☆ Opinions: “Intersectionality” is a pillar of university cancel culture. It's also completely illogical (1/6)
Image by Thomas Malton, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ex-De Anza College DEI Dean Dr. Tabia Lee and School of Woke author Kenny Xu attribute much of higher ed's free speech problems to this one pervasive theory. The kicker? It wasn't originally intended for academia—let alone free speech debates. An Opp Now exclusive Q&A.
Opportunity Now: In your perspectives, how does race play into cancel culture at local colleges?
Tabia Lee: I was once a faculty director for an Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education, which should have been a red flag by the title alone! And when I found myself in an environment where race and gender identities were weaponized (I was attacked and called names I had never been called in my life), I really wanted to understand the people around me.
Part of my background is as an educational sociologist (which is now a loaded term, so I don't often claim it anymore). So I sought to understand: who were these people that were surrounding me? We were using similar words but meaning very different things about them. I wanted to understand their mindsets. Where did this all come from?
In my work as a teacher in professional development, I had developed and coined this concept “ideology-in-practice.” It's based on Argyris and Schon's work, as well as others in the professional development and leadership fields. And as I started to examine what I was seeing around race, racialization, and gender identity—and that process in action—I noticed that many of the things that have overtaken our local colleges are rooted in what I and others call “critical social justice ideology.”
“Intersectionality” (defining people by identity checkboxes) is one of the key pedagogical tools that they use. However, it's not really a pedagogical tool at all—but a misapplication of the original tool as articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw. It's morphed into something completely different. And, you know, that happens. As a theorist, you create things that people use (and misuse) as they will.
Kenny Xu: May I ask: what was it originally meant to be, and how was it warped?
TL: Kimberlé Crenshaw developed intersectionality as part of legal theory and critical legal theory specifically, to show that there was a disparate impact in the legal system on Black women in terms of judgments, sentencing, etc. She and Black feminists at that time were trying to shine a light of, “Hey, there's a difference in the way that Black women are treated by the legal system.”
So that was not supposed to be a pedagogy or go directly to students, right? Teaching these ideas of “I am a victim” or “I am an oppressor” or “you are the oppressor because your family has this background”—it’s against the original intent.
ON: While folding in some overt Marxism.
TL: Moreover, the original idea of intersectionality wasn't articulated as something to be packaged to kindergarten students, which is what's happening right now. Students are being taught things about: “Who is an oppressor? White people are oppressors. Your white relatives are oppressors.” Kindergarten students. You know—“How do we see white privilege around us?” These have become embedded as pedagogies in our K-12 classrooms, all the way up.
KX: That makes sense. And the fact that intersectionality as a pedagogy came out of a framework meant for the legal profession signals to me that it might be excessively recriminative.
ON: Mr. Xu, you're not only working in academia but graduated college six years ago. How do your experiences inform your view of race and cancel culture in higher education?
KX: First of all, I want to acknowledge that it has gotten better. When I was a student in college from 2015–2019, race was probably the most important factor on campus for determining who was oppressed by society and, therefore, deserved better treatment by us as individuals.
As Dr. Lee mentioned, the effect is pronounced when you tie race into intersectionality. This framework says there are layers and layers of discrimination, and that if you’re higher on the intersectionality pyramid—not just if you're Black, but if you're Black and a woman, or you're Black and a woman and lesbian and trans, etc.—you deserve even more social currency to counteract how society's wronged you.
ON: So the more social currency, the less the likelihood of being cancelled?
KX: Right. And academia was building towards this intersectionality pyramid for a long time. In recent years, it spread to dominate how companies and even governments operate.
It’s a dangerous system. When you do belong into those identity categories and have that power, the temptation is to use it to abuse others—and they must allow it, by nature of the ideology. When I was doing investigations for my former nonprofit Color Us United, we found that if you were a Black woman and were working for, say, American Express, you could demand privileges that white men of your same grade couldn't demand. You could treat employees and customers in a way that you couldn’t if you were a white man. Lawyers were scared of you. Human Resource officers were scared of you. Clearly, this is not the way to build an engendering, trustful society.
That’s why I started to speak out about it because, as an Asian man, I might belong in some of these categories. But the truth is, most of the world—most of America, even liberal America—does not view Asian men as part of the victimhood narrative, as part of the same level of oppressed classedness as if you were, say, a Black woman. It’s a confusing and inconsistent ideology. And it unfortunately affects everything about free speech at colleges: what’s permitted, celebrated, or censored.
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