The Lost Art of Intersectionality - Op Ed

 

Buddy Devine's Substack

The Lost Art of Intersectionality

How the left forgot its own core philosophy in exchange for a bizarre performance that will only divide us further.

Buddy Devine Jun 20, 2026

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First, let me make this clear before any Nazis think this article is on their side: I am not racist. Racists are evil, and racism is one of the biggest and most prevailing forms of bigotry in our society.

But… it's not the only form of bigotry. And it's not the worst, overshadowing all others.

That's the problem. Lots of people champion intersectionality, coined by Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw, yet they fail to understand how to apply it. Because the point of intersectionality is that all systemic bigotries are interconnected — they feed into one another, and fighting to end one injustice will bleed over and help to end several others.

For example, trans women face a lot of transphobia and transmisogyny right now, and basically have for most of human history in some form or another. But fighting transphobia doesn't just fight transphobia. It fights sexism — it fights for women to have a right to present masculine or however they want, outside the male gaze. Fighting transphobia fights racism and the masculinization and dehumanization of Black women. Etc.

The point of it is to remove what divides us, so we all see our struggles as connected and can organize better and be more united in our shared goals of freedom and liberation from our shared oppression under capitalism and authoritarianism the world over. Great leftist political leaders understood this — Black Panther leaders like Fred Hampton, and Harvey Milk with his Rainbow Coalition, bringing together many oppressed people to have a say in building parallel power and organizing for all their communities and shared goals.

But people now have more of a separatist bent across the board, and let's just say it's not doing wonders for us in general.

The truth is, not wanting to spend time with people different from you — people who might be bigoted, boring, ignorant, or anything else you just don't want to deal with — in your own social life, is understandable. That's very normal.

But when it comes to leftist organizations, and even the production and advancement of philosophy and thought, and hell, even a lot of online and in-person leftist social groups — the separatist mindset is very worrying to me.

The left grows more divided and fractured every year, and the right only grows in power. They have internal disagreements too, but they work with each other regardless of petty disagreements. The one thing we could probably learn from the right is how unified a front they are.

I've been in leftist organizations for a long time, going to protests since I was seven years old, when I attended Occupy Wall Street. I genuinely cannot remember the sheer number of coalitions, organizer meetings, actions, and protests I've helped organize, attended, and gotten arrested for, for a variety of causes. Some that come to mind: the NYC trans youth rights protest in 2023; a trans rights advocacy group I interned for, also in 2023; Pop Climate/Planet Over Profit; Mad Pride NYC; student activism at SUNY New Paltz; the City College of New York LGBT club, where I was treasurer for over two years; volunteering at the Queens CSA and soup kitchen with the Girl Scouts; founding a nonprofit that works with the homeless in Harlem and gives out free resources; running support groups to help disabled people become writers and get benefits; and many more.

I only list my credentials not to brag, but to preface this by saying I know what I'm talking about. I am not like some people who speak of the left broadly after getting called mean names on Twitter once (cough, Barry Weiss). I know what these people are actually saying. I know what the trends are.

Aside from a rise in actual normalized antisemitism — not criticism of Israel, just the classic "socialism of fools" — a worrying number of leftists are, sadly, conspiracy-brain-addled, repeating Protocols of the Elders of Zion–level "Jews run the world" conspiracy theories uncritically to their uneducated leftist audience when criticizing Epstein or the Rothschilds. That's why people call leftism the socialism of fools. 😔

There's also a concerning trend among leftists to be extremely sanist and ableist toward autistic people on an interpersonal level, or to otherwise have no patience for people who are autistic — unless they're extremely high-functioning, barely autistic in practice, quirky, and therefore socially desirable in leftist spaces. In my experience, actually autistic people often get left behind or outright bullied.

