[dfxm12]

Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it.

For most values of "we", sure. There are a few who are benefitting immensely from this at the expense of the rest of us, though. I'm not sure how to get your average voter interested in understanding things like intersectionality while conservative propaganda feeds into their basest predilections.

[lukifer]

This exemplifies the point: our very language has become politicized. Robin Hanson calls the phenomenon "RightTalk" [0]: we care less about outcomes, or even policy positions, than simply cajoling people to use the right keywords. A trigger word like "intersectionality" (whatever the intrinsic merits of the model), yields very different mental associations and emotional reactions [1] depending on who hears it, and the ideological/tribal waters in which they swim.

Probably the most absurd political divide I've ever heard in my life is between the slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter": on their surface meanings, not only are they logically compatible, but the latter actually eclipses and reinforces the former! But it's another case in point: the meanings of the phrases don't matter, let alone any ostensible outcomes. It's simply a way to wave a flag of team membership.

[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/07/beware-righttalkism.h...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

[AstralStorm]

No, the latter is attempting to wash out the problem, removing the mention of the people most affected by it. It's transparent and reactionary.

[rbecker]

Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions?

It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set.

It should not surprise you that the people whose group self-interests are proclaimed illegitimate by a social theory (more than just illegitimate - the cause of the suffering of all the other groups!), would not agree with that theory.

[dragonwriter]

> Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions?

> It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set.

That is not a conclusion of intersectionality. That is, to the extent it is a component of the anti-racism movement, much older than intersectionality and operates on a level logically orthogonal to intersectionality. It's basically the discrimination + position of power view of racism combined with the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive but racism is strongly negative.

(I get that this is confusing because right-wing critics of the movement keep taking the names of individual elements of theory embraced by segments of the left and attaching everything they disagree with by everyone on the left [and then, every generally-seen-as-bad movement in history whether it relates to either the particular element or the left] and attaching it rhetorically to that element, and the mass media—including the center-right corporate media attacked by the right as leftist—covers the right-wing attacks more than the theory itself, so that those attacks shape the understanding of the terms by people outside of either strongly-interested camp.)

[rbecker]

> That is not a conclusion of intersectionality.

Could you explain more? Because it seems to me that's how it's used in practice. See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change [1,2,3], and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears [4].

> the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive

Again, depends on the group. For example, white privilege is seen as negative, but it's just white group solidarity.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/28/kashmir-muslims-fe...

[2] https://time.com/5877176/kashmir-special-status-india-domici...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/why-ho...

[dragonwriter]

> > That is not a conclusion of intersectionality.

> Could you explain more?

Sure. Intersectionality is a comparatively recent concept that privilege and disadvantage experienced by individuals is not a simple additive or multiplicative combination of the privilege or disadvantage associated with isolated parts of their identities, but that the interaction of such group privilege and disadvantage is more complicated, and particularly that discourse and solutions centered on serving the needs of single-axis identity groups in isolation, even when aggregated, often do not well serve the interests and needs of individuals in overlapping disadvantaged groups; it specifically originated in the late-1980s/early-1990s black feminist movement with the argument that generalized race and gender dialogue missed the particularized issues faced by women of color.

The idea, on the other hand, that there are ethical differences between (in the US, particularly) white identity movements and black, etc., identity movements (and, more generally, in identity movements among locally advantaged classes and those of less advantaged ones), is many decades older than intersectionality theory, having a variety of different roots, the clearest theoretical one (that not the oldest or necessarily the most important) being the "prejudice plus institutional power" view of racism (first expressly articulated in the those terms in 1970), which was immediately applied to the idea of relative merit of group identity movements.

The two ideas can interact (as they do in, e.g., dialogue about "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism"), but are essentially orthogonal concepts. One can fully subscribe to either without subscribing to the other.

> See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change, and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears.

The difference there is about institutional power and single-axis identity movements. It has nothing to do with intersectionality, and everything to do with perceived alignment of group identity and preference with institutional power (Muslims being seen as disadvantaged with regard to the Hindu-dominated institutions in India, while no similar institutional disadvantage is perceived for the white ethnically-British in Britain.)

[rbecker]

> The difference there is about institutional power...

Doesn't that effectively mean only groups without the ability to stop immigration, can have legitimate reasons to stop it? As soon as you have institutional power (i.e. power to shape immigration law) your reasons for opposing immigration become illegitimate?