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By: Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer

Published: Feb 13, 2024

On October 7th, 2023, most Americans watched in horror as Israel experienced the deadliest terrorist attacks in its history. In the days and weeks that followed, some of that horror mingled with confusion.

For example, on Oct. 8th—before an Israeli counteroffensive was launched—BLM Grassroots issued a “Statement in Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” writing that they “stand unwaveringly on the side of the oppressed” and “see clear parallels between Black and Palestinian people.” Two days later, BLM Chicago posted a graphic featuring a paraglider with a Palestinian flag and the text “I stand with Palestine” (terrorists had used paraglides to attack a Music festival on Oct. 7th, killing over three hundred civilians). Even more bizarre posts began turning up on social media. The Slow Factory, a progressive group with over 600k followers on Instagram, posted a graphic stating “Free Palestine is a Feminist issue. It’s a reproductive rights issue. It’s an Indigenous Rights issue. It’s a Climate Justice issue, it’s a Queer Rights issue, it’s an Abolitionist Issue.” The group “Queers for Palestine” began showing up with signs at various demonstrations. A banner hanging from a building at the University of British Columbia announced, “Trans liberation cannot happen without Palestinian Liberation.”

What explains these signs and sentiments, which seem to be springing up organically around the country and other parts of the world? How is the Hamas-Israel war connected to climate change? Why is it a feminist issue? Why are “queers” standing in solidarity with Palestine when Israel’s government is far more permissive than Palestine’s (for example, same-sex activity is criminalized in Gaza)? What has inspired an outpouring of egregious and unconscionable antisemitic rhetoric and behavior in various cities and on a number of college campuses?

The answer is, in a word, intersectionality. In this article, we’ll explain the intersectional framework that undergirds these phenomena and will then offer a brief reflection on how it can be resisted.

* * *

Intersectionality was a term coined by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. She used it to describe the discrimination faced by Black women, whose social location (that is, their relationship to power within U.S. society) was predicated on both their race and their sex simultaneously. In other words, a Black woman’s experience cannot be reduced to merely the sum of her race and sex experiences. Instead, she occupies a unique (and uniquely marginalized) category that is shaped by both her Blackness and femininity.

Although Crenshaw’s first examples focused on race and gender, intersectionality was rapidly applied to other categories like sexuality, class, and disability, just as Crenshaw intended. Indeed, precursors to Crenshaw’s conception of intersectionality can be found in other Black feminist writings. For example, the Combahee River Collective Statement insisted in 1977 that it is “difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because... they are most often experienced simultaneously” and feminist Beverly Lindsay argued in 1979 that sexism, racism, and classism exposed poor Black women to “triple jeopardy” (see Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, p. 76).

So in what ways does intersectionality shape progressive views on the Israel-Hamas War?

First, through its embrace of the social binary; second, through its implicit adoption of the category of “whiteness,” and finally through its commitment to solidarity in liberation.

The Social Binary

While the concept of intersectionality can be understood narrowly to refer to the trivial claim that our identities are complex and multifaceted, Crenshaw intended a far more robust understanding rooted in a prominent feature of critical social theory, what we call the “social binary.” The social binary refers to the belief that society is divided into oppressed groups and oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, physical ability, religion, and a host of other identity markers. Crenshaw did not merely believe that Black women (and White men, and Hispanic lesbians) all had different social locations, but that they had differently-valued social locations.

In a 1989 paper, Crenshaw asked the reader to “[imagine] a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability” and who were then literally stacked “feet standing on shoulders with the multiply-disadvantaged at the bottom and the fully privilege at the very top.” This understanding of intersectionality necessarily assumes a hierarchy of oppression and privilege such that people can be ranked in order from most to least oppressed.

Although Crenshaw didn’t discuss “colonial status” in the body of her paper, she did state in a footnote that Third World feminism is inevitably subordinated to the fight against “international domination” and “imperialism.” It is at precisely this point that intersectionality affects progressive understanding of Israel-Palestinian relationships.

Later critical social theorists, and especially postcolonial scholars, believe that colonialism—like white supremacy, the patriarchy, and heterosexism—divides society into oppressed and oppressor groups. Because the Israeli government is positioned as a “colonizing foreign power,” it is therefore necessarily oppressive. Conversely, Palestinians are then necessarily positioned as a colonized, oppressed group. Never mind the spurious assessment of both. Note here that critical theorists make these judgments not on the basis of the actual history of the region (which is complex) or a careful analysis of particular Israeli policies (which are certainly open to debate). Rather, the mere identification of Israel as a “colonial power” is all that is needed to set up a social binary between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The social binary then explains why some progressives make such a quick, simplistic analysis: intersectionality deceptively primes them to see the world in these black-and-white terms.

Whiteness

A second factor that contributes to a reflexive pro-Palestinian perspective by some in the U.S. is the ascendance of critical race theory and an attendant understanding of “whiteness.”