Because at the end of the day, autism is an intellectual and social disability, and leftist spaces — even organizations — are, at the end of the day, social spaces: social clubs, nightclubs, meetups, etc. They can be profoundly cruel to autistic people who want to join their movement and are often told autism isn't an excuse for not having a filter and offending someone — when in practice, it kind of is. Not having a filter is part of autism and should be met with appropriate levels of empathy and non-ableist understanding. People are allowed to be offended or mad, sure, but many act as if autism weren't a factor, as if we were cruel on purpose and just wanted to say something offensive to hurt someone's feelings — as if we're all assholes using autism as an excuse, when it's a socially impairing disability, especially if you have lower-functioning/higher support needs. Not knowing what offends people is often just something we can't control, like someone with Tourette's swearing, or someone in a wheelchair not walking. It can be managed, but in leftist spaces, often, if you're not "woke" enough from the start, you're the enemy. There's no room for growth, no room for disability complicating your relationship to social politics and your understanding of them, no room for mistakes when there should be — and it's a problem.

But this essay isn't about how the left doesn't understand autism. I'll leave that topic for another time. I'm not even talking about all of that — how the modern left overall has flaws, blind spots, and bigotries it perpetuates (gosh, what a shocker).

This is about racism.

Lately on the left — and for years now, but recently it's gotten to what I believe is a peak — it needs addressing. Racism is treated by many on the left — not only people of color, I'd argue mostly by white people, whether wanting to virtue-signal their woke prowess, or genuine believers, or both — many (not all), but a concerning and loud portion of leftists online and off, treat racism as the beginning and the end of bigotry and systemic oppression. That all their politics must center it. Or else.

Not intersectionality, even if they claim it is. No — they act as if racism is the worst, the most severe form of bigotry historically and in the present day, and that's simply not true, and a harmful myth if it continues to fester inside the left.

Racism is very, very bad, and it's embedded in our society. You need to unlearn it — unlearn white privilege, unlearn colorism, unlearn white supremacy, and learn its history and how it's affected laws and culture, from beauty standards to labor laws to policing — everything. All of that is true, and racism needs to end. #HappyJuneteenth — that was yesterday as of my writing this. I hope all who celebrate had fun.

The thing is, a lot of people act as if racism is worse than any other bigotry, which simply isn't true, and that shouldn't be a shocking statement. Many on the left also act as if any other oppression you suffer doesn't really matter as much and doesn't really affect you if you're white — and if you're white, you're assumed to be using your white privilege all the time, and your queerness and disability and womanhood or whatever, to absolve yourself of being racist. Which does happen. But then it's assumed that any white person who's poor, oppressed, or disabled actually had it really good because they're white, and that all of their genuine oppression — just as real as racism, which they also face — doesn't deserve outrage, or worse, isn't even real, and is only a distraction to excuse their latent racism, always lurking behind everything white people do.

Which is horrible, and the opposite of intersectionality. Saying and treating one bigotry as worse than all the rest, and falsely proclaiming it as the axis around which all other bigotries move, is absurd — but once something is normalized on the left, most people don't question it for fear of being seen as racist.

This troubling attitude is also seen in how leftists handle bigotry when it does arise. If you're accused of racism — even if it's false and used as a bullying smear tactic, something autistic people know well — it doesn't matter, since racism is a sacred cow. If you want to quickly discredit someone at the DSA you don't like, telling everyone he's racist means he'll likely never recover his reputation. Meanwhile, claims like he's ableist, sanist, transphobic, classist, and especially sexist are often seen — sometimes as a serious offense, but just as often as a "he said, she said," given more nuance and the benefit of the doubt, especially if the accused is well-liked. They're trivialized and ignored, in a way racism accusations never are.

I think a lot of this is white people overcorrecting, which is understandable. But I will be blunt: people saying oppression of non-white people in the United States and the world over — racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and especially anti-Blackness, etc. — is the worst, and that anyone who's white isn't even oppressed and is a malicious person always using their real oppression to hide their incredible self-centering in white supremacy, taking up space, having privilege as if being white cancels out their other oppressions — the whole point of intersectionality was to avoid this, but it's like people aren't even trying anymore. Just platforming the most trendy bigotry as the worst one, to shame and silence anyone who ever made a mistake in a racist society, or committed the crime of being white while committing their lives to leftism and uplifting people of color and all oppressed people — something I don't think we appreciate most white people simply don't do.

