
Standpoint Epistemology3 (or Standpoint Theory) is the idea that an oppressed group’s viewpoint is superior to an oppressors. This is because it is made in the world of the oppressor, while it also understands its own distinct viewpoint, which the oppressor presumably doesn’t. In feminism (where it originated) it can be explained as, ‘women understand men because they live in a man’s world, but men do not understand women because they don’t live in a woman’s world’. It is claimed that this standpoint view affords the oppressed a type of telescopic vision as compared to the oppressors 2D view. To simplify, the oppressed view is superior to the privileged view.
This concept is critical to wokeness, because it gives it a value-hierarchy.
Remember, to the woke, postmodernism has removed any certainty of knowledge – so how do you evaluate the merits of different viewpoints? Answer: Standpoint Theory. Those who are more oppressed, should be favoured, while those who are more privileged should be disfavoured. When this concept is conjoined with intersectionality, where the oppressed/privileged are now understood to be fixed identities, you have a hierarchy of fixed identities.4
While this idea was originally meant for discussions specifically about oppression and discrimination, it rapidly carried over to almost any possible discussion (since oppression is ‘systemic’, it is assumed to be everywhere). This is why even mildly disagreeing with an oppressed person on any subject can get people into trouble. This is why white woke liberals can have such a hard time contradicting black people on ANYTHING. This leads to an unintended consequence and real world danger of wokeism.
Standpoint Immunity
This is not a component of woke ideology, but it is a frequent and inevitable consequence of it. Given their broken grasp of reality, the woke are almost oblivious to the idea that the real world doesn’t read or follow their manifestos. The repercussions of wokeism can be severe.
When the privileged cannot question the oppressed, this can afford them a free pass on just about anything. This is why almost no noise comes out of the woke camp about the state of the Uighurs in China. This is why they are shockingly silent on the biggest pro-woman protests in human history taking place right now in Iran. From the treatment of homosexuals in Saudi Arabia, Africa and elsewhere to the abuse of women on Canadian First Nations reserves, to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, it’s crickets from woke activists. If they are deemed oppressed, they can be racist, they can be homophobic,
They can threaten to kill.
They can assault women.
They can beat children.
They can groom children.
They can conduct mass sexual assaults.
And they can rape. And will vilify fathers who do something about it.
If you are a part of the oppression hierarchy, then the privileged can’t say anything against you. Your victims are either less oppressed than you are (and deemed relatively privileged), or they are effectively stranded.
Some of the examples above did draw attention from authorities – eventually – but they all experienced significant resistance from woke captured institutions and woke adjacent media. For example, in Rotherham and other rust-belt UK towns who experienced the same nightmare, the woke aggressively argued that the South Asian gangs preyed upon all disadvantaged girls and that sexism in the police force was a primary driver. Both these points are highly dubious and meant to deflect from the responsibility of woke culture and influence. The police and authorities were intimidated by the Labour Party and left dominated councils who rejected and stigmatized any scrutiny of non-English non-white activities as racist tropes – and criminal elements within the South Asian community sensed it and exploited it. In the case of the Virginia father who protested the rape of his daughter in a washroom-by a male-bodied transgender person, they pressed prosecution against him right up until acquittal.
Again, intersectionality with Standpoint theory creates a hierarchy of identities, so that oppressed identities outrank less oppressed and privileged ones. In practice, the privileged find it difficult or impossible to question those deemed oppressed.
So, what does this hierarchy look like?
The Master Victims
In theory this hierarchy should be flexible, based on different situations- and very, very rarely this does happen. However, the system almost always ends up being rigid. It is a power structure and those at the top don’t want to give up being the king of the castle. About fifteen years ago, the hierarchy would have looked something like this:
An Old Intersectional Hierarchy
This is generally the order of the progressive stacking of the Occupy Wallstreet movement in 2011.
Note that under the principles of intersectionality, multiple identities should add up to higher levels of status, though outside of purely woke, far left circles, this almost never happens. Why? Because of the unintended consequences of standpoint immunity.
It’s also important to note that as a movement they need a bad guy to fight against. A scapegoat. A boogeyman. And it’s quite clear who that is.
And the Victors of the Oppression Olympics are…?
