This is something that I want to address regarding the dominant narrative that I’ve heard so much of since I’ve been on campus—the narrative of intersectionality.
You are an individual with the right to believe and think whatever it is you want in your own head. Since coming to Carleton, I have heard a lot, particularly through my experience in clubs and within the classroom about white privilege and intersectionality. This is the idea that various areas of identity (class, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) are not completely independent and separated concepts from each other. I would like to firmly assert that I don’t agree with this idea, as it is the classification of people into arbitrary groups that are based on things that they largely can’t choose or control.
I grew up as a minority in my high school in Vancouver. I had five white friends, but most of the people I got to know were Chinese or Filipino. I was born to an Afro-Caribbean mother and a Canadian father, and remember passionately cheering on Jamaica with my entire extended family in every Olympics.
According to the logic of intersectionality, I’m just a white male, the most privileged—despite the fact that men make up a minority of university populations, and do worse in school on average, according to a 2015 StatsCan report. I am an individual, and I may or may not share characteristics or beliefs with other individuals within this group of white men.
According to the logic of intersectionality, my four white male friends are more privileged than my wealthy Chinese friend whose family buys him a new car every couple months or my Indian friend with a large house and intact family. But how? One of those four white men couldn’t put food on the table for a time, and had to move away during his final year of schooling so his family could find affordable housing. For another friend, his mother would disappear for weeks at a time and abusing substances when he was young, and he would be uncertain if she was alive or dead. There simply is no calculator you could give me, where I could punch in the aspects of their identity and suddenly find that my white friends are more privileged because of their skin colour.
What I would like everyone to consider is the radical notion that the greatest minority is the individual. By claiming there’s some hierarchy of oppression, we are ignoring the fundamental nature of reality: everyone is born with some advantages or disadvantages, whether white, Black, man, woman or otherwise. The greatest privilege to be born with white skin, but money. My friend’s skin colour did not buy him food when he was hungry—it has no monetary value.
And quite frankly, if you consider yourself an anti-racist, consider how racist intersectionality is. It literally lumps people into racialized categories, a racial hierarchy with a group at the top and others on the bottom. I worry about a future in a world coloured by such thoughts. It doesn’t leave any room for the nuance and complexities of life, where there are so many more grey areas than oppressor and oppressed or good and evil.
So, I implore you to believe in the rights of not groups, but individuals. When one thinks in terms of groups, it becomes frighteningly easy to trample individuals’ rights in the service of the greater good. It also becomes easier to become prejudiced, when people are lumped together. I think now is a more important time than ever to stand up and make your voice heard if you believe fervently in individualism and not an intersectional racial/gender-based worldview.
