12:52am February 8, 2015

On Difference

Here’s the thing about the anti-individualist strain in social justice/leftist circles:
If we shy away from talking about ourselves as individuals, the only way that remains to us to talk about our differences becomes through the lens of groups. I am talking to you; you are not like me because you are black and I am not. You are talking to me; you are not like me because you are male and I am not. Etc.
Our differences become a matrix of intersectionality, a tapestry woven out of — but only out of — the ways that different identities affect each of us. Personal preferences or even personal experiences that we would otherwise think have shaped us become sprinkles on icing on the cake that is our identities.
But it’s the cake that really matters.
And that seems good enough to many of us, at least at first. We do end up talking about differences, and talking about how those differences affect us.
But, because we’ve downplayed our individual differences and decided they don’t matter politically (the political is personal, but the personal doesn’t inform our politics, whatever the slogan says!), we start to expect everyone within some group we’re part of to think the same thing:
This is the feminist opinion on Issue. This is the anti-racist opinion. This is the trans-positive opinion. This is the disability community’s opinion. And on and on and on and on.
Intersectionality is great. But people are not tapestries woven of oppression and privilege, despite how much better a picture we get when we remember intersectionality.
We’re not patterns of thread — or an ever-sharpening pattern of pixels.
We’re people.
It’s time we called on our “movements” to remember that.