‘Intersectionality’ – The Destructive Ideology Balkanizing the Country

‘Intersectionality’ – The Destructive Ideology Balkanizing the Country

“Intersectionality” theory and practice is an increasing focus  of ours. You may recall my NY Post op-ed, Toxic fuel for far-left terrorists came straight from our colleges, and our presentation to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

I appeared this morning on the Jerry Rogers Show to talk about what intersectionality is, how it’s implemented, and why it is a danger to the survival of the country.

(Partial Transcript – auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity).

Rogers (00:00): So the issue of equity, politics, racial politics, DEI politics is a topic weekly here on the Jerry Rogers show. And we’ve used the term ‘intersectionality’ often and how it impacts everything from our schools to our corporate boardrooms, to our politics, to our media. And so I’m very pleased to have on the show today. William Jacobson. He’s a professor at Cornell Law School. He is also the founder of Legal Insurrection. Is it Bill? Is it William? What do you like?

WAJ (00:49):

Bill is fine.

Rogers (00:51):

Alright. Well Bill, welcome to the program. I appreciate it, thank you. If you don’t mind, tell us what exactly is the intersectionality theory?

WAJ (01:02):

So intersectionality is essentially a group identity theory. It started relatively simply, as a way in which you can view different forms of discrimination. So it started as an employment law theory and the theory was, with regard to black women, that there are two forms of oppression working on them, or two forms of discrimination, one sex discrimination and one race discrimination. So far it’s understandable.

But it has morphed into the dominant ideology on campuses and increasingly in radical circles in society.

Intersectionality treats everybody by their group identity, and that’s what makes it different than our US constitution, than our state laws by. And it makes it different than the whole ethos of the civil rights movement, which treats people as individuals entitled to be treated fairly without regard to race or sex or national origin.

So intersectionality orders everything in an oppressor, oppressed ideology and framework based on your group identity, and it therefore orders groups in terms of where they stand in this hierarchy of oppression.

And that’s the problem with it because over many years it has morphed into an anti-American anti-capitalist, anti-Israel, some would say antisemitic movement, because it classifies capitalism and it classifies the United States as white oppressor societies. And that’s what intersectionality is. And it has been picked up throughout campuses.

I teach at a law school, at Cornell Law School on a campus, and it is the dominant ideology. It has had various forms over the years. It’s critical race theory, diversity, equity and inclusion. But at every step of the way, it’s ordering oppression, it’s ordering group identities. And particularly when it comes to Israel, it is the unifying ideology that harasses Jewish students on campus.

I’ve seen it at Cornell where when they come with their anti-Israel boycott motions, they always do it as people of color versus white oppressor Israel. And of course, they view the same thing with the United States. That’s what intersectionality is.

It has morphed even worse into the ideology of terror groups, like you might have seen in the news recently, the Turtle Island Liberation Front. That’s a very much an intersectional sort of group. It treats the United States as illegitimate.

On every campus almost, there is a so-called ‘land acknowledgement’ requirement, that has to be stated at the beginning of every meeting acknowledging that we are on stolen land.

At every level it’s oppressor versus oppressed. It is people of color versus whites. And its goal is to delegitimize the United States, to delegitimize capitalism, and to delegitimize Israel.

Rogers (04:11):

You know, it’s interesting… So here, my question to you is, is when we create competing groups rather than a unified society, we no longer have shared values. And what happens to a culture, to a society when we can’t agree on what’s shared values? We don’t have to agree on all the particulars, all the politics, right? Diversity of opinion, of diversity of thoughts is important. But when we can’t simply decide on what’s right and wrong, that’s dangerous for the cohesion of a culture, yes or no?

WAJ (05:14):

Yes, absolutely. I have two websites that address that issue. One is criticalrace.org, which is interactive maps tracking Critical Race Theory in Higher Education, and the Equal Protection Project (equal protect.org) which challenges discriminatory practices based on DEI throughout the country. And we’ve challenged over 275 universities for over 800 programs.

