Intersectionality leads directly to the hatred we see on college campuses and other progressive enclaves

There seems to be a sense of shock and sadness at the sudden rise in hate, as if this were entirely unexpected, but there shouldn’t be.  This is the logical outcome of dividing the world into the oppressed who can do no wrong and the oppressors who are never right.

“The rats need to be eliminated from Cornell,” claimed a website targeting the Center of Jewish Living at Cornell University.  Another threat on the same site called for people to follow Jews home and “slit their throats.”  A few days earlier, a so-called professor of history, Russel Rickford claimed he was “energized” and “exhilarated” by Hamas’ unprovoked slaughter of 1,400 Israelis.  “Hamas has shifted the balance of power,” he said at a rally in Ithaca, New York on October 17. “Hamas has punctured the illusion of its invincibility. That’s what they’ve done. You don’t have to be a Hamas supporter to recognize that. You don’t have to be a Hamas supporter to recognize that. Hamas has changed the terms of debate.”  He continued, “It was exhilarating, it was energizing. And if it weren’t exhilarating by this challenge to the monopoly of violence – by this shifting to this balance of power – then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.”  Cornell University wasn’t alone.  Some 30 student groups at Harvard proclaimed their support for the terrorists of Hamas over the democratic citizens of Israel, after those same citizens, young, old, even infants were slaughtered.  At George Washington University, similar sentiments were projected onto campus buildings including “Glory to Our Martyrs” and “Free Palestine From The River to the Sea.”  Other statements blamed the university itself for supporting genocide, claiming “GW the blood of Palestine is on your hands,” “GW is complicit in genocide in Gaza,” “Your tuition is funding genocide in Gaza,” and “President Granberg is complicit in genocide in Gaza.”  Even high school students have been swept up in the pro-Hamas propaganda, when a 16-year old girl at Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women participated in a walk out and brandished a sign claiming the world needs to be “clean” of Jews.  “Everyone is scared of Israel and their hate crimes. [President Joe] Biden is supporting a genocide,” she explained.  These and other disturbing developments have left many – including the current occupant of the White House – to wonder what dark virus of the mind appears to have infected academia and what to do about it.  The situation is so severe that the Biden Administration has even gone so far as to unveil “new actions” to combat the “alarming” uptick in antisemitism on college campuses.  According to NBC News, “The departments of Justice and Homeland Security are partnering with campus law enforcement to track hate-related threats and provide federal resources to schools.”  The actions come amid the White House expressing concern over “an extremely disturbing pattern of antisemitic messages.”  “These grotesque sentiments and actions shock the conscience and turn the stomach. They also recall our commitment that can’t be forgotten: ‘never again,’” spokesman Andrew Bates explained.

Overall, there seems to be a sense of shock and sadness at what has been perceived as a sudden rise in hate, as if this were entirely unexpected, like finding out you have Stage IV cancer before exhibiting a single symptom, but there shouldn’t be.  To me at least, this is the logical outcome of the intersectionalist philosophy that has been metastasizing – to continue the analogy – in academia and other progressive enclaves for decades.  The term itself was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberle Crenshaw to describe how race, class, and gender “intersect” with one another and overlap.  Professor Crenshaw first used it in a paper for the University of Chicago Legal Forum, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”  At the time, she was differentiating the experience of black women and black men, believing black women faced more hardships because of both their race and their gender.  As she put it,  “I will center Black women…in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences with a single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences.  Not only will this juxtaposition reveal how Black women are theoretically erased, it will also illustrate how this framework imports its own theoretical limitations that undermine efforts to broaden feminist and antiracist analyses.  With Black women as a starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis.  I want to suggest further that this single axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry into the experiences of otherwise privileged members of the group.”  On the surface the concept might seem an obvious, non-controversial statement of fact, and many including Professor Crenshaw herself still insist that is the case.  A black woman can be discriminated against both because she is a minority and because she is a female, at times even by members of her own minority group.  Likewise, a black, homosexual man can be discriminated against because of both his race and sexual preference.  As frequently happens, however, ideas can take on a life of their own, evolving beyond their original conceptions.  Whether she wanted it or not, the framework that Professor Crenshaw developed has since been folded into the collectivist philosophy underlying socialism.  Rather than viewing any potential intersectional phenomena from the perspective of an individual black woman, the intersection of variously oppressed groups has become the dominant interpretation.

Today, Dictionary.com specifically addresses the “group” aspect in their simple online definition, “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”  I cannot speak for Ms. Crenshaw, but it seems overwhelmingly obvious to me that this shift was intentional, purely for political purposes:  Individual minority groups do not have enough votes on their own to advance progressive causes.  To maximize their political power, disparate groups needed to be convinced that their plight was shared.  The challenges faced by Asians and blacks, for example, do not have much in common in reality, but if both are marginalized, disadvantaged, and oppressed by the white man, suddenly they can stand in solidarity.  Black Lives Matter has, in fact, made this solidarity a centerpiece of their response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7.  Almost immediately, they began comparing their “oppression” in the United States to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.  “We, too, understand what it means to be surveilled, dehumanized, property seized, families separated, our people criminalized, and slaughtered with impunity, locked up in droves, and when we resist they call us terrorists,” wrote Black Lives Matter Grassroots in the aftermath of the largest slaughter of Jews in a single day since the holocaust.

