Privilege, Oppression, Intersectionality and the Church
by Andrew Wilson, Think Theology:
Both sets of terms are designed to stack the deck one way or the other. The negative terms are all loaded: nobody self-identifies as a politically correct cultural Marxist, or actually advocates victimhood culture, or champions identity politics, and although there is such a thing as critical theory, precious few people who use the term negatively have ever read much of it. The positive terms are loaded too. If you are not woke, you are still asleep. If you don’t want social justice, you must want social injustice. If you are not Antifa(scist) or antiracist, you are a fascist racist. And so on.
To complicate things further, key terms are used in completely different ways. Both groups want equity and justice, but one group sees this in terms of outcome (eliminating the gender pay gap, or ethnic disparities in university admissions), and the other sees it in terms of opportunity (making all positions available to all people, even if that means more men become CEOs, more women become primary school teachers and more Asians get first class degrees in Maths). Both groups want diversity, but one group wants diversity of identity (sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation), expressed through representation, while the other wants diversity of ideology (religion, class, political affiliation), expressed through freedom of speech. The word “privilege” may be the most neutral word we have available, but given that the many of the key spokespeople on all sides are as privileged as each other, that doesn’t solve the identification problem either.
Please right-click links to open in a new window.