Conservatives have really weird ideas about what “intersectional feminism” means. I’ve been running into it a lot lately. Up to and including that it denies individualism (in fact it’s about re-acknowledging individuality in the social system), that it creates oppression (in fact it’s about recognizing certain forms of oppression with the hope of removing them), and it’s really just redistributive crypto-Marxism (and seven Jew bankers in a bunker a mile below Jerusalem run the world…oh wait, no, that’s a different bonkers idea). I’m not kidding. (Example. Example. Example.)

At MythCon in a couple weeks there will be a panel on intersectionality in which these whackadoo conspiracy theorists will be discussing their crank ideas with feminist social media educators, who fortunately will be there to challenge this strange new mythology. It’s a conversation usually everywhere avoided, and thus long overdue. Isolationist information bubbles do not correct misinformation. They only expand it. They fuel conspiracy theory nonsense; they don’t forestall it. So I’m pretty sure you don’t want to miss this.

Which is fitting for a conference run by Mythicist Milwaukee, an organization devoted to questioning, exposing, and dispelling myths. This conference is about modern social myths, and in particular which claims are the myths. Because the current decade we live in can aptly be defined by the fact that everyone thinks everyone else’s beliefs are myth, but never their own. We live in an age of modern secular “religions” in that sense. Superstitions abound about the way the world is, and the way the world works. Complete with elaborate mythologies in support of each worldview. And this is no less true of liberals than conservatives: both are growing into false worldviews bolstered by systems of secular mythology. Both have a lot to learn.

As skeptics we have a responsibility to dispel the myths of all sides in any debate, by appealing to reason (a.k.a. fallacy-free logic) and factual reality (a.k.a. evidence). So here is a primer on the myth and the fact of intersectionality.

Intersectionality: What It Is & What It Isn’t

In the most straightforward, everyday-English terms, intersectionality is a theory in social science which postulates that (a) an individual can be affected by more than one kind of disadvantage and discrimination within a social system, and (b) we must account for them all to fully understand what each person might struggle with.

As such, intersectionality is not a total theory of the individual. That is, it’s not a theory about the totality of any person. It is solely a theory about discrimination and disadvantage. It says nothing about what movies you like or whether you are kind to strangers. It only covers one particular aspect of a person: the sum of discrimination or other relative difficulty they will encounter in a given system.

Which works like velocity in Relativity Theory: the intersectional state of an individual will change based on where they are. It’s relative to social location. Which varies over space and time. Move them to a different social system (or indeed, change the social system) and the discrimination or difficulty they face may be different.

This is what all science does: focus on particular aspects of things (in this case, inequity in the social systems people inhabit), so as to understand them better. Efforts to understand and theorize about human sexuality in no way entail the belief that humans have no other interests or behavior to study but their sexuality. Just as efforts to understand and theorize about electron fields in no way entails the belief that chemistry or biology or economics don’t exist or should be ignored.

Understanding the world requires more than just understanding electrons. Just as understanding people and societies requires more than just understanding intersectionality. It may seem absurd that I have to explain this. But alas, this is how far off the rails of comprehension conservatives have fallen.

By contrast, intersectionality is not:

1. A social policy program. Nothing about the fact of intersectionality entails or even implies anything as to what’s to be done about it. Policy conclusions require added premises: a value system, a worldview, an additional body of facts.
2. A conspiracy to rob and enslave you. It’s simply a statement of fact about reality. If you are worried that fact is being used criminally or unethically to push oppressive or dangerous agendas, you need to separate the fact from the abuse of the fact.
3. Marxism. That’s a disproven economic theory about how social systems do or would operate under certain conditions. Marxism is not even socialism (as not all socialism is Marxist). But intersectionality says not one single whit about economic systems or how they operate. Other than that various forms of inequity exist in the systems we observe. It doesn’t even say it’s inevitable. Or that any certain solution to it exists.

You might notice a theme here. Nearly every bonkers thing conservatives say they believe about intersectionality, relates to policy rather than neutral factual descriptions of reality. But intersectionality is not a policy. It’s simply a description of an observed feature of social systems. So what’s going on here? How can they be so confused?

An important analogy is global warming. That it is happening is beyond all rational dispute (example example example). And yes, that means anyone claiming it isn’t even happening, is as bonkers as a flat earther. Even that it is being caused now by human activity (fossil fuels primarily) is beyond all reasonable dispute. One can be confused or uneducated or not smart enough to understand how the science establishes that fact, but it’s as much a fact as plate tectonics, for example; or radiometric dating.

And yet, because people are terrified of the policy implications of the fact of global warming, they are irrationally driven by cognitive dissonance into denying even obvious scientific facts. They feel safer denying it is even happening, than dealing with the more difficult and scary prospect of having to work out (and expend the emotional labor to defend) just why we should do nothing about it. So climate science denialists conflate policy with fact all the time, and can’t extract themselves from the confusion. “Global warming isn’t happening, because carbon taxes would suck.” That’s a classic pseudoscientific fallacy. But alas, bizarrely common.

Similarly, as we’ll see, haters of “intersectional feminism” are doing the same irrational thing: they argue about how unfair or bad the consequences of the policy implications would be; as if that had anything to do with whether the stated theory is a correct factual description of any social system. Which usually means, the system the haters are in. Folks often don’t care about social systems they are privileged to avoid…until they can use them as a token to evoke the “it’s worse over there, so nothing is wrong here” fallacy. “Crime is way worse in the United States, so there is no crime to worry about in the United Kingdom.” Does that make sense? No. So please don’t use that form of argument. It’s irrational.

