It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.
That's... Exactly the opposite of a blind spot in intersectionality. The idea that those in the intersections of marginalized groups suffer more doesn't come from some bizarre belief that those at the top mistreat them twice as much. It comes from recognizing that more people feel comfortable mistreating them.
It's well-documented at this point that black women in the USA during slavery were mistreated just as much by white women as white men, despite the weight of patriarchy causing white women to be mistreated by white men as well: oppressor in one situation, oppressed in another.
Intersectionality is calling out that those differences are present within groups, and that no analysis based on only a single axis can ever explain the full situation.
Agreed. In tech especially, certain minority groups (East and South Asians) are over represented so our processes must evolve to deal with the situations that result from them.
I'd rather the processes evolve to treat all discrimination on factors such as race or caste as bad, regardless of the race or caste of the people doing the discriminating.
That’s the theory, which, if you actually took to its logical conclusion, would result in treating and evaluating every individual as an individual, and the entire concept of group identity as a short-hand mechanism for assigning “intersecting identities” would have to be abandoned.
It does not logically follows at all. Nothing in what previous poster said prevents analysis of group behavior or treatment. It does not make it impossible to talk about race or gender or age - it only makes it less naive.
It makes it impossible to assign an individual identity — and evaluate individual behavior and status — as merely a function of their coarse-grained group membership.
It does not make it impossible at all. And it also does not need to. You can talk about how groups are influenced or how they interact without making all the interaction to be result of "merely" just that.
> ... the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.
I think this is a textbook description of intersectionality[1].
> It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.
what's really bleakly funny is that you're right - that's how it's taken, but that's actually a major _point_ of intersectionality.
Well, "DEI" in the end is the neoliberalization of (the capitalist-corporate-compatible parts of) intersectionality, so it's not really surprising that something of significant value was lost in the appropriation.
It's well-documented at this point that black women in the USA during slavery were mistreated just as much by white women as white men, despite the weight of patriarchy causing white women to be mistreated by white men as well: oppressor in one situation, oppressed in another.
Intersectionality is calling out that those differences are present within groups, and that no analysis based on only a single axis can ever explain the full situation.