The Myth Of Intersectionality And Woke Political Alliances

The Frankfort school philosophy eventually completed the conceptualization of postmodern class warfare.  The shift from the social (economy) to the societal (minority groups perceived as oppressed: non-white, non-Christian, women, homosexuals).

In their ideology, ultimately the disparate so-called oppressed groups would emerge as one.  As the agent of the revolution, substituting the proletariat in carrying the promise of emancipation, rising against the oppressions inherent in Western societies and Christian values (embodied by the heterosexual white Christian male).

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This (postmodern) new left dream of a “convergence of struggles” – i.e. unite all social protest in a movement – presumes that oppressed groups recognize themselves in the fight led by other oppressed groups: The fight against a common enemy that will benefit all.

This is the same principle behind the concept of intersectionality, a term introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights activist and professor of law at Colombia University, in a paper for the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989 entitled: “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”.

In this paper, Kimberlé Crenshaw discussed how the “single-axis framework” treats race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience. According to her, this framework implicitly benefits the perspective of the most privileged members of the oppressed groups: elevate one category of analysis (one axis) above and to the detriment of the others.

She took the examples of sexism and racism claiming they focus specifically on one single identity discourse. As such, she criticized the feminist movement for focusing largely on white women's experiences and the antiracism movement for focusing largely on black men's experiences, both marginalizing African American women, being simultaneously black and female.

According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, the narrow focus of the “single-axis framework” prevents the representation of those who experienced multiple oppressions, such as black women, who experience the combined effect of practices that discriminate on the basis of race and on the basis of sex.

She continued by claiming that the lack of intersectionality convolutes the redistribution of opportunities among opposed groups. As such, it reinforces a hierarchy in which certain groups singularly disadvantaged (white women and black men in her examples) are incentivized to protect the source of their privilege. Therefore, discrimination is viewed through the lens of the most privileged within the group i.e. sexism through the lens of white women and racism through the lens of black men. Consequently, the experiences of those suffering from multiple discriminations (e.g. black women) are neglected.

And so, Kimberlé Crenshaw proposed intersectionality as a method to acknowledge that people can undergo more than one type of prejudice, to recognize the particular set of grievances lived by the several victim groups.

By intersecting axes of oppression, breaking the way the dominant social narratives classify those victim groups, the oppressed minorities would then be able to unify and form a political coalition enabling them to fight against the oppressive Western society.

Intersectionality is therefore a view of the world through group identity terms: gender, race, and sexuality attributes that make the victim status which in turn serve as a basis to establish alliances with other victim groups.  For example, black men have a common cause with other allegedly oppressed groups such as women or homosexuals.

Consequently, intersectionality is based on the oppressor vs. oppressed dichotomy. It creates an “us vs. them” paradigm, the “us” being the righteous victims rising together to fight oppression and “them” the antithesis: white, Christian, heterosexual men accused of all the evils.

Instead of judging people as individuals on the basis of their actions, unique experiences, thoughts, etc., intersectionality only views group identity (race, gender, sexuality). It values a person's opinion according to the number of victims’ groups this person belongs to.

With intersectionality, victim solidarity trumps all other considerations. It is the dream of a union between groups with opposite convictions. A chimeric coalition between beliefs in total contradiction.

The most blatant example is islamo-wokeism, an alliance against a perceived commonality of enemies; Western culture and civilization.  Feminists, under the principle of intersectionality, sympathize with an ideology that subordinates women to men.  And LGBT communities defend a theology that regards homosexuality as morally wrong and severely punishes it by law in many Muslim countries.

Indeed, with the political polarization shifting from the social to the societal, the new left-federating axis turned out to be wokeism and Islam in opposition to the right rejecting identity politics and Islamisation. Consequently, for the postmodern left, the fight against Islamophobia supports diversity and advances progressivism. 

Therefore, islamo-wokeism ended up being the union of both reactionary Islamist and liberal intellectuals with a communitarian vision of society, supposedly resisting together, thanks to intersectionality, against a common enemy deemed oppressive and Islamophobic.  

Islamo-wokeism is a political connivance between the decoloniality doctrine (critiques of the perceived superiority of Western culture) and left “Third Worldism” (philosophy attributing the responsibility for poverty in the Third World to the interventions of Western countries). Islamo-wokeism is an ideology built on the hatred of Western tradition and ethnomasochism.

For those reasons, the left regards the Muslim world as virtuous in opposition to the so-called oppressive Western Christian world (hence why the Third Worldist liberals side with Palestine against Israel, allied with the United States i.e. the West). In addition, those postmodern Marxists are fascinated by Islamic totalitarianism, a totalitarianism that orthodox Marxism failed to impose in Europe in the 20th century. As per the Islamists, they appeal for tolerance and mercy in accordance with the woke principles despite their contradictory value system.

Consequently, even though the left typically disdains religion and the traditional and moral requirements it entails and Islam embodies the opposite of a Western progressivism judged decadent by such a traditional religion, both created an unlikely alliance built on their desire to bring down the West, perceived as the source of evil in the world. They formed a coalition on their supposed oppressed status. And as long as Islam will play the victim in Western societies, wokeism will provide solicitude and help. 

However, such a political alliance against the so-called oppressors will not take long to implode as soon as one party feels strong enough to impose values according to its principles. For example, in June 2013, in Hamtramck, Michigan, the Muslim-majority council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property to the dismay of the left feeling betrayed. In Belgium, a homophobia awareness campaign in a high school ended in a show of force from Muslim students shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) while spitting on the LGBT flag. Nevertheless, for now, the woke prefer to turn a blind eye to Islamists taking precedence over LGBT convictions. 

Under the guise of intersectionality, the progressive left supports the establishment of political Islam in Western societies, an all-encompassing system that rules every aspect of life: religion (din), state (dawlah), and law (shariah).   Islamo-wokeism is therefore proof that the fiction of intersectionality produces individuals suffering from substantial cognitive dissonances in the face of reality. 

However, Islam being the affirmation of civilization, the more it will assert itself in Western societies, the more the woke will realize that the Islamic identity is not as progressive as fantasized.