Intersectionality as a theory is extremely well confirmed scientifically. In fact, it’s one of the best confirmed theories of the social sciences. It is simply a demonstrable fact that (a) people in certain social systems (such as “American society”) face discrimination and disadvantage based on attributes shared only by subsets of the total population and (b) many people face multiple forms of such discrimination simultaneously. Both are verified by literally hundreds of studies and thousands of testimonies. Saying this is false or a conspiracy theory is just whackadoo. Full on. I’m sorry to say, but it is.

But this is an entirely different matter from what we should do about this fact, or where or when or how. Like global warming. We can agree it’s happening and human civilization is causing it, and then debate what policy solutions may exist for it, and their relative costs and overall consequences.

Rational people act like that. Just FYI. I’ll get to that completely unrelated policy dispute shortly. Because that’s what really has conservatives hiding under the bed clinging to their wooby. Just like those Christians who don’t really believe because of the evidence (all their arguing about evidence is just a rationalization), but because they are scared of the chief implications of Christianity being false: that they aren’t immortal, and no superman is coming to save them.

“The world sucks a little, and we should do something about it” defines liberalism’s mostly correct grasp on reality. Conservatives, by contrast, mostly want to do things about mostly mythical rather than actual problems. Illegal immigration, for example, is not even close to the top problem crippling American society today. Yet it’s irrationally many conservatives’ top fear and priority. Statistical facts don’t support such a bizarre notion. But there it is.

But it does go both ways. Liberals fuck a lot of things up and are wrong about quite a lot. Conservatives, though, seem to be worse. Even when they’re right. The U.S. federal deficit is a far more pressing problem, for example, and conservatives are right to beat on that drum, and liberals wrong to slight it; and yet conservatives are the worst creators of that problem, and only ever continue to make it worse—whereas the only group that ever actually did something about it, were the liberals. Go figure. But I digress. Point is, conservatives need to learn to face their fears and confront and accept reality, instead of denying facts and replacing them with nonsensical priorities—every bit as much as liberals do. If not more so.

Recalibrating “Liberal” & “Conservative”

What do I mean by “liberal” and “conservative” here? It’s not what most people might think. The words have changed in particular content, but not general principles. And I think a lot of people have overlooked that. It took me a while until now to figure this out myself. But the fact is: more people are “conservative” than claim to be. “But I don’t believe x, y, and z; so I can’t be a conservative” is what they might say. Not realizing that x, y, and z have long since ceased to be defining characteristics of conservatism.

Science has abundantly shown that there never really has been what we call “liberals” and “conservatives.” Except on such a small scale as to be trivial. For instance, books and articles that list traits of conservatives and liberals gloss over the fact that almost no conservatives or liberals tick every box listed; variation is considerable. As descriptions of larger populations, those are mythical constructs, in which we place “all of one set of beliefs and attitudes” that we associate with each term. But in reality, very few people actually hold all of those beliefs or attitudes. Many conservatives mix in liberal beliefs; many liberals mix in conservative beliefs; and most liberals and conservatives mix in nuanced beliefs that fit neither mythical category.

I’ve been struggling with how to manage this fact in communication for a few years now. Here I’m just going to cut the Gordian knot by using “liberal” and “conservative” solely in the sense I defined in Sense and Goodness without God:

These differences do not reliably track any specific policies. That a liberal believes there are social problems we need to take steps and pool resources to fix does not mean every liberal agrees with every proposed way of doing that. Likewise, that a conservative believes we shouldn’t have to do anything, that the status quo (or even “the way things once were”) is the best there is, does not mean they think every institution they defend couldn’t do with improvements (as long as it doesn’t cost anything), or that there aren’t problems to solve—they just regard existing systems (or mythical past systems they believe we have deviated from) are already up to the task of solving those problems, if only we’d just deploy them the way they were meant and stop messing with them.

So do not take me to mean anything else by these words. I do not mean by “conservative” someone who is against abortion, for example, or who opposes all social welfare. And I do not mean by “liberal” someone who sees racism everywhere, or wants to overthrow all forms of capitalism. Quite simply: liberals think there are problems we (as individuals) could step up and do more to fix; conservatives disagree, except for all the problems they think liberals created. That’s pretty much it.

Conservatives defend the way things are (or “used to be”), and rationalize away any claim they owe more to their fellow citizens than they already give, or are more responsible to act than they already are. Liberals do the opposite. And yet, not on every single issue. “How” conservative or liberal you are, is really a measure of how many issues you take one stand on, relative to the other. And as such, not all liberals are totally liberal, not all conservatives are totally conservative. That’s the factual reality. Understand my language throughout this article (and probably hereafter) as fully encompassing that fact.

This does entail a curious observation: every opponent of intersectionality I’ve ever encountered anywhere, online or off, is a conservative. In the sense I mean. Which is the only sense left that still tracks reality. I don’t mean they are all Christians or all against abortion and welfare. I mean they are conservatives in the modern sense. They don’t like change. Recent change. Proposed change. Changing themselves. Changing the rules. Anything that actually requires anything of them, they’d rather rationalize their way out of. Even to the point of denying racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination exist in any Western social system.

And yes, this includes conservative opposition to “regulation.” The desire for removing regulations is not an attraction to change, but an urge to return to some imagined ideal past in which things were better because that regulation didn’t exist. More often than not, that’s factually false (which is usually why the regulation exists). But it’s what they believe. Likewise, conservatives as a whole can’t claim to be any more pro-individual-liberty than liberals, despite their constant whinging that they are. In truth, conservatives have the same subset of fascists as liberals do. There are as many liberals defending free speech as there are conservatives defending censorship; and vice versa. It’s thus not a distinguishing feature of either. So it’s really just about fear of change vs. urge to change.

