It's easy to say that it feels like a psyop, but the levels of class reductionism - that is to say - the knee-jerk ridicule of intersectional shit or critical race theory stuff feels highly suspect. Like, you can't say white people are nerds (which they are) in a lot of anti-woke left spaces without harsh rebukes, and it seems really suspect to me. Is there a real fash pipeline in our midst? Are class reductionist white people that sensitive and defensive and... well... white to the point that they can't let go of their privilege even in the context of them being left?
This question makes me think of the woke CIA ad from a few weeks ago, because I think it was that kind of mid-2010s intersectionality-cum-imperialism that the "dirtbag" left kind of emerged as a cultural reaction to.
The self-seriousness, the focus on individual empowerment instead of collective power, the desire to climb patriarchal capitalist systems instead of tear them down, etc. All of it stuff that the dirtbag left took deliberately opposing positions on.
Unfortunately, I think part of that opposition included a reluctance to engage with intersectionality in any form or write it off as just another tool of empire. Especially for straight white guys who only really felt oppression economically and not socially.
It's made worse by the fact that a lot of white leftists in the U.S. are downwardly-mobile former members of the PMC, so their idea of the working class is some romanticized vision of white West Virginia coal miners or something.
I don't think this is a problem that's going to be solved by anything less than the majority of "middle-class" white people going flat broke and having to ally with working class PoC just for survival's sake.
obviously white male leftists (like me) need to improve but doesn't the liberal university discourse also need to? that discourse is why the woke cia ad exists in the first place and is a perfect metaphor for how it ignores POCs internationally
Well sure, but 1. I think that's a separate discussion and 2. The co-optation of certain language doesn't necessarily mean that the language has no value.
I mean, yes, the ad speaks to just how enslaved to imperial capitalism The Academy and many academics are. And granted, I've never heard anyone on any of the shop floors I've worked use intersectional "lingo." But those both speak to the fact that there is some liberatory power in intersectional discourse. At the very least, it gives marginalized people a more concrete way of expressing their lived reality than they previously had. The powers-that-be have to co-opt the language because otherwise it would be used against them.
In other words, it's used to legitimize necessary college-grad professions like the CIA, while at the same time it's excluded from (or even mocked in) basic education. Helps make sure the proles stay nice and ignorant and paying more attention to ESPN's play of the day than to their ever-worsening conditions.
I think when people have issue with "iNtErSectIOnalitY," it's not explicitly the theories they are complaining about, at least in a charitable interpretation.
Is it problematic to say that intersectionality and other popular theories are eminently good theories but in America they are practiced by college elites who are free to ignore class and non-American POCs?
I agree 100% that it's a classed discourse itself, or in its own terminology, it's a privilege to be able to speak about privileges, and intentionally so. Imho this is how reasonably smart, educated, 'nuanced' people can look the other way when Kamala Harris calls Guatemalans homophobic.
As theory predicts