Like with all hierarchies, power gets concentrated at the top over time, to the detriment of everyone else on the ladder, while those on the bottom fall off completely. As such what used to be ‘POC’ (People of Colour) became BIPOC – as the Black and Indigenous emerged as front runner ‘racialized’ minorities.5 Meanwhile, other visible minorities -who generally became successful- slipped toward ‘white adjacent’ status, except when their victimhood serves the purpose of the BI group, (the most noted exception here being the Palestinians, but there has been moderately effective pushback from the Jewish community).
Over in the second rank LGBT group (Which had originally started off as GL… something), the T aggressively pushed up to the top and is now challenging the BI hegemons. Additional letters and numbers have been added: (2SLGBTQIA+), while in reality the LGB are being shunted to a privileged status.
Disability and Fat studies have worked their way on the hierarchy, but generally fall below the LGBT grouping, and are usually only seen as intersectional contributors; that is, they only contribute as intersectional bonus points in organizations where intersectionality can fully apply itself.
The working class was ejected long ago and sometimes even takes the ‘most disfavoured’ title. The poor (but not working class) are almost completely ignored.
Some erosion of Standpoint Immunity can be seen in western societies as wokeism becomes stronger. Many black and indigenous activists or politicians have been silenced if they don’t toe the woke line. Again however, these situations are typically where wokeism has become dominant, and where they explicitly speak out against wokeism or dare to line up with Conservative opponents. A great example of this is school board trustee, Mike Ramsay.
There is also the situation of the Woke-adjacent or Woke-oblivious liberals, who do not yet see or understand wokeism as being distinct from liberal values. Occasionally, properly liberal viewpoints shine through confused woke narratives. A great example of this is former Ontario Premier Bob Rae’s almost single-handed campaign to help the Rohingya.
Moving Forward
In 2023 there are two kings of the castle: The Trans-Queer identities and the Indigenous/Black racialized minority grouping. Everyone else is taking second seat to these groups. The TQ group is particularly dangerous but vulnerable. Wokeism has created tremendous social capital out of identities, and given that racialized minorities are considered a ‘closed group’, otherwise privileged identities can only gain access to favour by declaring a gender identity.6 Its dangers are clear, but its vulnerability lies in its acting as a social contagion and its complete detachment from reality. The pushback is well underway in the UK and the US, and just getting started in Canada.
There is some friction between the groups as the postmodernism inherent in the TQ group clashes with the essentialist tribalism of the racialized CRT/Post Colonial Theory group.
However, the longer term danger to multicultural societies is the racialized group, as it falls along predictable tribal lines, is the oh so human bad habit of dividing up into groups and fighting over land and resources. One does not need to read a great deal of history to understand what that can mean.
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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read The Original Sins of Wokeness
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Critical Race Theory, an Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/413/142/1660699/
Epistemology is the philosophy of how we know things, but academic geeks use the term as a synonym for ‘knowing’ or knowledge.
It gets even worse when structuralist ideas and Foucault’s power epistemology get twisted into it.
In Canada IBPOC is sometimes used to acknowledge the Indigenous as master victims, while the fight between I and B is still happening in the US.
A significant exception to this is the ‘pretendians’, white people who claim (often spurious) indigenous ancestry.
Thanks for the primer, which I needed because I find Woke ideas so repellent, I find them difficult to read.
My view is that the process you have outlined is commensurate with the rise of working class/religious constituencies who drove the rise of Trump. Wokeism and the civilizational/racial and sexual narratives it brought in its wake were a two pronged counter attack, where minorities were social justice trumps.
The twin pillars of this counter-attack were to go after the cultural/historical and the mainstream reproductive/familial roots of the enemy, delegitimize that enemy and destroy it through control of the architecture of social discourse and the social institutions that mediate it, and do it without necessarily having to get a democratic majority onside to get it done.
The once liberal hegemons quickly morphed into neo-clerical autocrats who moved from reasoned debate to oracular dogma and magical thinking, that rendered all opposition as heresy.
The result is a unique form of totalitarian governance that will almost inevitably lead to civil war if it isn't stopped, because the price of failing to do that will be total, in a game where the stakes are so enormous, no one can afford to lose.
This is an amazing resource on the dangers of intersectionality-in-practice. Thank you for shining a light! It is important that we name these toxic race ideologies and encourage critical thinking about them in every sphere. My recent contribution to this effort an essay on Race Ideology-in-Practice: Racial Equity in American Learning Environments may be found at: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/race-ideology-in-practice