Not everyone is fully conservative by this measure. Most conservatives can adduce a few exceptions to their aversion to change. But it will still dominate most of their thinking. That’s what makes them conservative. New, hip, conservatives, maybe, who accept a lot that conservatives of fifty years ago wouldn’t. But conservatives all the same. Conservatives who simply grew up in more enlightened times, and thus accept as a “status quo” worth defending, what liberals generations ago already fought tooth and nail to secure. But change keeps on going. And that’s too much for them.

Irrational Fears Lead to Tinfoil Hats

One of the conspiracy nuts who will be on the MythCon intersectionality panel is Clay Routledge, whose Tweet blesses us with this article’s banner image today. It’s a retweet of another whackadoo, self-professed feminist Christina Hoff Sommers (who spends most of her time attacking everything feminists say), whose own tweet (linking a video I’ll discuss shortly) declared:

I have read enough about intersectionality to see that it’s a conspiracy theory that leads to tribalism & bullying.

Yep. Acknowledging discrimination exists, and exists along numerous axes simultaneously rather than only one, is a conspiracy theory. It’s tribalist and bullying. Scared of reality much?

Routledge of course shoots the moon with his own comment:

Correct. Intersectionality is at odds with all we have learned from the intergroup/social conflict empirical literature. It can only divide.

Which amounts to him flat out saying that “discrimination exists, and exists along numerous axes simultaneously rather than only one” is not just factually false, but contrary to “all” scientific findings about discrimination in society. Only, that’s not what he meant (well, it may have been, since he does think there’s a conspiracy afoot). Rather, he is confused. Like Sommers, he thinks global warming is a conspiracy because he is horrified by the proposed solutions, er, I mean, he thinks intersectionality is a conspiracy because he is horrified by the proposed solutions.

Because that’s where both of these Tweets epically fail: they have conflated the fact of intersectionality, with some sort of imagined bugbear of policy proposals for responding to it. Somehow, they think, the fact that discrimination exists is being used to “bully” them and create “tribalism” and that acknowledging discrimination exists somehow can’t possibly be the right way to end it. Full on. Bonkers.

Rational people would respond differently. This is what a rational person would do who was actually concerned about the discovery of intersectionality and how people are using that discovery in social communication and policy discussions:

1. Locate and document specific actual examples of that fact being misused to recommend bad policy or abuse people.
2. Locate and document examples (if there are any) of people using the same fact correctly: without abusing people, and with more sensible policy proposals.
3. Admit the facts of reality. Then offer sensible analysis of the different uses and policy proposals related to those facts and their relative merits.

Why don’t we see this? Where are the rational people? Please let’s have more rational people. People producing useful, rational, actually informed educational media on topics like this. But alas, we get cranks and fools, like Sommers and Routledge. I’ll fisk the Sommers video before I conclude, to show how far of this mark she falls. But first, let’s dispel a bunch of basic mythology.

The Truth about Bias

The irony is that what Routledge and Sommers are doing is tribalism. They are the ones being divisive. And they are the ones pitching conspiracy theories. They are the ones wearing the tinfoil hats.

Denying people face discrimination is the purest form of identity politics: because it defends the supremacy and privilege of those not subject to that discrimination. Denying that black people face discrimination, is a defense of white people’s advantages over them. Likewise every other trigger of discrimination or cause of disadvantage, from gender status to beauty standards to disability and sexuality. Denying people face discrimination in a social system is defending the bias against them and inequities upon them. Which defends the identities that are advantaged, maintaining the superiority of those identities. Identity politics. As pure as the master race.

Does this mean Routledge and Sommers are conscious, ideological sexists and racists or what have you? No. They might be, sure; but if they are, their defense of socially preferred identities can’t tell us one way or another. Because most bias is not conscious. They are conservatives, in that they are terrified of the suggestion that there might be something they need to do or fix in the world that might be in some way their fault (or the fault of “their people,” the classes of people they silently identify with, and sometimes even claim outright to be defending), and therefore they need desperately to claim that nothing is wrong and the very suggestion that anything is, is a conspiracy against them.

These folks, like all others akin, are defending themselves against what they fear are too many claims on their own autonomy. Liberals are just asking too much. How dare they. Maybe they are. But to defend this myth of ‘fictional discrimination’, they have to defend supremacist identities, by empowering the privileged to continue discriminating unfairly against whole classes of people, and enjoying advantages over them, and empowering even the privileged who don’t discriminate, to nevertheless also benefit from that discrimination and advantage. They are doing this by simply denying discrimination and disadvantage exists, and insisting any attempt to do anything about it is evil and must be stopped. Hence, for example, what they are saying can’t be racist, these fools tell themselves, because there is no racism in society worth fretting about, therefore no other race they could possibly be defending by denying racism exists. It’s thus “not” identity politics in their minds. But it is. They are just too unconsciously biased and irrational to work this out.

Take racism as our continuing example for a moment. White people don’t have to be racists themselves to benefit from racist policing and incarceration: because if you’re white, no matter what you do or think, no matter how unbiased you personally are, you still enjoy the privilege of being less likely railroaded into a criminal conviction (and everything else that’s skewed your way). Imagine if a video game—some first-person shooter, say—secretly but automatically inflicted damage on any character controlled by a black player at the start of every game; white players would win more often. Not because they are cheating. But because the system is cheating black players. Yet white players still benefit. They have the privilege of not starting the game with docked hit points.

That’s systemic racism in a nutshell. It is not that every white person in America discriminates against black people (consciously or not). It’s that more people discriminate against black people more often than a white person in the exact same circumstances would experience. So a black person has a higher difficulty navigating life and getting ahead than a similarly situated white person does. Thus the system is racist. Even if only some of the individuals in it are actually doing anything discriminatory.

