I just heard this term for the first time recently. Intersectionality is the idea that your value, your worth, who you are is determined by how many victim statuses you can claim. White? 0. Black? 1. Male? 0. Female? 1. Straight? 0. Gay? 1. Are you the same gender you were born (called "cisgender")? 0. Transgender? 1. And, oh, trust me, there are more -- lots more. But if you are a black female lesbian transgender based on that list I just started, you have 4 points of intersectionality that the white male straight guy has (who, by the way, at this point is a big, fat zero).
Deriving your value from your victim status seems ludicrous, but it's popular today. On the other hand, the rest of us typically derive our value from other equally ridiculous things. It is our fame or success, our power or our privilege, our wealth or our abilities, or other things that the Bible calls "temporal" (2 Cor 4:18). We derive our sense of well-being and personal worth from the transient. And by "we" I mean the world, certainly, but also believers. We get confused about our purpose here as ambassadors (2 Cor 5:20) on a mission (2 Cor 5:18) which is not about us (2 Cor 5:14-15) and is powered by God (2 Cor 4:7; Phil 2:13). Not the same thing.
Some of us are "building a portfolio" on our intersectionality -- how many victim statuses we can claim. Most of us are "building a portfolio" on our own efforts. Either of these are ludicrous and entirely about both the here and now and about us. None of this stands up in the light of the eternal -- God's eternal power and eternal purpose that we are to be a part of. We need the long view, and being a victim or a worldly success of some sort is not that view. "We walk by faith, not by sight." (2 Cor 5:7)
7 comments:
I had a pretty good score before i was saved. when i added all my afflictions, conflictions, addictions and predilections, i was a perfect 10. Now that Jesus washed me clean of all these dubious distinctions, the world sees me as a perfect zero... but i rejoice in the understanding that i am still a perfect 10 in the eyes of my father... thank you Jesus.
Bruce Jenner was born a total zero, but is now up to... 2? 3?
When I was young liberals had a reputation of being Jew-friendly, if not outright Zionist. But these days the most anti-Semitic demagogues tend to be leftists. My expectation is for the fraction of American Jews registered Republican to increase, and I see some evidence for that this century.
It's a high fly ball to right field. What's this!? That ball just came back from left field?!
My score is 1 as far as I can tell. Im a victim of intersectionality. I am relived however that my iPhone didn’t finish that word for me.
Sorry, Danny, in today's "intersectionality", no matter where you fall, as a white middle class American Christian, you automatically get a zero. Nothing we can do about it.
I think authentic Christians get a zero no matter what their skin color. The last will be first, or something like that.
Do you suppose it's possible to end up with a negative number?
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