Forms of oppression do exist, but intersectionality theorists mistake both the symptoms and the cause. Oppression doesn’t come from a conspiracy of whiteness. It’s the default mode of anyone in power, regardless of outward identity factors. We are defined equally by inward factors, and in our hearts we can all identify as sinners. Where sin has room to flourish, it will. 

A charming little video on YouTube features schoolchildren explaining to each other what “intersectionality” is. To them it means identity: the combination of factors, like skin color, gender, and ability, “that makes you, you.” Simple, right? Not so much. Intersectionality is an academic theory, the origin and definition of which are easy to explain. But the implications are thick and sticky as molasses.

Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw invented the term as a way to describe the unique challenges of black women. Her Exhibit A was a legal case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1977), in which black female employees sued the automaker after their termination. The plaintiffs claimed their case did not involve racial discrimination only, or gender only, but a matrix of the two. The district court dismissed that claim, fearing that introducing a new level of injustice “governed by the mathematical principles of combination and permutation,” would risk “opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.” To the contrary, wrote Ms. Crenshaw: Combination/permutation is the only way to understand our social dynamic. Intersectionality is not about identity per se, but about “how systems contribute to exclusion.”

In the 1990s, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins stirred the term into her lectures on “interlocking oppression.” As campus activism grew during the first decade of this century, “intersectionality” became a useful umbrella concept for a network of expanding grievances—a Pandora’s box, if you will. Females, Blacks, Latinos (and Latinx), “non-white” Asians, atheists, gays and lesbians, as well as the transgendered, gender-fluid, disabled, and fat-shamed could all, if they were so inclined, find a place in its matrix of exclusion and privilege. Only one group was left out: white males. But they could buy indulgence out of their privilege prison by becoming fervent “allies” of marginalized groups.

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