Reality Check 101

The establishment of the United States of America was a total paradigm shift in the world at that time. The genius was in the notion that a nation could survive as a union of one diverse but united free people who could participate in government while simultaneously protecting themselves from tyranny.

Throughout America’s struggles with her sins, at least until the early 1960s, the purpose and goal remained the preservation of a “melting pot” of one people. It was a common assumption, celebrated as a virtue. Even Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement had its power in the recognition that a whole segment of citizenry had been disenfranchised from that “one people.”

Things are different now. Somehow that struggle, its vision and its very language, has been gradually high-jacked by forces completely antithetical to an [A]merica, upper case “A.” Through the deceptions of multiculturalism and Marxist-style appeals of factionism to multiculturally hyphenated populations, the nation is becoming ”[a]merica,” lower case “a.”

Enter the ascendency of intersectionalism. Kimberle W. Crenshaw has the dubious distinction of spawning this idea in 1989. She founded both the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) and the African-American Policy Forum.

Like so much of what comes from the left, intersectionalism is built on the premise that anyone who could conceivably be classified as a minority lives in an environment of multiple social and political oppressions. As one theorist, Evonnia Woods explains it, every oppression is part of a system of its own and as every separate category of victimization is added together with others by an individual or group, that voice rises in importance and power. A straight, white male has little right to be heard compared to a female Muslim feminist like Linda Sarsour.

It is not difficult to understand how, on the surface, intersectionality seems to be nothing more than an observation of the obvious. All of us live within networks of connections and influences. But that is not what is going on here. This is actually a doctrine and movement that seeks another total paradigm shift of historic proportions in American cultural and political history. It is an illegitimate distortion of the complexities of humanness for the purpose of harnessing the power of victimness.

Some purveyors of this thinly veiled class warfare are not shy. Evonnia Woods writes that the most difficult task for followers is to overcome good-bad or superior-inferior thinking. Another proponent calls for the use of “oversampling” in research (over emphasize minority populations in data) because decision-making is more valid when it is based on perspective and experience rather than by principle or fact. Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes “lived experience … is a better guide to truth than self-serving western and masculine styles of thinking.”

Intersectionality is dismissed by many on the right, but it is a dangerous faux-rights strategy. In the flow of public discourse and debate, the significance of one’s opinion and the right to express it is subject to one’s status in the intersectional web. If, perchance, the person is, for example, a conservative, white, pro-life male, his insignificance justifies shutting him down by force if necessary. He, after all, represents the oppressor — the western patriarchal privileged class.

Critics have noticed an almost religious zealotry in segments of the intersectional crowd. Original sin is privilege or power. Confession and repentance are “checking your privilege.” Conversion is becoming “woke” to your privilege and then ordering your thoughts away from it. The life of faith therefore becomes the fight against perceived injustices.

Joe Carter, editor for The Gospel Coalition, is off-base when he suggested in his column “What Christians Should Know About Intersectionality” that intersectionalism can be appropriated to understand Bible characters as oppressed in many ways and to interpret their experiences accordingly. It is extremely dangerous to apply a neo-Marxist-type system to the ancient world.

He is correct, however, with a few other cautions. First, the whole system has developed into experiences above realities, especially if inconvenient truths contradict those personal perspectives. Second, it creates new forms of “systematic sin.” A coherent culture or for that matter, a coherent life, cannot survive if it is not rooted in fact.

Of more immediate consequence are the growing instances of self-justified anarchist-style aggressiveness by the “aggrieved” against those insignificants they seem unable to tolerate. We must find the moral strength and will to combat the factionalism of intersectional-type philosophies. We must regain [A]merica again.