by Robby Soave
But here we have an obvious issue: asking people about their oppression—even earnestly, out of a sincere desire to become better educated—is discouraged, and there’s no other way to gain this knowledge, since the oppressed themselves are the only experts. This makes it frustratingly difficult to have supportive conversations about oppression, let alone tense ones.
The second problem, which follows logically from the first, is the perfection problem. Very few people can grasp with 100 percent perfection the various requirements of intersectional progressivism, given that they aren’t allowed to interrogate the oppressed, who are the only source of knowledge about oppression. I once saw this issue explained perfectly in a blog post, written by a woman complaining about all that was required of her. “As an ally, my job is to not impose my own beliefs of what’s ‘right,’ but instead amplify the voices of the oppressed people that I’m trying to be an ally for,” she wrote. “Except that I shouldn’t bug them about educating me, because that’s not what they’re there for. And it’s my duty to talk about the issue of oppression in question, because it’s the job of all of us, rather than the oppressed people, to fix it. Except that when I talk, I shouldn’t be using my privilege to drown out the voices of the oppressed people. Also, I should get everything right, 100% of the time. Including the terminology that the oppressed people in question themselves disagree on.”28
Even the most well-intended person is bound to slip up. I once saw someone post a note on Facebook asking for help finding shelter for a wheelchair-bound neighbor.29 The immediate reply was this: “The only resource I have for you at the moment is in regards to the words wheelchair bound,” accompanied by a link to a Huffington Post article titled “Stop Saying ‘Wheelchair-Bound’ and Other Offensive Terms.” You probably didn’t know “wheelchair-bound” was offensive terminology—I certainly didn’t—and in any case you shouldn’t ask someone in a wheelchair what the correct terminology is, because it’s not that person’s job to educate you.
In the Daily Beast, Kristen Lopez described the 2018 Marvel superhero film Ant-Man and the Wasp as ableist—that is, disparaging of people with disabilities—for including a character who suffers from chronic pain and is attempting to cure her condition. “Instead of helping Ava find a way to cope [with] (and not necessarily eradicate) her disability, the film seeks to provide a cure.” That’s a bad thing, wrote Lopez, because not all disabled people want to overcome their disability.30 Who knew you could run afoul of disability activism by making a movie in which a character who suffers from chronic pain tries to overcome said pain?
The writer, academic, and activist Freddie deBoer once described an event he witnessed: “A 33-year-old Hispanic man, an Iraq war veteran who had served three tours and had become an outspoken critic of our presence there, [was] lectured about patriarchy by an affluent 22-year-old white liberal arts college student.”31 The veteran had committed a crime of the “wheelchair-bound” variety: he had called on other veterans to “man up” and denounce the war. What he did not and could not have known, since he had spent part of his adult life on a battlefield rather than in a feminist studies classroom, is that “man up” is a gendered term, and thus unacceptable.
According to deBoer, these incidents frequently resulted in would-be allies growing disheartened with the cause. Nobody’s perfect—and that’s an issue for intersectionality, since it demands total adherence to all facets of its approach.
The third problem, which grows out of the first two, is the coalition problem: it’s extremely difficult to form strategic relationships with groups outside the progressive left for the purpose of advancing a single issue. Take any cause—legalizing marijuana, for example. There are a lot of Americans who subscribe to a diverse range of ideologies, with some interest in the issue. There are liberals and leftists who think using marijuana is no big deal, there are libertarians (like myself) who think the government has no right telling consenting adults what they can put in their own bodies, and there are even some conservatives who think enforcing federal marijuana prohibition is a waste of law enforcement resources and a blow to states’ rights. People from all three of these groups could and should work together to advance marijuana decriminalization, despite their myriad differences on other issues. But intersectionality gets in the way, since the intersectional progressive only wants to work with people who oppose all the various strains of oppression—not just the ones relevant to the narrow issue of marijuana legalization.
It’s difficult to imagine, for instance, that one of the crowning achievements of recent single-issue advocacy—gay marriage—would have gone as relatively smoothly had intersectionality been as ubiquitous a decade ago as it is today. Gay marriage was in some sense the last non-intersectional leftist cause: activists who supported the issue were extremely disciplined and specifically avoided tying it to other, more fringe causes. Adherents of gay marriage, in fact, worked tirelessly to bring conservatives into the movement, stressing that gay people only wanted legal equality and sought to form the same kind of family arrangements that social conservatives believe are desirable for society. The marriage equality movement turned to Ted Olson, a Republican and former solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to represent it in the lawsuit against California’s Proposition 8, which had banned gay marriage.
