{"id":54213,"date":"2024-12-02T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=54213"},"modified":"2024-12-01T09:44:04","modified_gmt":"2024-12-01T14:44:04","slug":"qotd-intersectionality-on-campus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/12\/02\/qotd-intersectionality-on-campus\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Intersectionality on campus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>… intersectionality’s intellectual flaws translate into moral shortcomings. Importantly, it is blind to forms of harm that occur within<\/em> identity groups. For a black woman facing discrimination from a white man, intersectionality is great. But a gay woman sexually assaulted by another gay woman, or a black boy teased by another black boy for “acting white”, or a Muslim girl whose mother has forced her to wear the hijab<\/em> will find that intersectionality has no space for their experiences. It certainly does not recognize instances in which the arrow of harm runs in the “wrong” direction \u2014 a black man committing an antisemitic hate crime, for instance. The more popular intersectionality becomes, the less we should expect to hear these sorts of issues discussed in public.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most pernicious consequence of intersectionality, however, is its effect on the culture of elite college campuses. Some claims about “campuses-gone-crazy” are surely overblown. For instance, judging from my experience at Columbia, nobody believes there are 63 genders, and hardly anyone loves Soviet-style communism. (That said, the few communists on campus tend to despise intersectionality with an unusual passion.) But one thing is certainly not exaggerated: intersectionality dominates the day-to-day culture. It operates as a master formula by which social status is doled out. Being black and<\/em> queer is better than just being black or<\/em> queer, being Muslim and gender non-binary is better than being either one on its own, and so forth. By “better”, I mean that people are more excited to meet you, you’re spoken of more highly behind your back, and your friends enjoy an elevated social status for being associated with you.<\/p>\n

In this way, intersectionality creates a perverse social incentive structure. If you’re cis, straight, and white, you start at the bottom of the social hierarchy \u2014 especially if you’re a man, but also if you’re a woman. For such students, there is a strong incentive to create an identity that will help them attain a modicum of status. Some do this by becoming gender non-binary; others do it by experimenting with their sexuality under the catch-all label “queer”. In part, this is healthy college-aged exploration \u2014 finding oneself, as it were. But much of it amounts to needless confusion and pain imposed on hapless young people by the bizarre tenets of a new faith.<\/p>\n

Coleman Hughes, “Reflections on Intersectionality”, Quillette<\/em><\/a>, 2020-01-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… intersectionality’s intellectual flaws translate into moral shortcomings. Importantly, it is blind to forms of harm that occur within identity groups. For a black woman facing discrimination from a white man, intersectionality is great. But a gay woman sexually assaulted by another gay woman, or a black boy teased by another black boy for “acting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,53,41,13],"tags":[1307,196,99,764],"class_list":["post-54213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-intersectionality","tag-lgbt","tag-racism","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-e6p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54213"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92729,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54213\/revisions\/92729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}