That’s how systems can be racist even when not everyone in the system is racist. Because when there is even just a disproportion of racism affecting one race compared to another, the affected race faces a systemic disadvantage. Acknowledging this, is simply acknowledging reality. Denying this, is defending the advantages of a white identity. No matter how unaware of that fact you are. And as for racism, so for all other forms of discrimination. It’s all like this.

Not only can systems thus be racist (and sexist and homophobic and so on) when many or even most people in the system are not, but there is also a difference between conscious and unconscious racism. When conservatives hear “everyone is a little bit racist” they think this means everyone is a “little bit” of an active supporter of the KKK or a reader of The Daily Stormer or thinking of ways to keep the black man down or wishing they didn’t have to hide all the reasons they are sure black people are bad. They confuse having an overtly racist ideology, or even just a conscious belief in the inferiority or otherness of black people, with having an unconscious cognitive bias triggered by skin color. Those are not the same thing.

When Philando Castile was killed by police officer Jeronomo Yanez despite breaking no laws and complying calmly to every stated request, this was almost certainly racism in action. Because we rarely see this happen when the person in the car is white. But this was not racism because Yanez is consciously racist. He’s not, so far as I know, a supporter of the KKK or a reader of The Daily Stormer or constantly thinking of ways to keep the black man down or wishing he didn’t have to hide all the reasons he is sure black people are bad. I doubt that. More likely Yanez just intuitively felt scared of people with black skin. And this caused him to delude himself into a panicked sense of danger, resulting in the crazed, undisciplined shooting of another human being to death. Almost certainly his racist bias, an inherent panic at black people, causing one to interpret everything black people do as menacing, was not the product of conscious beliefs. But it’s racism all the same.

If Castille had been white, statistically, Yanez probably would never have imagined himself in danger, or would have been more cautious in assessing it. His brain would have delivered him a more positive spin on what Castille might have been doing, rather than an ominous one. He’d have been more measured in his response. He wouldn’t have panicked. And Castille would still be alive. That’s white privilege. It wouldn’t be anything this imaginary White Castille did—he didn’t “steal” that privilege from black people. But he has it all the same. Because of an unconscious bias installed in Yanez. By the system.

That’s how most racism works. And the only way to combat it is the same way we must combat every other cognitive bias we all suffer from: by being aware it exists, so we can put a conscious check on ourselves to make sure we are responding to reason rather than a bias. A more informed and conscientious Yanez would have asked himself if he was panicking because Castille was black…or because Castille was really doing something dangerous. And he’d have had his perception, and thus his panic, under better control. That’s what taking racism seriously means doing.

Conservatives don’t like confronting reality, especially when it’s scary; and unconscious bias is really scary. Because you can’t control it. Conservatives think the individual is godlike in controlling their minds, beliefs, and destiny. Total pseudoscience. Yet it tends to be what they think. And that’s pernicious, not only because it isn’t true, but because—ironically—you cannot even approximate their cherished ideal of autonomy, if you aren’t even willing to admit you are governed by cognitive biases. Biases you did not choose, nor can simply delete. Biases that are not the product of beliefs. Biases your culture has subtly programmed you with, without your awareness or control. Because this is the thing: the only way to know your beliefs and decisions are not the product of a cognitive bias, is if you are aware of which biases could be at work, and how to correct or control for them, and then activating a conscious check on them as a control.

If instead you go around insisting you are a superhuman devoid of any cognitive biases, you will be the biggest puppet of cognitive biases of anyone on the planet. Though liberals are not wholly immune to this folly either, this is a lesson conservatives need most desperately to learn.

Identity Politics Is Not a Bugbear

And for all that, identity politics by itself is not even bad. Contrary to conservative ranting about it, in fact democracy absolutely depends on identity politics, and no progress in human society could ever be achieved without it. We have labor laws now because workers rallied around their common identity to create an interest group that by thus uniting could muster the votes to change laws to end abuses against them. Abuses that targeted them because of their identity. Workers did not choose to be an abused class of people. All they could do was choose to end that abuse by forming a coalition to fight it. Nothing is ever accomplished in any democracy, unless people who share common interests band together to achieve it. That’s identity politics.

And one of the principal strategies business interests use to try and continue their abuses against workers, is to try and divide workers against each other, to trick them into thinking they “didn’t” have common interests, that they weren’t being targeted as a class, that the very suggestion of a difference between workers and employers was “divisive,” that what they want would actually be bad for them. When in fact what was divisive was the employers treating workers differently than their peers—and certainly differently than they’d ever have submitted to being treated themselves if they had any say in the matter.

Trying to deny discrimination and abuse exists, is precisely how abusers stay in power and get to keep abusing. So, a little suggestion here. You might not want to be a dupe empowering them. Yet that’s what you become when you deny the abuse exists.

The abused will rightly not like you for siding with their abusers. And they won’t be impressed by your insistence you aren’t siding with them. Because no matter what you think you are doing, you are empowering discriminators nevertheless, by doing exactly what they want: denying that a class of people is being discriminated against. You are giving discriminators cover. And you are disempowering the very people who share a common interest because they are being targeted with discrimination. By insisting “recognizing that common interest” is divisive, you are the one supporting divisiveness rather than unity. It’s not the other way around. Think about that.

It is also true that identity politics itself, like anything else, can be abused. Unions can be a powerful force for workers; and also exploit and harm workers. Unions are, after all, just another corporation, paid to do a job (which is: advocate for its customers). And like all corporations, it can suck at it, it can become corrupt, it can put profits before quality, it can have bad ideas. But also like all corporations, it could also do a good job, ethically and efficiently. There is no single certain outcome. It’s just another social system that has to be managed, to keep steering it in a healthy rather than dysfunctional direction.