Consider Andrew Sullivan making the case for gay marriage in a 1989 New Republic article. “Marriage provides an anchor, if an arbitrary and weak one, in the chaos of sex and relationships to which we are all prone,” he wrote. “It provides a mechanism for emotional stability, economic security, and the healthy rearing of the next generation. We rig the law in its favor not because we disparage all forms of relationship other than the nuclear family, but because we recognize that not to promote marriage would be to ask too much of human virtue. In the context of the weakened family’s effect upon the poor, it might also invite social disintegration.”32 It’s a fundamentally conservative argument, crafted specifically to appeal to conservatives. In my lifetime, support for gay marriage has increased from 27 percent in 1996 to 67 percent two decades later, and gay marriage is legal everywhere in the United States.33 This extremely happy development is in large part due to the work of a coalition that would be much harder to put together in the age of intersectional activism.
Contrast the triumph of gay marriage with some examples of the setbacks and infighting that occur within an intersectional framework. During the June 2017 Chicago Pride Parade in recognition of gay equality, organizers asked Laurel Grauer, a Jewish lesbian, to leave. Grauer had dared to carry a flag bearing a rainbow (the symbol of the LGBT community) and the Jewish Star of David.34 She was told her display made people feel unsafe. One might expect everybody who supports equal rights and dignity for LGBT people to be welcome at pride events, but from the standpoint of the organizers, the march was intended to be intersectional—meaning it was both pro-LGBT and “anti-Zionist.” (Anti-Zionists oppose the state of Israel’s existence.)
For the modern left, Jews are outranked by minority groups whose oppression is considered more serious than, and to some degree at odds with, their own. The incident at the Chicago Pride Parade is not a one-off. Linda Sarsour, an activist and a leader of the Women’s March, has made the dubious claim that anti-Semitism is “different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic.”35 Sarsour and fellow Women’s March leaders Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez have drawn criticism for their ties to controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who is widely considered to be an anti-Semite.
Or consider an illuminating episode involving the Democratic Socialists of America, the left-wing faction of the Democratic Party that got a huge boost from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. In January 2018, the DSA tweeted that it would be unveiling its Medicare for All campaign, an effort to extend the national health insurance program to everyone in the country. This was an unsurprising development—empowering the government to provide more comp
rehensive health care coverage is a fairly standard goal of liberal activists, not just the far left. More surprising was the furious blowback the DSA received from many of its own members who identified as disabled. The DSA’s Medicare for All committee had apparently failed to consult the Disability Working Group about the campaign’s rollout, which led the latter to protest that they were being left out of relevant decision-making. Since disabled people are especially affected by health care policy, the Medicare for All group had essentially failed to let disabled people be the experts on their own oppression—an intersectionality no-no. Amber A’Lee Frost, a Medicare for All activist and prominent DSA member known for appearing on the left-wing Chapo Trap House podcast, hit back, accusing her critics of trying to sabotage the movement with their “pathological anti-social behavior.” This made matters much worse: the comment was perceived as an attack on the autistic community.
Frost had committed an ism: ableism. Several dozen DSA members signed a petition demanding “that Amber A’Lee Frost immediately remove herself from any involvement, official or unofficial, with DSA’s Medicare for All campaign, and should she not, that she be removed.”36 Because intersectionality means casting suspicion on organizing efforts if these efforts do not make the marginalized the center of attention.
College campuses, where the grievances are significant but the stakes are low, play host to some of the most farcical examples of intersectionality-induced bickering. A particularly revelatory crisis emerged at Evergreen State College in Washington during the spring 2017 semester. Every year, activist students organized a Day of Action during which students of color would deliberately leave campus as a means of protest against racism. But in 2017, the activists decided to try something new: they would ask students of color to remain, and white people to leave. This tactic didn’t sit well with Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen. Weinstein was a fellow progressive—he supported Sanders over Hillary Clinton—and sympathized with the activists’ goals, but felt that the new plan for the Day of Action was unsound.
“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles, and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away,” Weinstein told an administrator. The latter, he contended, “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”37 In response, activists surrounded Weinstein outside his classroom and accused him of being a racist. “This is not a discussion!” they told him. A student activist, Hadley, later explained her actions to Vice correspondent Michael Moynihan: “You [Weinstein] don’t get to spread this problematic rhetoric.”
A subsequent dialogue between the activist students and college president George Bridges similarly spiraled out of control. During the meeting, activist students repeatedly belittled Bridges, a meek, bow-tie-wearing white man—even instructing him to keep his hands at his sides and stop pointing at people. “Fuck you, George!” said one student. “We don’t want to hear a goddamn thing you have to say.” When George asked the students to let him leave the room so he could use the lavatory, they told him to hold it. Hadley told Moynihan that Weinstein should go be a “racist and a piece of shit” somewhere else. The campus police told Weinstein they could no longer guarantee his safety on campus; he eventually resigned.
Each of these examples shows how activists who worship at the altar of intersectionality felt compelled to turn on people for committing venial sins. It’s not enough to share the intersectional progressives’ goals relating to a specific issue: one must also support their tactics, speak their language intuitively, defer to the wisdom of the oppressed without either speaking on their behalf or expecting them to speak for themselves, and commit to every other interrelated cause.