Let me give some examples and myth-bust this harmful misinformation and warped mindset. Some talking points and slop you might see flooding Instagram, and even in speeches at rallies, and just all over, are:

"Just because you're queer or disabled doesn't mean you can't be racist." True. I don't understand why they focus solely on that example, which isn't even the most prevalent by a long shot. Why not also say: "Just because you're Black doesn't mean you can't be homophobic. Being Black doesn't give you an excuse to be bigoted toward someone else you have power over, such as women or LGBT people." Especially if you're a Black cis man with institutional power — there's a lot of homophobia and transphobia in the Black community, and it needs to be stamped out.

Why not say: "Just because you're a woman doesn't mean you can't be transphobic," or "just because you're disabled doesn't mean you can't be sexist"? Literally any combination is pretty much true. You can always be a token, you can always be a bootlicker, you can always perpetuate harm regardless of what your oppressed identity might be — it doesn't actually matter, you're still causing harm and being a bigot, and that should never be excused, no matter what.

And yet, that's not the message. It frames white queer or white disabled people as always the villain. And this kind of messaging leads to people in the real world being horribly sexist and getting away with it by saying "she was a white woman." Being horribly ableist while overselling someone's white privilege, at the same time being incredibly ableist toward them with little pushback — not for being rude or racist, but for having a disability, which you're perpetuating people to invalidate, question, downplay, and even harm someone over, on the premise that they are always secretly using their mythical white privilege and other oppressions to be racist, even when they are not — and you're the one being bigoted, just as bad as being racist, but because the left has put racism on this untouchable pedestal. This kind of divisive nonsense has been very well documented.

Another thing: white people are oppressed a lot. Being white doesn't give you a free pass. If you're a white trans woman, no one cares that you're white; all they see is a trans person, and they open fire. If you're a white autistic man or woman, people aren't going to hire you because you're white — all they see is autistic in the way you walk and talk, and they will discriminate. They will deny you freedom over your own life, bully you for being weird, and no one will actually stop any of it because you're white.

Literally, the whole point of intersectionality is to say all oppressed peoples' oppression is equally real, valid, and systemic in our lives, and all of it is equally worth fighting against — all our rights are equally worth fighting for, all of it is equally severe. The history of slavery was severe. But so was the history of mental asylums, and women being forced into sex trafficking and sexual slavery and child marriage all over the world. So is the history of the Holocaust and the pogroms. So was the history of the brutal caste system in India, indentured servitude, the current slave-like conditions in Amazon factories, the homelessness crisis, and the oppression of the worker and the poor. So was… need I go on? Their white privilege doesn't always come into play or help them get ahead of or get one over on Black people.

Wealthy Black businessmen and celebrities are, sure, subject to racism, but they still have power over their poor white assistants and house cleaners, or the poor white veteran or homeless man in their neighborhood. Class is just as relevant as race — this is Intersectionality 101.

Or: if a Black man raped a white woman, many leftists would question the woman despite their self-proclaimed feminist politics, because of the racist history of white women lying to get Black people killed. But Black people who have raped women, white and Black, very often use that same shield of anti-racism as an excuse to get away with horrible sex crimes. They have the power. Men have power over women under patriarchy. Look at R. Kelly, Diddy, O.J. Simpson, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson — all of these evil men raped countless women and girls, white and Black, and successfully used their race as a shield, saying all accusations against them were racist attacks and nothing more. Which happens all the time in the Black church, Black entertainment, and other power structures and industries, etc., just as it does in white ones.

But leftists fear calling out Black misogyny, or Black homophobia and antisemitism, or the use of racism as an excuse to rape, or the founding of harmful cults like the Hebrew Israelites or the Nation of Islam, etc., which is a terrible double standard, and kind of racist in itself. If a lot of leftists think Black people are never wrong and can't be criticized, they've deified them to the point of dehumanization — wonder why the "Black New World Order" kink still exists? It's because this mentality is one goon sesh away from raceplay kinks and white "sissy degradation" play, which I'm not going to kink-shame, but it's kind of funny how these people are trying so hard to impress Black people when in reality they're coming across as backward and unserious to the educated leftists among us. Also corny.

Though there are a lot of Black people who perpetuate this myth too, and I say the same thing to them: you're not a leftist if you don't fight for intersectional justice. I'm not your white bogeyman, wet-dream stock villain, or whatever bullshit y'all have normalized outright, shitting on white people as a whole as if that's productive and not insanely performative.