Likewise for any other special interest group. There can be abuses of identity politics, there can be divisive uses of identity politics. There can be corruption and error in the deployment or pursuit of identity politics. But merely engaging in identity politics, is not divisive or abusive. To the contrary, it is necessary to bring equality to all humankind. It is necessary for any progress ever to occur. If common interests don’t unite, they can’t win elections or pass laws. And if problems affecting certain classes of people aren’t acknowledged, they can’t be fixed.

Black people have a common interest: discrimination targeting their skin color. Women have a common interest: discrimination targeting their gender. The disabled have a common interest: discrimination targeting their disability. You can even follow this all the way down to trivial cases, such as the physically unattractive having a common interest, only there the statistical effects just aren’t that large, and the system wasn’t built on codifying that bias, and hasn’t only just recently (in human years) broken free of that discriminatory legal and social architecture. Nevertheless, even those classes of people have their advocacy. And there is nothing wrong with that. Solutions are up for discussion; some might be good, some bad. But even if there are no tolerable solutions to think of, they still aren’t wrong to call attention to the discrimination, that it’s unfair, and that people might want to take some care to avoid discriminating. Rethinking how our biases lead to unfair treatment is always a path to making the world better. But discrimination rooted in centuries of structural mistreatment is more damaging and harder to combat. And the fact of it, wholly apart from what you think will or won’t work to solve it, is totally bonkers to deny.

The most pertinent point here is that none of these people are choosing this. They don’t get to choose to not have this common interest. Black people don’t get to choose to not have a black identity—because racism prevents them from escaping it. The only way they can combat this mistreatment, is to recognize it exists, and unify to oppose it. It’s the racists who create and sustain black identity in this form. Trying to tell black people they should stop thinking of themselves as black, and then racism will go away, is just dumb as daisies. If society didn’t discriminate against skin color, there would be no significant black identity, at least none that any conservative would worry about. As an identity it would be no different than Cubs Fans or Marvel Geeks or Irish Heritage. None of which the likes of Routledge and Sommers seem all that worried about or oppressed by.

That also illustrates another irrational conservative talking point: the claim that talking about the classes that people belong to that are affected by discrimination or disadvantage somehow erases every other part of the person. Nonsense. We can write articles about Cubs Fans without thereby denying they widely vary in character, personality, professions, abilities, interests and so on. We are not “taking away their individuality” when we focus for a moment on one particular aspect of a person. Identity is simply a logically necessary consequence of set theory: every part of a person’s individual identity belongs to some set to which other people happen to belong as well, conferring like interests and properties. Denying this is absurd. While doing it to the exclusion of all other sets a person belongs to is likewise absurd. Which is why intersectionality was developed in the first place.

Intersectionality was invented specifically to acknowledge that in diverse populations, every individual will belong to many overlapping sets of attributes shared with other people. Yes, it then picks out the superset of all those sets that face disadvantage or are targeted by discrimination within a social system, but only to study the sources and effects of that cumulative overlapping discrimination and disadvantage. That does not deny the existence of all the other sets a person belongs to that are not discriminated against or don’t produce a disadvantage. Intersectionality, again, is not a total theory of personal identity. It’s only a theory about disadvantage and discrimination in social systems.

More Conservative Myths to Dispel

Having said all of that, conservatives will by now have been triggered by language that terrifies them into seeing only a red haze and never listening or hearing what’s actually been said. So let me dispel some of these linguistic myths that might trigger you.

Feminism is simply the recognition that discrimination against women exists, and we should do something about it. It’s not a Marxist conspiracy to subordinate and enslave men. But it’s also not Gospel. What feminism simply is, leaves a lot of room for feminists to disagree on the particulars: what discrimination actually does exist; and what solutions to it are good ideas or bad. Feminists can be as wrong about either as anti-feminists are. And like anyone, feminists can be right and wrong at the same time, having many facts wrong, but such that correcting their facts still leaves us with facts enough to support their overall conclusion on something. Feminism has always been subject to correction and improvement. In fact, intersectionality was invented to correct feminism on one very important point: that it’s not just all about women.

Hence feminism should face constructive skepticism, just as science should, and your own political party, and your own communities and societies and in-groups, and everything else. That’s not the same thing as denialism or opposition. Being critical of science does not mean being a science denialist. That’s tinfoil hat. Sensible skepticism applied to science still leaves you with a lot of warranted science. Likewise, sensible skepticism applied to feminism will still leave you with a lot of warranted feminism, too. If it doesn’t, you might want to feel your head for tinfoil.

Privilege, meanwhile, is simply the absence of a disadvantage, in particular a disadvantage the underprivileged are saddled with. This can include disadvantages caused by bad actors and unconscious biases (discrimination), but also disadvantages that are no one’s fault and unavoidable (like disease and disability, or being born in a third world country). Having privilege in no way entails you have done anything wrong. You have privilege as an able-bodied person, because there are people who need to navigate the same society as you in a wheelchair, and that disadvantages them. It’s not your fault that it does. It just does. And as compassion and reciprocity would dictate, you could at least do what little you can to equalize that disadvantage. Such as support handicap accessibility wherever it makes sense to. And not expect them to be able to do the things you do as easily. And, of course, not discriminate against them.