Kali Halloway, writing for the progressive magazine, The Nation, recently detailed the history of this relationship, noting “Solidarity Between BLM and Palestine Has Deep Roots.”  “Historically, radical Black activists have found kinship with the Palestinian cause. During his third trip to the Middle East in 1964, Malcolm X advocated for ‘the right of the Arab refugees to return to their Palestine homeland.’ Two months later, he wrote in the English-language Egyptian Gazette, ‘There are over 100 million of our people in the western hemisphere who are of African origin. Just because our forefathers once lived here in Africa, would this give Afro-Americans the right to come back here to the mother continent to drive the rightful citizens…from their cities, confiscate all their property for ourselves, and set up a ‘new Afro-American nation’—as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?’”  Even before the attack on October 7, “a coalition of journalists, artists, and organizers representing Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project 100, and other groups, organized by Dream Defenders, spent 10 days in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel.”  Ahmad Abuznaid, a cofounder of Dream Defenders, told Ebony magazine at the time, “We thought the connections between the African American leadership of the movement in the US and those on the ground in Palestine needed to be reestablished and fortified.  As a Palestinian who has learned a great deal about struggle, movement, militancy, and liberation from African Americans in the US, I dreamed of the day where I could bring that power back to my people in Palestine.”  The result was the creation of an aligned group, Black for Palestine which issued the “Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine,” signed by more than “1,000 Black scholars, activists, students, and artists.”  At the same time, Ms. Halloway cautioned her readers not to fall for the claims of right wing “activists” like Christopher Rufo who see this as an opportunity to “create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind.”  In her view, the solidarity we are witnessing now “is rooted not in rhetoric, but in organizing, mutual aid, and the radical idea that everybody—everybody—has got to be free.”

This might be true, rather technically speaking, but it amounts to a classic distinction with no difference.  The concept of colonization has, in fact, pervaded the discourse in far more than a merely rhetorical fashion.  Zereena Grewal, a professor of American Studies at Yale, a contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and others, provided a perfect example.  In the immediate aftermath of the attack,  she posted on X, “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.”  Later, she claimed “Settlers are not civilians.  This is not hard.”  From this perspective, all that matters is what group one falls into, either colonizer or colonized, oppressor or oppressed.  Agency is entirely stripped away.  It does not matter that the young people slaughtered at a concert on October 7 had no part and bear no responsibility for the establishment of Israel in 1948, or that the Palestinian people today are not the same group that was dispossessed generations are ago, or that even that they voted Hamas, a designated terrorist into power in the first place.  The only relevant fact is what group one belongs to in the present, and in that context, the oppressed are always justified no matter how barbaric their actions and the oppressor is always wrong no matter how obvious their right to defend themselves.  Ironically, it doesn’t even matter that the beliefs of the oppressed group would be considered largely amoral if they were held by the oppressor.  It is little appreciated, at times, how radically different the world view of progressives espousing solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinians themselves actually are.  Women in Palestine have few, if any, rights.  Homosexuals, none.  Transgender are likely to be executed on the spot.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion, things we are told are so important to progressives in the United States do not exist.  If Hamas were put in charge of the world right now, all of the advances progressives cheer as necessary to perfect society would be wiped completely away in an instant.  Women wouldn’t be allowed to go to school, much less work and vote, assuming anyone could vote at all.  Conservatives, meanwhile, who continue to support something resembling traditional values and are even slightly hesitant to embrace radical transgender ideology, are routinely attacked as amoral retrogrades, even though by any objective standard they are far, far more progressive than any adherent of Hamas’ radical Islamist philosophy.  In a very real sense, progressives from Black Lives Matter to academia, are embracing and supporting the very things they claim to hate here at home.

This seems puzzling, something that cannot possibly be so, until you consider that morality, as it has been traditionally known, cannot exist after the complexities of the world and the millions upon millions of individual decisions that have created history in the past and drive it forward into the future are reduced to simple collectivist groups of oppressor and oppressed, ranked according to their level of victimhood.  Morality requires choice, the desire in each of us to do the right thing even when no one else is watching.  These are individual decisions that occur far, far below the level of the group, in how we treat our loved ones, neighbors, fellow members of the community, state, and country.  In this view, any group will have both good and bad people.  Even with an individual person there will be good and bad behavior, and each of us is responsible for our own behavior as we struggle, sometimes unsuccessfully, to be our best possible selves.  There are also behaviors that are considered unjustifiable under any circumstances – killing innocents, hacking up babies, maiming, torturing, and raping among them.  An individual that engages in such atrocities must always be brought to justice, even if we might sympathize with circumstances that lead to this point.  Collective action arises out of these individual behaviors; a group of mostly good people will generally speaking, be a more just and fair one than the opposite because a larger percentage of people will be making a larger percentage of morally correct decisions, treating people with dignity and respect.  While each individual is not responsible for the behavior of the group, their membership in it doesn’t protect them from all repercussions.  The majority of the soldiers who died fighting for the Confederates in the Civil War were not slaveholders themselves.  The majority of Germans during World War II did not personally lead Jews to the concentration camps.  There were members in both groups that retained their individual morality and even fought against the atrocities being committed in their name.  This was no protection, however, when the war came.  Similarly, if the Palestinians are indeed as righteous and justified as intersectionalists proclaim, they should stand up against the atrocities being perpetrated right now.  This is the obvious solution when a monstrous crime has been committed on your behalf, but progressives are incapable of calling for it because all they are concerned about is the group itself, however rotten or amoral much of it has become.  They support the Palestinians because in their eyes they were wronged, and they hate the Jews because they did the wronging.  For intersectionality to exist, nothing else matters. You cannot divvy the world up by race and expect any other outcome.