This year, I was invited to participate in this Social Justice Warrior conference at Santa Clara University: https://www.scu.edu/fagothey-conference/. I guess I was invited to be the token libertarian. They asked me to speak about Intersectionality (a topic on which I have previously written nothing), and Immigration (on which my views are well-known). The conference is this Friday and Saturday, so I’ll be in the middle of it when this post goes up.

So I thought I would post here my comments on the concept of “intersectionality”. Note: since I have done zero academic work on this topic and in fact did not think about it at all before they invited me to go to this panel discussion, this is just armchair, personal opinions. If you want an academic-style discussion by people who work on this, go elsewhere.

What’s Intersectionality?

The term “intersectionality” (as I recently looked up) was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, a social-justice-activist lawyer and philosopher, who also happens to be a black woman. She gives an example of a company that was sued for discrimination against black women (DeGraffenreid v. General Motors). The company had black employees, and it also had female employees, but it had no black female employees. (The black employees were men doing manual labor; the female employees were white women doing secretarial work — or something like that.)

I guess the plaintiffs lost because the judge thought that (a) there was no racial discrimination since the company had black workers, and (b) there was no gender discrimination since the company had female workers, and (c) that’s all there is to it.

Crenshaw has a plausible case that there could still be discrimination, based on the category of ‘black women’. So the result of the intersection of these two categories (‘black’ and ‘woman’) can’t be predicted just from looking at each category separately.

So that led Crenshaw to talk about ‘intersectionality’, which I guess is the phenomenon of having multiple oppressed-people categories, with the suggestion that this can give you unique experiences of marginalization that are more than the sum of the forms of oppression due to the individual categories.

Is it Real?

Every concept attempts to capture some aspect of reality. In addition, a concept may also serve useful social functions. I’ll get to that part in a second.

As to capturing reality: Crenshaw’s example is very plausible on its face. It’s entirely possible that there could be discrimination against black women, even when there was no discrimination against black men, nor against white women. So I see no problem with recognizing intersectionality as a valid concept (one that succeeds in capturing a real phenomenon).

But now I want to talk about its social function.

The Social Function of ‘Intersectionality’

About Cultural Groups

There is a phenomenon among humans of forming ‘cultural groups’. Roughly, these are collections of humans who have some shared norms, beliefs, and practices; who influence each other and help to enforce those norms and practices; and who tend to ‘identify’ as members of that group.

These cultural groups used to be mainly tribes. Now they’re mainly nations. But also, within a large cultural group, there can be smaller ones (sub-cultures). Some cultural groups are territorially united (like nations); others are ideologically united (like ‘the libertarian movement’).

I note some pervasive features of cultures. One, they try to preserve and defend themselves. If it’s a territorial group, it will try to defend its territory against outsiders. If it’s an ideological group, it will will try to defend its beliefs against outsider beliefs.

Most cultural groups, by the way, hold extremely self-congratulatory beliefs; they tend to regard themselves as superior to all other groups. In the case of ideological groups (including religions), it is common to believe that one’s own belief system is the key to saving the world.

Another interesting feature: basically all cultural groups have status hierarchies. Social status is unequally distributed, and your status will tend to affect lots of things that people care about, such as how nice other group members are to you, how much respect you get, how much material resources you get, and mating opportunities. People generally want higher positions in these hierarchies.

The Social Justice Tribe

Social justice warriors are an example of an ideologically-united cultural group. (They often don’t like the label ‘Social Justice Warrior’. It is, however, the only common term I know of that refers to this specific group.)

This tribe has, as a core part of their identity, a self-conception as people who are fighting against prejudice in our society. They have core beliefs revolving around the pervasiveness and awfulness of this prejudice, especially racism and sexism (but there are also several other forms of prejudice that are held to be rampant).

The wider society is, for the SJW’s, divided into good and bad groups: the good people are the oppressed, and the bad people are the oppressors.

This tribe, by my read, had its origin in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. At that time, racial and gender prejudice was very bad and very obvious, so it is easy to understand why a movement would arise to fight against prejudice.

The movement did more than promote political change. It also provided a sense of meaning and identity for its members. It became a new tribe that people could identify with. When this happened, one could predict that the tribe would display the characteristics of human cultural groups mentioned above.