Not only can you have privileges without that being anyone’s fault, privilege can even be earned and deserved, and thus not a social justice issue in the first place. You may be unfairly privileged to have access to a college degree, but having earned a college degree confers privileges on you that you have earned, such as access to better or certain forms of employment, and greater knowledge and understanding of the world. Similarly, if you pay dues to be in a group or association, all the benefits of that membership are also privileges. But they are privileges you paid for. The privilege to be able to pay those dues may have been less earned than you think (accidents of birth, and the variable luck of opportunities, have a lot more to do with it—not everything, but a lot). But notice how those are two different things. One is a question of choosing to be a dues paying member of an association. The other is a question of poverty. Which is an issue of access to opportunity: what choices can you even make?

And once again, as with all things, some things can be a little of both.

Many conservatives want to try and fob everything off on the individual, with an irrational adherence to the pseudoscience of Just World Theory and the myth of the Rugged Individual, frequently sliding into the assumption that everyone deserves everything they get, that random chance and unfair circumstances have nothing to do with outcomes, and if someone’s life sucks it must be their fault somehow. When really, if those same conservatives were placed in exactly the same circumstances, they’d be just as screwed—and would endlessly complain about how unfair that was.

Conservatives too often assume everyone is just like them—has all the same resources, all the same knowledge, abilities and limitations, all the same luck, taught all the same things, given all the same skills—and therefore the disadvantaged just aren’t using their talents and opportunities well. In truth, success is a combination of individual choices and unchosen circumstances. Indeed, pretty good models now show that in fact, luck matters more than talent. Even the most talented individuals get crushed by bad luck; while mediocre talents excel solely because of good luck. Wealth and income disparity simply exacerbate inequities in who gets ahead; they do not resolve them. Consequently, poverty, and indeed therefore crime, are as much the outcome of a dysfunctional system, as of individual choices. Indeed, what choices individuals can make, or even think to make, are themselves a product of environment—which is itself determined by systemic disparity. Luck.

Those computer models I just linked to show that success (which can mean, for example, the ability to escape poverty and accumulate a surplus of wealth) is always a combination of earned outcomes (talent and effort, making the most of the opportunities afforded you) and unearned accidents of chance (what luck befalls you at and after birth). Even your talent and determination are in part accidents of chance: accidents of genetics, of which parents you got, of parental environment and childhood, of what schools and peers and mentors and hardships you were saddled with but couldn’t choose to have or avoid.

To anyone who wasn’t born in an impoverished, crime-ridden ghetto: Had you been born in one, you would be more like the people who live there, than who you are now. Similarly, if you’ve always been a man: Had you been born and lived as a woman, you’d be more like a woman than you are now. You’d be taking a lot more precautions around men than you now do; and you’d likely think differently about several things. Think that through. You can’t just assume everyone has, and has had, all the advantages you benefited from to make you who you are. So social system fixes can’t be based on that assumption. Simply as a matter of factual reality. This point is superbly explained by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his debate with Jonathan Chait.

Finally, not all discrimination is bad. If you need to be tall for a certain job, it is appropriate to discriminate on that dimension (pun intended). Being tall is then a privilege, for anyone seeking that job; but there is no social justice problem to solve in that case. Education does entail more knowledge and expertise in the subjects studied, so extending more privilege to the educated on a subject they know is appropriate. Achievements should be rewarded, so privileging achievers with relevant accolades and responsibilities is appropriate. These aren’t inequities. So they aren’t social justice concerns. And smart activists know this.

Likewise, it is and should be totally legal to privilege “beautiful women” when hiring, if for instance your business is modeling or an exotic dance club. But if beauty is not in fact a requirement for the job, nor height nor skin color nor gender, then discriminating on those dimensions is prejudice that unfairly privileges certain people, because it unfairly disadvantages others. That’s a social injustice. And thus what social justice as a cause aims to correct. The question of how best to do that remains. But there is a difference between recognizing the problem exists and is unfair, and what might best fix it. Confusing the two, is irrational.

There can be many nuances to all this (just see my discussion with Noel Plum about female sports, for example). But it’s a fallacy to use “there are nuances” as an excuse to rationalize yourself into insisting “there can’t be anything wrong.” Be more skeptical of your own biases. Challenge them. Seek greater self-knowledge and self-awareness. And care about your fellow human beings and how they aren’t always getting the lucky breaks you are.

Example: Atheism

Atheist is an intersectional identity. In many places within America (and even more so in some other countries), atheists face discrimination as atheists, and seek to expand their numbers, and socialize. Accordingly, atheists unite around these common interests, and lobby legislatures and work in courts to protect the rights and interests of atheists (see the countless examples at FFRF, AA, MRFF, MAAF, and SCA); they also provide other resources, opportunities, and support when the law simply isn’t able to protect atheists from discrimination or isolation—including providing or helping locate nontheistic mental health care, addiction recovery, parenting and homeschooling groups, and beyond. All because in the U.S. Christian privilege is real, and it tends to exclude or limit atheists in various ways, sometimes even leading to violence.

And yet, in the U.S., black atheists have it worse. This has been examined in such documentaries as Contradiction; Stray From the Flock; and Exodus. And elsewhere (example example example). This makes it harder to increase the number of atheists in black America, and harder to be atheists in black America—at all, much less “out.” This is an example of intersectionality (and thus an empirical demonstration that the theory is correct and intersectional identities exist): being an atheist entails certain levels of discrimination, especially in certain places or social systems, discrimination that choosing instead to be a Christian, for example, would avoid; and being black entails its own kinds of discrimination; but being black and an atheist compounds the discrimination experienced. And that puts black atheists in a different position than both white atheists and black theists.

