Intersectionality

November 10, 2016

If you did not understand intersectionality – the connection between all forms of oppression –  before, I hope you understand it now. Trump prevailed by appealing to white identity and racial fear. He summoned within the shrinking white electorate a fear of the brown menace of Mexicans and Muslims swarming “our borders”.

And now a Climate Change denier is in charge of protecting the environment. Now Trump will select Supreme Court justices he has promised will roll back marriage equality. Now millions of Americans will lose any access to healthcare and some will die because of it.

Barely half of America’s eligible voters cast a ballot and the majority voted for Hillary Clinton. Let this sink in: Less than a quarter of US voters was all it took to secure this election for a con man and a bigot. The right-wing struck a resonate and fearful note and too many on the smug left stood on the sidelines. And oh the sexism. Yes the media’s inability to cover a powerful woman without the word “shrill”, comments on her clothing, and if, how and how often she smiled.The granular analysis of every her every flaw while treating Trump like an amusing showman.

The habit of glossing over Trump’s con game, his tax returns, his shady ties to Putin, his litany of sexual assault accusations was so over the top as to parody itself.

So racism and sexism combine to imperil the country and the planet as this superpower heads the keys to an imbalanced, vindictive bigot. I think America will survive. I think we here will fight back in ways unavailable in Hitler’s Germany.

I pray we don’t wipe another country off the face of the earth before we wrest control back of this train. So when those of us fighting like hell for the rights of LGBT people speak out against voter suppression, racism, sexism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, immigrant bashing, the school to prison pipeline, the failed drug war we do so out of an understanding that our fates are tied quite literally. This is not a human rights ecosystem that allows you to “get yours” and move on.