The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 62
Intersectionality is usually credited to Kim Crenshaw, who coined the term as well as “Critical Race Theory” in 1989. It has an older history, however. Listeners to the New Discourses Podcast will have heard earlier episodes in which James Lindsay articulates how intersectionality arose from the Critical Marxist Theory of Herbert Marcuse in the late 1960s, but there’s another link in the middle of the twenty-five year span between 1964, when Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man, and 1989. That link can be found in the Black Feminist organization known as the Combahee River Collective, which published a manifesto-like statement in 1977 that lays out intersectionality 12 years before Crenshaw ever wrote about it. In the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, then, we can find the first articulation of what intersectionality is really about and see unambiguously its deep Marxist roots, cementing the claim that it is, in fact, Identity Marxism. Join James on this episode of the New Discourses Podcast to hear the statement in his signature style.
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3 comments
Thanks Dr. Lindsay for unpacking all the crazy; It is incredibly complex and complicated.
To simplify things for us lay-folk, it would be helpful to develop a Venn-diagram or pictogram which shows the hierarchy and overlap of all these theories.
It seems to me, given that everything ties back to Marxism, it is important to highlight that everything that stems from that corrupt (and murderous) ideology, is therefore corrupted (GIGO).
Here’s a documentary on Audre Lorde’s years in Berlin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS5eu2o1gZU
Non-white modernists have been engaging intersectional interrogations of American liberal inequities for over a hundred years. You just don’t know what you’re talking about, and have apparently never heard of Frederick Douglass or the Harlem Renaissance.