The Arithmetic of Intersectionality

The celebrated law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw explains that black women make up one-third of police shooting victims.

The popular theory of intersectionality — the notion that black women, by virtue of being both black and women and thus victimized by both racism and sexism, are the most oppressed, and thus the most deserving of power and influence (and, no doubt, the most competent too, for reasons) — helps explain during the Great Awokening much of the striking over-representation of black women in hiring for top jobs (at least temporarily, although a lot of black women executives promoted for DEI reasons seem to be getting fired lately).

Intersectional examples include Democratic nominee presumptive Kamala Harris, the huge number of black women nominated to the federal judiciary by Biden, and the countless op-eds in leading newspapers by black women revealing all the great insights they’ve come up with since 1619 (usually, involving their hair).

The originator of the Theory of Interesectionality, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a tenured law professor at both Columbia and UCLA, is one of the intellectual titans of the current conventional wisdom. Columbia Law School proudly declares:

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. In addition to her position at Columbia Law School, she is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in critical race theory and in “intersectionality,” a term she coined to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice.

Vox explained her epochal insights:

Crenshaw has focused in much of her research on the concept of critical race theory. … critical race theory emerged in the 1980s and ’90s among a group of legal scholars in response to what seemed to Crenshaw and her colleagues like a false consensus: that discrimination and racism in the law were irrational, and “that once the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the underlying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign state of impersonally apportioned justice.”

This was, she argued, a delusion as comforting as it was dangerous. … There was no “rational” explanation for the racial wealth gap that existed in 1982 and persists today, or for minority underrepresentation in spaces that were purportedly based on “colorblind” standards. Rather, as Crenshaw wrote, discrimination remains because of the “stubborn endurance of the structures of white dominance” — in other words, the American legal and socioeconomic order was largely built on racism.

In other words, equity demands that much of your home equity be taken from you and given to blacks.

Crenshaw first publicly laid out her theory of intersectionality in 1989 … the law seemed to forget that black women are both black and female, and thus subject to discrimination on the basis of both race, gender, and often, a combination of the two.

Crenshaw’s fans often object that her theory of intersectionality is actually much more intellectually sophisticated than right wing chuds assume, although her acolytes never seem to remember to object to the Biden Administration relying upon the similar black + woman = best interpretation in their hiring.

So, let’s check in with this giant of modern thought’s Twitter account:

An obvious general empirical problem with her influential Theory of Intersectionality is that while it predicts that black women must be the most oppressed, being both black and women, in reality, black men tend to have vastly worse problems, such as going to prison. (Similarly, black gay men should be more oppressed than black straight men. Yet, during my corporate career, black gay men appeared to be much more likely to have nice white collar jobs than did their straight counterparts.)

Harvard economist Raj Chetty's study of 21 million across two generations found black men are imprisoned about 300% more than white men raised at the same income. In contrast, Black women are locked up only 30% more than white women with equal upbringings.

America offers countless DEI programs to reduce racial gaps, which black women appear to do a decent job of taking advantage of. But black men tend to be so self-burdened by criminal records that many fail to exploit modern America’s pro-black bias.

Looking at individual rather than household income on tax returns, Chetty found that in 2014–2015 the median white woman age 31 to 37 made 30 percent more than the median black woman. But white men made well over twice as much as black men.

Much racist antiwhite speech like this tweet is generated by educated black women angry at the black men in their lives for acting like lazy knuckleheads. But they can’t say that, so they rechannel their rage into that politically correct defamation of whites that holds together the Democratic Party’s Coalition of the Margins.