So what the DEI programming does is it forces students to identify by group identity. It essentially is a balkanization of our country. It is turning us into the former Yugoslavia where people are at each other’s throats based on your group identity, based on essentially your tribal identity. And that’s my big issue with DEI, that’s why I’ve been so outspoken about it at Cornell and elsewhere, which is that it forces students to view themselves not part of a greater whole, the United States of America, in which they fully belong without regard to race, sex, or national origin. And it forces them to compete based on their group identities.

We’ve seen this, and we’ve covered this in K through 12 also, what started on the campuses did not stop on the campuses. DEI and group identity ideology is fully into K through 12.

There was an incident in the Providence Public School District where we brought a teacher forward, essentially a whistleblower, and she described what the new critical race curriculum did in her school. A white teacher teaching in an almost a hundred percent minority district. Always got along with the students, but when they introduced the new curriculum, the students no longer viewed themselves as part of the United States. In fact, they refused to stand, many of them, for the Pledge of Allegiance. In Rhode Island, you must recite the Pledge of Allegiance in class, but of course, constitutionally no student needs to. And they stopped doing that.

They started referring to her as America, ‘you are America because you are white. We are not America.’ That’s what it does.

If you wanted a way to destroy our country, what would you do differently than the left has done to our education system where it forces students to view themselves not as part of the greater United States, but as part of their group identity, where it sets group identity students against other group identity students, sets them against their school districts, sets them against their parents, and ultimately sets them against their country?

Whoever devised this scheme to force this into the education system knew what they doing were doing. What would you do differently if you wanted to destroy the United States than what the left has done to education?

Rogers (08:01):

You know, I’ve been saying this, in fact, I said it in the first hour of the program today, that the left is at war with America. The left is at war with Western civilization. It’s a kind of cultural revolution. Is the Trump administration, uhaving success, will it have sustained success in undoing or pushing back on this, on this balkanization of this DEI, racial equity intersectionality,

WAJ (08:30):

The Trump administration’s taken very important action. The executive orders defunding the DEI industrial Complex have been extremely important and very impactful, but we should not kid ourselves.

This is an ideology, intersectionality, critical race theory, diversity, equity and inclusion, which has been 30 years in the making. It didn’t just happen a couple of years ago. And it’s very deeply embedded throughout the campuses, throughout the K through 12 teachers unions and throughout K through 12, both public and private schools.

So this is not something that’s going to be won with a half dozen executive orders or a year or two of civil rights enforcement action. Now, the executive orders have been impactful. The civil rights enforcement has been impactful, but you need to change the campus and the K through 12 culture, and that’s going to take a lot more time.

What we’re seeing is the DEI industrial complex, which are the consultants, which are the teachers’ unions, which are the foundations that fund this, which are the states that in many cases fund it. It used to be funded by the US government, not anymore.

They are entrenching themselves. They are circling the wagons. They are hanging on hoping to wait out the Trump administration. They’re hiding things.

At our websites where we track this, criticalrace.org and equalprotect.org, we have seen how they are masking things. They’re changing names.  At Cornell where I teach diversity, equity, and inclusion is now called belonging and understanding. It’s almost comical, the word games they’re playing.

They’re putting things behind login walls. So we have researchers who research this and we then bring legal actions, what used to be on their public facing websites no longer is, they’re taking them down and they’re putting them behind paywalls, or I should say login walls where you need a student ID in order to access the information. So they’re masking it by playing word games. They’re shuffling people around and they’re hiding things.

And therefore this is going to be a much longer, harder effort than just the Trump administration.

Rogers (10:51):

…. So my last question to you is, is there hope?

WAJ (12:37):

I think we need to keep fighting it. There’s no alternative but to fight this DEI industrial complex, the balkanization of the country, the destruction of the country under an ideology where even publicly elected officials are refusing to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States. We have no choice but to fight it.

This is not a battle over education. People need to understand this is a battle over the survival of our country. What they have done to the education system is tearing our country apart at the seams and it’s everywhere. And there is a generation or two of students who have been raised knowing nothing else. They know nothing else about the United States other than the propaganda they’ve been fed in the educational system.

So your question is, is there hope? I don’t think we need to answer that question. We just need to fight it. We just need to stand firmly for the principles of our country, for our country, for our system, and for equality, and not for the racism of the DEI industrial complex that needs to be defeated. Whether it takes two years or 20 years, it must be defeated.

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