I don’t get how intersectionality is so hard for these people to understand.
100% sure, in most cases, it’s being uncomfortable owning up to how they might have benefited from structures of oppression. Liberal brainworms they picked up from birth causing cognitive dissonance with what they’re learning about how capitalism works.
So it’s easier to just essentialize everything down to class bc then you don’t have to unpack the complexities of how it’s woven into identity and all the uncomfortable conversations and thoughts that come with it
If thats actually what they care about though its counterproductive at best to post shit mocking identity politics as a whole, and thats if you intepret them in the more favorable light.
I’ve come to realise that people have a hard time understanding concepts like “less likely” and “more likely”
Like with masks and people who think “reduces the chance of catching covid” means that they’re useless because they don’t 100% prevent covid. These types also seem to get confused as to why someone who is vaccinated would wear a mask. Again, because both of these things together reduce risk more than either alone.
I guess what I’m saying is that some people think that because they’ve seen white cis male homeless people, that must mean that their gender, race and orientation had no bearing on how likely they were to end up there.
A lot of Americans have the belief that if poverty was or is hypothetically escapable, then people had enough of a chance and so their poverty is an individual failure. The anti-identity politics crowd tries to invert that. They interpret claims of racial privilege as tantamount to claims of personal moral failure as the cause of poverty. Like a “you’re an able bodied cis white man, but you’re poor? It’s your own fault then.” Rather than like you said, it’s just less likely being because of a ton of factors.
Also I think when people hear about it they automatically assume that it means society just goes “oh you’re white, why here’s a million dollars!” And certainly things like that happen (I know some people personally who have absolutely failed upwards as a result of nepotism)
But it also works in more insidious ways, like cops fucking with you less, maybe you get a lighter sentence on something or just spend a night in jail where a poc would probably do real time, maybe people just treat you better or you are more likely to be chosen for a job (I personally experience this pretty commonly).
Even for poor people like me, It’smore a lot of little benefits that add up to a even bigger advantage, and then yeah there’s also increased likelihood of generational wealth just by virtue of being born white (when I say little benefits here I don’t mean to diminish how profound effect they can have on someone’s life, I just mean relative to more overt stuff people would typically think, like the example I gave earlier of just being handed 1m bucks or having mom and dad buy you a house or whatever)
spot on. humans, generally speaking, have a hard time with statistics, large numbers, fractions…
And small numbers. There was that survey recently where people had to estimate the populations of some groups, and they estimated about 20-30% of the population to be Jewis, or trans, when both populations are around 1-3%. The fallacy here being that “I know people from this group, so it mustn’t be that rare”. And of course, it isn’t that rare! 1-3% of the population is relatively large, and if your friend group isn’t overly homogeneous there’s a very high probability you know at least one person belong to a “rare” category.
People’s issue with relatively small numbers really bothers me for some reason, lol.
I’ve come to realise that people have a hard time understanding concepts like “less likely” and “more likely”
As a matter of statistics, its easy. But as a matter of personal perception and empathy, its crazy difficult.
Blame the media, blame Dunbar’s Number, blame the Protestant Work Ethic, blame survivorship bias, but it just doesn’t come naturally to put yourself into someone’s shoes, statistically speaking.
You need some kind of intersectional medium to give people visibility into how the other side lives. Otherwise they’re just marks on a ledger, creating no more I instinctual moral imperative than the score at the end of a sporting event.
It’s tone deaf and unclear is the main problem. The tweet itself isn’t clear if it’s in support of more intersectionality and more focus on class, or if it’s calling for the end of identity politics entirely. You’re right that more intersectionality is needed, entailing more talk about class, but I doubt mocking identity politics at its face is the way to do it. The way the tweet is framed strikes as mocking the idea that cis white privilege exists at all. At first glance it looks exactly like the thing a chud would post, which has been a problem even here.
Lots of folk will say we should tone down our accusations of racism and how we talk about gender, because that supposedly alienates some true working class, as in, cis white guys wearing overalls.
There are much more clear and simple ways to express class based politics without looking like a reactionary bozo in the process.
Yeah, if this was purely meant to attack bad faith usage of liberal identity politics, there are more clear ways to do it. Make it sound like a democratic politician somehow. This seems a lot closer to left punching, it’s very much going “how do you do fellow workers, I also get annoyed by those activists and campus politics”. It’s not some sober analysis of how liberal politicians have abandoned labour, it’s virtue signaling to people who get annoyed by certain type of language (which I’ve rarely heard in the past decade anyway).
Their logo is the most generic thing possible. It looks like something you’d see in a senior citizen friendly gym, or a really condescending liberal disability “help” group which mostly sweeps the disabled under a rug somewhere and only takes them out to go mall-walking once a week.
every time i read MLM i just assume it means multi-level marketing marxist-leninist-maoist men loving men and it works surprisingly well for me.
I’m sure we’ll end homelessness if we all just became a bit more racist. Not like the anti-homeless and anti-poor sentiments in America are racially coded in any way.
