Social Justice Must Be Complicated, Because Oppression Is Never Simple
There is no one-pager solution to systemic oppression.
“We won’t get anywhere if we keep dividing ourselves like this. We have a common enemy.”
This is the refrain that I, and many other marginalized people, hear when we talk about privilege, oppression, and intersectionality. It’s a refrain most often coming from the most privileged within the movement — the white person in a class movement, the white woman in a feminist movement, the black man in an anti-racist movement. This argument, that taking time to address issues affecting specific subgroups within movements is at best distracting and at worst destructive, is not new. But since the election of Donald Trump has led to a rise in danger for multiple groups of people in the U.S. (and beyond), and with the handwringing over the inability of the “left” to defeat such obvious bigotry and unsuitability for office, it has become less of a complaint and more of a demand.
But this argument that paying heed to “Identity Politics” is divisive or destructive is not only wrong, it runs counter to how we approach any other complex issues in our society, and underscores a fundamental misunderstanding of how systemic oppression works.
