"Let's say that, like, I think white women need to kind of step up their game to be quite honest.
Like, sorry but I'm calling, I'm calling you [bleeped] out.
You really do because, like, you know
there's like- we can- I couldn't agree more with everything that these brilliant women are saying
but, like, I'm also seeing the silent killer which is a lot of white women at the top who are kind of
reinforcing a lot of old ideas, they're..."
If you're now thinking, "What the hell are you talking about?", you haven't spent much time on a modern college campus.
Intersectionality is a form of identity politics in which the value of your opinion
depends on how many victim groups you belong to.
At the bottom of the totem pole is the person everybody loves to hate - the straight white male.
And who's at the top?
Well, it's very hard to say because new groups claim victim status all the time. No one can keep track.
So, how does this intersectionality thing play out? Something like this:
Let's say you're a gay white woman.
"As a queer woman..."
Your opinion matters, but less than that of a gay black woman.
Why? Because while all women are oppressed by the patriarchy and all gays are oppressed by the
heterosexual majority, blacks have a victim status that whites obviously don't.
"Like, the guy at the top's louder,
it's harder to say, like, I think this should be a black writer..."
Of course, a gay black woman's victim status is less than that of a black trans woman who ranks below
a black Muslim trans woman, and so on. The more memberships you can claim in oppressed groups,
the more aggrieved you are, and the higher you rank. Get it?
Good, because it's about to get even more complicated.
Intersectionality takes your victim status and uses it as the basis for creating alliances with other victim groups.
"I'll just speak from my own personal experience.
It's just like I wasn't sure how to be an ally I wasn't sure what type- I got so caught up in like what kind
of terminology I was supposed to be using..."
Here's the logic: a black gay and a Hispanic gay may not belong to the same victim group racially.
But they do belong to the same victim group on the basis of their sexuality.
By focusing on the places where various victim identities intersect,
intersectionality creates a united "us-versus-them" paradigm: righteous victims rising up together to fight
the oppressor, those dreaded straight white men.
This explains why, at a rally protest the treatment of Palestinians by Israel,
you might see a contingent of lesbian activists. That's intersectionality at work.
They're so united by their victim status that it doesn't matter if
Islamists throw gays off of buildings or murder female family members who defy their father's wishes.
Victim solidarity trumps all other considerations.
That some professor tucked away in an ivory tower would come up with this nonsense is not surprising.
What is surprising and disturbing is that so many people actually go along with it.
"As I started to rise in television,
I started to just get more blunt and just start saying, like, 'I would like a black writer' because if I said 'diverse',
you know, you get 'well white is diverse', which is something somebody said to me and I was like...
'Wow'
I was like, 'it's not, cool'.
But to really, you know, I reached out to my, you know,
the women that I respect who are who are not white writers and directors and I said, 'what should I say?'
'What language should I use?', you know?
And I think it's worth it if you're in a position of
hiring power or a green-lighting power to, like, reach out to people that are not like you and say
'What can I do to be an ally?' and 'How can I how can I support writers of color and
LGBTQ and disabled writers, like, what can I do?'
Intersectionality promotes the biggest hoax of all, that we aren't individuals
who are to be judged on the basis of how we act but are merely members of groups to be judged on the basis
of our group identity. In other words, you and I as individuals with our unique
experiences, thoughts and ambitions count for nothing. Our racial and sexual identity count for everything.
It's hard to imagine an idea less likely to produce a free and equal America than that. But what do I know?
I'm just a straight white male.
I'm Ben Shapiro for Prager University.