Intersectionality is impossible. There I said it.
I read Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches a month ago. I like Lorde — she’s one of my favorite poets. Yet, her writing was hard to wrap your head around in one read because 1. She’s an amazing lyricist, and all her punch lines sound like they could be plastered onto a dorm poster and 2. and aside from her figurative forte, her writing focuses on women specifically of color. Inevitably, race plays a big role in her identity. However, I was getting caught in similar weeds of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: were certain behaviors like distrust against man justified because of society’s oppression on a race or sex? Or both? The questions intended to unveil the cultural misunderstanding of feminism became more complex.
Lorde’s essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House highlights this: her focus on intersectionality blurred the lines that distinguishes systems of power such as race and sex.
And in the middle of reading, I had to ask myself more questions: do I study only white females from the 18th or 19th century? Do I focus specifically on Asian or African-American females? Peering at my laptop beside me, my sister couldn’t help but chime in. I realized that it’s impossible to separate feminism from another fount of marginalization.
“But, I love Toni Morrison,” she said looking out at the sea coast. “Isn’t Morrison and Lorde the pioneers of intersectionality — exactly what we need right now?”
Because I love affirmation, I’ll go on ahead and agree. Intersectionality is and should be the reality, especially when talking about equality. No women is Woman A or Woman B — same applies to the rest on the spectrum. But, to understand and study intersectional anything requires a myriad of case studies that allow for a huge sample group to postulate from. Without comprehending the way of thinking that every individual is specific, dangerous generalizations are made. Thence, ignorance.
So, this Christmas break in order to kill the five hours at Logan Airport, I packed a book from a book store in Seattle called Not All Dead White Men by Donna Zuckerberg. It’s Mark’s sister talking about a sub-reddit community called Red Pill — fervent zealots of Trump who under Greek or Latin pseudonyms go online and praise xenophobia, sexism, and racism. And these guys are smart. It was an intersectionality that I had never seen before: it went from PG-13 inability to study intersectional feminism to the Rated-R horrid manipulation of intersectionality in flesh and existence
A strategy that these reddit-ers will use to rebuke counter-ideologies or simply critiques against their philosophy is what Zuckerberg calls “appropriative bait-and-switch”. It’s using the pop-words from movements that highlight systemic oppression, and Red Pill writers use these words to create confusion about who is being oppressed. She alludes to Imran Khan’s essay called “The Misandry Bubble” in the ‘manosphere’ which is a virtual universe on reddit and in it states this:
“Men have been killed due to ‘feminism.’ Children and fathers have returned to the West via ‘feminism.’ With all these misandric laws, one can fairly say that misandry is the new Jim Crow.”
Zuckerberg notes too that these Red Pill users supplement this way of thinking imposed by White people to stop women from exercising their right to choose how to take care of their bodies. It’s two separate timelines and waves of culture. To talk about the old Jim Crow laws concerning restricting Black eligible voters from voting post-Reconstruction era or the New Jim Crow as term that’s used to talk about the systemic incarceration that target Black men and turn this contextual issue into a way of thinking that oppresses another distinct group of marginalized left me in rage.
I finally stopped to start writing this at a men’s human right movement called A Voice for Men. They wrote an article about how “all men are Tom Robinson now” because so many have to endure the false rape allegations like Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I was aghast. Then luckily, Zuckerberg let out of some of the steam by speaking what was on my mind: they’re using racial issues into gender issues”.
Intersectionality is difficult. And go online: type in intersectionality, and the top articles are about how it’s nonsense or impossible. It seems like nonsense and just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo because it’s hard to understand. Then if there’s anything to take away from that phenomenon, it’s everyone is complex and a new story. To simply categorize and try to put someone into a tidy box is impossible. What I took away was the need to give Lorde’s writing one more shot. I felt like I needed to understand the vast variety of different stories that different females share because if there are Red Pill writers online persuading a mass who cannot meet new people outside of their affinity or culture to be exposed to intersectional and hybrid individuals, it’s up to students like me to be more knowledgable and assert the need to understanding of intersectional feminism to have meaningful conversations and to develop mind that embraces all sorts of new people and situations. This is what it takes to be kind, open-minded people — through blogs likes these.
In my Ethics class the past semester, we were reflecting upon certain race and gender issues in the current climate. And one of my peers abruptly shouted: “What the point for talking about these things? We’re 13 kids in a classroom in Massachusetts sitting in a circle talking about things that we can’t fix?” My heart sank. I didn’t know what to say to that because the cynic inside of me agreed with him. Then, my friend chimed in.
“We talk about these hard issues because these are the seeds that need to be sowed in our minds in order learn what is morally just and wrong, what is ethically right and wrong.” Society will be hush-hush about it, but as students we have the ability to ask the grey questions and experiment with our beliefs.
We read and purposefully push ourselves to see things we are uncomfortable with because we don’t want to fight. We want to understand. And without even probing at the unknown, how can we argue with our neighbors and peers about our beliefs without trying to understand how their logic works? Intersectionality means something for me, but Red Pill takes it another direction. Interpretations and points of view are crucial as Hamilton writes in the Federalist, to remove freedom of thought is the worse antidote than the poison itself. Then all is left to do is to curb the effects by educating ourselves in intersectionality.