It’s even worse if you are an atheist, and black, and a woman. And worse still if you are all that, and disabled. Which adds to discrimination yet other disadvantages; and yet the disabled can also face even more discrimination for being an atheist than the abled do, because so many resources purporting to help them are monopolized by the religious, and disabled atheists are stereotyped as just angry at God for their disability, and other forms and modes of discrimination the disabled encounter more and more often than the abled will. So stacking disadvantages and targeted biases on top of each other, inevitably compounds how much privilege you lose in a social system. It’s just harder to live in that system, for people who have to deal with all that, than for people who don’t. It simply costs more, such as in emotional energy, physical and social resources, and opportunities.

There is no sense in denying this is true. It’s simply a demonstrable fact about the social systems we find ourselves in. Which is why intersectionality is such a well confirmed theory in social science. It’s almost as obvious as the earth is round. Which is why claiming “it’s false” is full-on tinfoil hat.

Standard Tinfoil: Christina Hoff Sommers

Remember that video I referenced earlier by Christina Hoff Sommers? It’s called Intersectional Feminism: What Is It? Let’s look at how this video illustrates stock crank and pseudoscientific reasoning found across the board in defense of all tinfoil hat theories, only here, applied to “intersectionality” in particular.

She starts by complaining about the fact that people with experience of a thing, know more about it than people who don’t; and people who don’t, thus could learn some things from people who do. She strawman’s this obvious fact of how the world works, into some sort of total superiority of knowledge it never claims to be, implying people with experience tyrannize people without it. “How dare scientists correct me on scientific facts!” “How dare eyewitnesses correct me on what happened!” This is the reasoning of a crank. But Sommers never really goes anywhere with this strange line of reasoning. Instead, she pivots suddenly to completely unrelated concerns.

Just as illogically, at timestamp 2:40, Sommers says a “non-politicized” version of intersectionality is true and fine, but then from minute 3:00 on spends the rest of the video attacking its “political use.” But she never explains what a “non-politicized” version is. How can documenting and acknowledging discrimination and disadvantage in social systems avoid being political? Crickets. This is another hallmark of crankery: claim that it’s okay to vaguely accept certain unfortunate realities, but bad to even suggest we do anything about them. “Can’t atheists just be quiet? Why do they have to politicize city council prayer?”

This absurdity illustrates Sommers’ conflation of fact with policy: she is terrified of the policy implications, so needs to deny the facts. This incoherent maneuver of setting aside some unexplained “other” version of intersectionality that somehow involves no one’s political interests is part and parcel of her cognitive dissonance avoidance. “Don’t think about the implications of this. Nothing to see here.”

And just as we’d thus expect, her complaints are more emotion-triggering rhetoric than clear outlines of what she would do differently. You would have to steelman her arguments for her to even make them work at all. But then they’d hardly work. Because sometimes the things she worries about do happen, and indeed should not happen and should be criticized when they do. But she incorrectly assumes this is all that ever happens, or that you have to reject intersectionality itself to challenge and reject its misuses. This “all or nothing” fallacy typifies cranks. As does elevating abuses to the status of norms. “Some people say false things about global warming. Therefore global warming is false.” Or indeed, “Some people propose disastrous policies to solve global warming. Therefore global warming is false.” The irrationality is palpable.

Eventually Sommers settles down to three talking points:

1. Intersectionality is “a conspiracy theory…constructed to be immune to criticism” whereby “men are marked as sinners and their job is to atone for their unearned advantages.” Sometimes true. Yet completely irrelevant to whether intersectionality is a fact.
2. “There is a mad scramble for victim status” and “polarization” results. Again, sometimes true. Yet completely irrelevant to whether intersectionality is a fact.
3. It authorizes the bullying and mistreating people of privileged classes. Again, sometimes true. Yet completely irrelevant to whether intersectionality is a fact.

This captures her terror. She fears the fact of intersectionality, because she is afraid it means she is guilty of something, and therefore will have to do something, and conservatives hate being told they have to do things. It’s sometimes true—there is excessive stereotyping and abuse from some people using intersectionality as their excuse—but there is no logical connection between that, and intersectionality being nevertheless true.

In reality, there is no “conspiracy theory.” Intersectionality is a demonstrated scientific fact. And it is not immune to criticism. Social scientists debate the instances, degrees, causes, and solutions of discrimination and disadvantage all the time. They just do it with evidence and reason, not fallacies and mythologies. They certainly don’t conflate solution proposals, with the problems that need solving.

More importantly, however, it is not the case that even a majority of social justice advocates, least of all actual social scientists and scholars, want to categorize “white men” as “sinners” and demand “atonement” for their unearned advantages. The odd college dumbass might say stupid shit like that. But actual expert adults do not: they actually make clear that this is not about blame, but about problems we need to work together to solve. They will tell you—if only you would listen—that privilege is not something you snuck into the store and stole; it’s not your fault that you have it. So it’s not something you have to “atone” for. Seriously. Actually read the experts on this. (Example. Example. Example.)

As I already explained above. That you have white privilege does not mean you are a racist. That you have male privilege does not mean you are a sexist. That you have ability privilege does not mean you, personally, are discriminating against the disabled. You might also be doing all those other things. But that would just be a coincidence. There is no logical equivalence between having a privilege, and being prejudiced. Nor any equivalence between having a privilege, and being the one at fault for that.

Your privilege exists all the same. And if we are not callous douchebags, if we believe in creating a better and more just world—the better and more just world God did not create (because he doesn’t exist)—then we should want those who lack our privileges, to also have them too. Or as near to it as is practicable.