CRT, which was birthed concurrently with intersectionality in the late 1980s, conceptualizes whiteness not as a skin color or even as an ethnicity, but as a social construct that provides tangible and intangible benefits to those raced as “White.” (Notwithstanding that white skin and whiteness are often conflated when it serves the interests of progressives). Whiteness as a social construct signals that “whiteness” is fluid and malleable and need not only include people traditionally understood as White. For example, in his important 2003 book Racism Without Racists, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva hypothesized that America could develop a “triracial order” consisting of “Whites,” “Honorary Whites,” and “Collective Black.” On Bonilla-Silva’s reading, Whites would include not just Anglo-Saxons, but also “Assimilated white Latinos,” “Some multiracials,” “Assimilated (urban) Native Americans,” and “A few Asian-origin people.” On the other hand, the “Collective Black” category would include “Vietnamese Americans,” “Dark-skinned Latinos,” and “Reservation-bound Native Americans” (see Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, 228).

Critical race theorists have long wrestled with the place of Jewish people within their racial hierarchy. On the one hand, Americans did not traditionally consider Jews “White” and the U.S. has explicitly discriminated against Jews in the recent past (Jewish admission quotas at Ivy League Schools being one glaring example). On the other hand, many critical race theorists today believe that most Jews have assimilated to whiteness and benefit from “White privilege” and therefore should be classified as White. In her chapter “Whiteness, Intersectionality, and the Contradictions of White Jewish Identity,” Jewish psychologist Jodie Kliman writes that,

As European Jews have slowly ‘become’ white over the last three generations (Brodkin, 1998), we have internalized White supremacy in general and anti-Black prejudice in particular...Immigrant Jews and their descendants assimilated into US society, becoming white, or sort of white...

Unfortunately, to the extent that American Jews are viewed as “White adjacent” while Palestinians are viewed as “Brown,” the former are members of an oppressor group and the latter of an oppressed group. This categorization adds another layer to knee-jerk progressive support for Palestinians.

Liberation

Finally, the glue that binds together pro-Palestinian, pro-LGBTQ, and feminist activists is a shared commitment to mutual liberation. Again, this commitment is not new; it is found in the earliest texts of critical race theory, including those authored by Crenshaw herself. For instance, in the 1993 anthology Words that Wound, she and other co-founders of CRT wrote that a “defining element” of CRT is the commitment to ending all forms of oppression: They write:

Critical race theory works toward the end of eliminating racial oppression as part of the broader goal of ending all forms of oppression. Racial oppression is experienced by many in tandem with oppressions on grounds of gender, class, or sexual orientation. Critical race theory measures progress by a yardstick that looks to fundamental social transformation. The interests of all people of color necessarily require not just adjustments within the established hierarchies, but a challenge to hierarchy itself (Matusda et al., Words that Wound, 6-7).

This last point is crucial to understanding the automatic solidarity between, say, LGBTQ activists and decolonial activists. One could, in principle, accept that both LGBTQ people and Palestinians are oppressed groups and still conclude that their goals are mutually exclusive. For example, most Palestinians are Muslim and traditional Islam rejects the sexual autonomy demanded by LGBTQ activists. Yet an intersectional framework insists that homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and colonialism are all “interlocking systems of oppression” that can and must be overturned simultaneously—never mind the details.

Lest anyone worry that we’re misinterpreting or overstating the degree to which popular progressive sentiments surrounding this issue are shaped by a fundamental commitment to intersectionality, consider the article “Palestine is a Feminist Issue” from the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. It begins with a quotation from Mariam Barghouti “Fundamentally speaking, feminism cannot support racism, supremacy and oppressive domination in any form” and immediately explains intersectionality in its opening paragraph:

Intersectional feminism is a framework that holds that women’s overlapping, or intersecting, identities impact the way they experience oppression and discrimination. Intersectionality rejects the idea that a woman’s experience can be reduced to only her gender, and insists that we look at the multiple factors shaping her life: race, class, ethnicity, disability, citizenship status, sexual orientation, and others, as well as how systems of oppression are connected... When we look at the world through an intersectional feminist lens, it becomes clear that Palestine is a feminist issue.

Conclusions

While the reaction of some progressives to the Hamas-Israel war took many people, especially Jewish people, by surprise, it was largely predictable given the powerful influence that intersectionality exerts on our culture. Intersectionality can lead to a grotesque moral calculus that justifies Hamas’ rape of Israeli girls as an understandable response of the oppressed lashing out at their oppressor. It has caused university presidents at our elite institutions to shamefully equivocate and prevaricate when given opportunity to unapologetically condemn antisemitism. Unfortunately, these examples are natural outworkings of the intersectional worldview.

For those who are alarmed by what seems to be growing acceptance of anti-Semitism within some segments of the left, we offer the following action items.

First, we should resist critical theory’s simplistic moral categories of Oppressor vs. Oppressed. To the extent that we see every conflict as a battle between innocent victims and cruel victimizers, we will gloss over the moral complexities of reality.

Second, we need to see people primarily as individuals rather than as avatars of their demographic groups. It’s much easier to dehumanize abstract categories than the nervous old woman across the street or the energetic cashier at the grocery store. Personal connection is an antidote to demonization.

Finally, we need to be realistic about the perniciousness of “woke” ideology, which has been infiltrating our institutions, universities, businesses, and places of worship for decades. Many social movements have waved the banner of progress and justice while slaughtering tens of millions. If we don’t learn from history, we very well may repeat it.

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