I'm a queer transgender man. I'm Jewish and autistic, mentally ill and physically disabled. I pass as white, and I do genuinely find it very easy not to be racist because I'm a good person — I've unpacked and educated myself, and most of my friends are Black, so I'm invested in uplifting Black people all the time, because they're literally my friends.

But myself and most other white people do have oppression. We have medical diagnoses and disorders, and queer identities, and trauma from conversion therapy or rape or incest or military school. We are poor. We are denied abortions. And we are oppressed just as much as people of color, only in different ways. Our oppression doesn't just evaporate because we're seen as white, even if we reject white culture overall due to its harms and false nature and do everything in our power to fight racism in our own backyard, on our own Instagram page, and in leftist groups and parties and families, etc.

Another thing: a lot of these uneducated, likely very young leftists don't understand that privilege isn't a moral failure. Everyone has some privilege over others, and everyone has some oppression and disadvantage compared to others — unless you're a very particular type of man (able-bodied, white, Christian, citizen, neurotypical, cisgender, etc.). Literally, a lot of y'all call out someone's privilege as an excuse to invalidate their success or hard work, victim-blame, or downplay their trauma or oppression, etc. It's gross.

We all have some privileges in life, every single one of us, in the unfair systems we live in. Everyone has some privilege and some advantages compared to others. Literally, we should be mad at billionaires, who have insane privilege. Pointing out someone's privilege has become a fast and easy way to discredit them. But no — being rich doesn't automatically make you ungenerous, or woke, or unable to experience trauma or oppression. No, being white doesn't make you automatically racist and unable to be oppressed in other ways. No, being a man doesn't make you inherently sexist, an incel, powerful, sexually aggressive, or worthy of fear or distance, or anything like that.

Literally, white people and men do face racism and sexism. Not systemically, not even mostly, but they do. It's kind of how y'all are treating white people with reverse racism — I'm not saying "reverse racism" in the Nazi dog-whistle way, just that even if it's not systemic, it's still forced onto them. White people don't really get arrested or killed by cops just for being white, for example. But socially? Yes. There's a lot of anti-white racism on the left, and it shouldn't be excused. Sure, POC joking that white people are wack or crazy or whatever is fine — sure, I make fun of cis people and straight people a lot. But this weird systemic push to overexpose and overplatform racism, and to literally push a harmful narrative that white people can't be oppressed, has done nothing but divide us further apart, which is the last thing the left needs right now.

What to do about this? Never be afraid to speak up if a leftist group isn't ready for nuance, criticism, or hard conversations — it's probably not the one to be a part of anyway, if it's falling into right-wing, dogmatic censorship traps. Ultimately, we need to be doing more to bring people together, not this crap. Rainbow coalitions, leftist movement leaders reaching out and highlighting issues and people from all countries, and bringing everyone to the cookout — not just those we look like and like — because separatist movements always fizzle out and die for a reason.

All of us, from all over the world, have more in common than not. Being in community means making a role for everyone in our movements and our future society. Recognizing the reality of everyone's suffering and specific oppression, instead of parading around racism like it's the only real oppression and all others are merely white supremacist distractions or disinformation. I feel like including people we don't usually include is so important.

Because every autistic young man, or oppressed and lonely young white girl, who feels their identity is being mocked by their friends at school, and by the movements and clubs they want to be a part of — who are hostile toward them, projecting unreasonably high standards and suspicious, villainous intent onto them before getting to know them as people, not identity cards — those people, of which there are millions, are going to the right. Turning into Nazis, incels, and tradwives — who are cruel to them and will spit them out. But at least, at least, they give them a place to belong. An enemy to hate, and a community of supportive, like-minded people to do it with.

The left really doesn't do enough of that for white people, disabled people, traumatized people who aren't perfect or easy but need us to reach out before they feel we're too hostile — because a lot of y'all can be — and make the morally conflicted choice that seems to be the only other culturally relevant one to them. And people will often compromise anything, even their morals, to feel less alone.

So: racism is bad. Duh. Please stop acting like it's the only bigotry that's bad. Reread intersectionality, and all of Crenshaw's work, tbh — it's really a great way to truly understand oppression and think about it while avoiding hierarchies and our own bias.

And stay critical of your enemies. And especially of your friends.