The Threat to the Tribe

Since shortly after its inception, the SJ Tribe has always faced a peculiar threat: the threat of its own success. The Tribe’s identity is centered around the belief in and opposition to rampant prejudice. Therefore, if the tribe were to actually succeed in its goals, that very success would undermine the tribe’s core beliefs. If they successfully defeat prejudice, they will have to stop believing that prejudice is rampant, they will have no reason (or greatly reduced reason) to devote themselves to fighting prejudice, and then the tribe will disband.

Preserving the Tribe

Tribes don’t voluntarily disband. This one has been under great pressure by the waning of prejudice in our society. It also, however, possesses impressive intellectual resources — some of the nation’s most clever and educated elites.

The solution to the above threat is to develop increasingly advanced, increasingly subtle prejudice detectors — so that when the obvious forms of prejudice disappear, you can still find pervasive injustices to fight against. The SJ tribe’s most talented elites have devoted decades to developing theories that help to identify more prejudice and more evils attributable to prejudice.

Enter “intersectionality”. As I see it, this concept is not simply an attempt to describe an aspect of reality (though, as I’ve indicated, it is that). It also serves as one example of the self-defense mechanism of the SJ subculture. Its social function is to enable one to see more forms of prejudice, and worse prejudice, than we could previously see without using that concept.

(It’s hardly the most striking example of that. But it’s the example that I was prompted to think about.)

Climbing the Status Hierarchy

In addition to serving a social function for the cultural group, the concept of intersectionality also serves a useful function for certain individuals: it helps them climb the social status hierarchy within the Social Justice Tribe.

Recall that in the SJ tribe, “oppressed” = Good, and “oppressor” = Bad. Note also that these classifications are group-based, not individual. (You don’t look at whether someone has individually oppressed someone else; you look at whether one group has oppressed another group.)

It is no accident that the person who introduced the idea of Intersectionality was a black woman. In introducing this concept, she was in effect reminding people that she was a member of two oppressed groups. Furthermore, members of multiple oppressed groups are even more oppressed than you would expect just from the oppression of their individual groups. Therefore, they are entitled to higher status in the SJ hierarchy than previously recognized.

The ‘black woman’ category could only be trumped by a category with three or more sources of oppression. (Maybe the best person in the world would be a poor, disabled, black, lesbian, Muslim, immigrant transwoman.) (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppression_Olympics.)

So What

Of course, none of this shows that intersectionality isn’t a real phenomenon. Indeed, the best tools for defending your ideological group and climbing the status hierarchy are going to be ideas that have intuitive plausibility and a basis in fact.

My aim is just to understand what is going on in our society. Lots of concepts are valid descriptions of some aspect of the world but don’t become popular like ‘intersectionality’ (which has very much taken root in academic-progressive culture, though not in the wider society). Most of the time, when you coin a new term and introduce a (semi-)new concept, it does not take hold, and people don’t wind up talking about it decades later.

So that was my analysis of why ‘intersectionality’ took hold: It is useful for particular members of the SJ sub-culture for promoting their status, and it is useful to the sub-culture as a whole for defending against the SJ sub-culture’s primary threat: the waning of prejudice.

Appendix: Reactions

Not everyone at the conference was happy with the above observations. I was on a panel, so each panelist gave a brief presentation, followed by a collective Q&A. I knew people wouldn’t like my thoughts, but I didn’t know exactly what they would say. Here are some of the things they said.

– One person couldn’t understand why anyone would hold my outdated view of cultures, which he thought most cultures don’t conform to. I am not sure, but I think he meant my view about status hierarchies, and I think he thought that most groups are not hierarchical.

– The same person objected to my ostensible view that people who resist oppression are just trying to get status in some academic subculture that those people themselves have never heard of. (Of course, I don’t think that and didn’t say that.)

– The same person objected to my ostensible view that the more subtle forms of oppression that people are objecting to today only recently appeared. (I don’t think that and didn’t say that either.)

– Two people strenuously denied that we (or left-wing activists, I guess?) have gotten any more sensitive to prejudice over the years; we’ve always been equally sensitive to all the same forms of (alleged) prejudice.

– One person strenuously insisted that SJW’s would be happy for their movement to disband due to having succeeded. They hope and pray for this day; they don’t want to be SJ activists, but they are just forced into it by the way the society keeps oppressing them.

Those were the main objections as I recall them.