The intersectional approach often seems petty and performative. The symbol of the gay equality movement, the rainbow flag, was designed by the activist Gilbert Baker in 1978: its colors were pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet, which represented sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic, serenity, and spirit. In 2017, the city of Philadelphia debuted a new rainbow flag to celebrate Pride Month—this flag included brown and black stripes, in recognition of people of color. Many members of the LGBT community—particularly younger ones, according to BuzzFeed—liked the new intersectional flag, which takes a stand against homophobia and racism.38 But many older LGBT activists were confused, since none of the original colors reflected ethnicity at all. Will the flag eventually have to add stripes for Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans? What about the disabled community, and those who languish under the oppressions of sizeism?
The thinkers who first defined intersectionality probably hoped that by linking all kinds of oppression together, they would force people to fight against a wider swath of bad things. Patricia Hill Collins hinted at this when she wrote, “Many African Americans deny the existence of sexism, or see it as a secondary concern that is best addressed when the more pressing problem of racism has been solved. But if racism and sexism are deeply intertwined, racism can never be solved without seeing and challenging sexism.” Collins wanted to tie sexism together with racism, so that everybody fighting racism would have to fight sexism, too.
But the more isms added to the pile, the more tenuous this approach becomes. It’s all well and good to say that sexism is as pervasive a problem as racism, but the intersectional activist of 2018 is reaching much further and making many more demands. From the standpoint of this movement, a woman marching against Trump, against the Republican Party, against police brutality, against war, against sexual violence, and for Israel’s existence is not an ally or potential ally: she is an enemy. She is part of the problem. She has failed the test of intersectionality—she is not, as anti-Trump poet (yes, poet) Elisa Chavez put it, “intersectional as fuck.”39 She might as well have voted for Trump.
The rest of the book will put this understanding of intersectionality’s pervasive influence to good use as we focus on the various contingents of Zillennial activism, beginning with the anti-Trump resistance.
— TWO —
NAZI PUNCHING
ANTI-TRUMP, ANTI–FREE SPEECH, ANTIFA
A day before the Women’s March, spectators and activists of all stripes descended on Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of President Trump. Supporters of the new president wore “Make America Great Again” baseball caps and toted “Trump-Pence 2016” signs. Detractors were more colorful.
“Trump is the symptom, capitalism is the disease, socialism is the cure,” read one sign, wielded by a woman with a T-shirt depicting a clenched fist.
Others were at least funny: I spotted a man holding a sign featuring a cartoon Batman slapping Trump in the face with the caption “Stop tweeting!”—a parody of a drawing from the Batman comics, in which the caped crusader slaps Robin. (The image has become a popular meme—for all you less-savvy tech users, a meme is a funny picture accompanied by text and circulated on social media websites.)
The demonstrations were mostly peaceful. Mostly.
Masked protesters known simultaneously as the “black bloc” (because they wear black clothes and hoods to mask their identities) and “antifa” (as in anti-fascist) smashed the windows of a local Starbucks and a Bank of America. They also set a limousine on fire. How these acts of property damage were intended to undermine Trump remains a mystery, given that the CEO of Starbucks and many Bank of America employees were financial supporters of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The limo driver, we learned, was a Muslim immigrant.1
A rioter knocked a friend of mine, the journalist Philip Wegmann, to the ground, causing him to briefly lose consciousness—even though, Wegmann told me, he was wearing credentials that clearly identified him as a member of the press.2 Wegmann is a writer for conservative news outlets the Washington Examiner and the Daily Signal, however, and one of the main principles of the new activist left is that unfriendly media organizations sho
uld not have the right to cover their activities, even on public property. But it isn’t just conservative media outlets that bear the “unfriendly” designation; many activists are equally dismissive of mainstream news sources. One activist told me that she hates CNN just as much as Trump supporters do. “I don’t trust CNN,” she said. “I don’t trust any mainstream media.” Only explicitly leftist media organizations are permitted to cover the antics of the #Resistance.
Of course, the most famous victim of Inauguration Day violence was alt-right leader Richard Spencer, a white nationalist with some positive feelings about Trump. An Australian news channel was interviewing Spencer when a masked protester walked up to him and punched him in the face while the cameras were rolling.
One can—and should—strenuously object to Spencer’s racist opinions while still acknowledging his right to hold them. As a strictly legal matter, his speech is quite obviously protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has carved out a few exceptions in two hundred years of jurisprudence, but none of them would apply here. In the 2011 decision Snyder v. Phelps, for instance, the Court held 8–1 that the virulently anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church could picket military servicemembers’ funerals, waving signs that read “God hates you” and “Fag troops.” The fact that the church’s message was objectively offensive and emotionally damaging to the families of deceased soldiers was not enough to strip it of constitutional protections. If such speech is protected by the First Amendment, you can bet Spencer’s is, too.