Denying the disabled curbcuts does make you an asshole. Unless there are some real, actual, legitimate reasons why it’s impractical—like, maybe your community is legitimately too poor to afford them. But as soon as the budget allows, put the damn things in. Likewise, a good, responsible skeptic lives the self-examined life. That includes examining whether your culture has programmed you to have biases, and if you can’t program them out of you, advocate that they not be programmed into future generations (see, again, my discussion with Noel Plum on women’s sports, particularly as continued there in comments). For example, you can help promote the cultural attitude that black people should be given the same benefit of a doubt as white people when trying to break into their own car. Or just about anything else these days. You can’t legislate unconscious bias out of people; you can only educate it out of them. Make them aware, give them the tools to detect and work around their own cognitive biases, and encourage them to habituate themselves into thinking differently. And help the educators who are doing this; don’t fight them.

Sommers fights them. Because she’s a crank who doesn’t know what she’s talking about, doesn’t really read any expert literature on the thing she is discussing, and acts solely on irrational, uninformed fear. Don’t be that person.

Indeed, Sommers closes her video with a litany of conservative fears rattled off in seconds (“check your privilege” “trigger warnings” “microaggressions” “safe spaces”), as all being a part of the “conspiracy theory” and “cult” of intersectionality; each one of which is whole separate issue of its own; not one of them is intersectionality; and I’m quite certain not a single one of which she correctly understands. All of them can be abused, indeed misused and misunderstood even by liberals (especially ignorant college dumbasses and YouTube hacks). But only a fool confuses the misuse of a term or concept, with the actual thing itself. Check your fear. Learn first. Before criticizing.

Sommers only sees the worst behaviors on the left—like black activists assassinating cops—and irrationally ignores the vastly larger majority of people who don’t do that, and even denounce it; and then acts like the extremism was an “inevitable outcome” of intersectional thinking, that it’s somehow “innate” to and thus “inseparable” from it. Bullshit. It’s not true of atheists, simply because there are atheists who’ve committed mass murder (“therefore violence is ‘innate to’ and thus ‘inseparable’ from atheism, therefore atheism is evil”). So why would it be true of people who simply accept scientific facts like intersectionality, and are thus inspired to find ways to make the world better than that? “You want to end discrimination, therefore you want to kill cops” is fantastically irrational reasoning. It’s the reasoning of terrified fools who can’t logic their way out of a paper bag; and who wouldn’t recognize a true fact if it kicked them in the ass.

Sommers then ends with the standard fallacy that there are worse problems in the world (bias against women is worse in Saudi Arabia, for example), therefore we should ignore milder forms of bias in our society. As if we can’t work on both. This “all or nothing” fallacy you will see conservatives employ like a universal tool to avoid acknowledging anything that makes any demand on them. It’s also fantastically irrational. “Fires are worse in California, therefore we shouldn’t fund fire departments in Maine.” Are you really that stupid? She is. So maybe you should stop listening to her.

Amusingly, Sommers does admit black male incarceration in the U.S. is a real bias problem we should address. She actually admits this is a real problem black people face more than white people in this country, and that we should be doing something about it. That is exactly what we mean by intersectionality. Sommers thus doesn’t even realize she is pro-intersectionality! And pro politicizing it—because you aren’t going to solve incarceration bias without politics. Yet she repeats the irrational “all or nothing fallacy” even here, saying that American incarceration has a discrimination problem that is worse for black men than white women, therefore white women should put all their own problems on a back burner. You can’t get more illogical than that. That’s not how governments work, that’s not how budgets work, that’s not how movements work, that’s not how societies work. Nothing on earth works like that. “Put all your attention and resources and concern on the one single worst item; ignore everything else.” Imagine trying to live your life that way. You’d be dead in a month.

And yet she really is that irrational. Because she closes with the delusional claim that intersectionality is causing Westerners to focus on themselves and psychodramas, rather than real world problems. That’s just false. Full on false. But it’s a result of her “seeing” only the worst examples (like feminist in-fighting and pettiness) and not noticing that intersectionality actually is being used to address all the things she thinks are more important—like excessive black male incarceration rates, and the plight of women in Saudi Arabia.

In fact this was one of the most important developments in Fourth Wave Feminism: the recognition of a need for global concern, that also addresses the differences in peoples and their situations—the very thing intersectionality was developed for. Fools like Sommers don’t know this, because they don’t actually read feminist literature. Beyond cherry picking it. Like Creationists do with biology literature. Intersectionality is about recognizing all the problems our social system faces in respect to disadvantage and discrimination, so that those who care about that can distribute available resources more effectively to address them all. In other words, it’s about being rational, sensible, and aware of how reality actually is, and actually works. It is a paradigmatic example of reality-based reasoning.

Conclusion

Intersectionality is a factually accurate, science-based description of existing social systems. Discrimination and disadvantage exist. And they exists on more than one dimension, simultaneously and cumulatively. They affect distinct classes of people. And those people did not choose to be discriminated against for being in that class, nor choose to be disadvantaged by it. This being a fact, entails nothing as to behavior or policy. Denying the factual truth of intersectionality, because you don’t like the policy implications, is as tinfoil hat as denying global warming for the same reason.

If you still don’t get what intersectionality is, or worse, if you still think surely it must be a global Marxist conspiracy to oppress able straight white men by taking away their toys and casting them into outer darkness, here is a three minute video that might help get you back to reality. Notice how there is nothing in there about Marxism, policy platforms, behavior recommendations, or anything scary. Just a straightforward description of undeniable facts observed to be the case in predominant societies today.

And if you really want to examine what solutions could be implemented for these inequities, don’t just go around cherry picking the worst ones, or fabricating strawmen of them in your head. Actually make a point of looking for the best literature making the best proposals most informed by evidence and science. And when you find it, don’t cherry pick the few things you don’t like and act like that was all that was recommended. Don’t fall for the cognitive bias Christian Theists live by, and “rebut” the weak suggestion and then assume you have thereby rebutted all the strong ones surrounding it. Filter down to the good suggestions. And follow them.