Privilege, Oppression, Intersectionality and the Church

Oct 22, 2020 by

by Andrew Wilson, Think Theology:

It is hard to engage with something when you don’t know exactly what to call it. People who dislike it use terms like identity politics, victimhood culture, critical theory, political correctness gone mad, groupthink, grievance studies, and cultural Marxism. People who like it talk about social justice, wokeness, intersectionality, sexual minorities, postcolonialism, antifascism, and the importance of decentring, deconstructing cultural supremacy, listening to marginalised voices and checking our privilege. This second group sees itself as challenging the elites: a patriarchal, cisgender, heteronormative, married, white, male, ableist, racist, sexually abusive, hegemonic world of privilege and power, in which Harvey Weinstein can molest who he likes and the Grenfell Tower can burn down as a result of greed and corruption, and in both cases people will still blame the victims. The first group also sees itself as challenging the elites: the faddish, smug, holier-than-thou, hypocritical, affluent, graduate, vegan, snowflake, bien-pensant thought police, who want to silence disagreement, invite grown men into girls’ changing rooms, and only stand up for poor people if they can prove they didn’t vote Leave.

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.

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