Capitalization Rules

Intersectionality is a term I've been running into quite often lately.  It was first coined in the mid-80's by women's rights advocates to suggest one couldn't look at the issue of women's rights just by looking at the historical oppression of women.  There were other factors at play like racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc.  Makes sense.

Back in the 80's, intersectionality was just another lower case word tossed around in the discussion.  But lately, according to thinkers like Andrew Sullivan and Paul Krugman, it has turned into a capitalized word with all the characteristics of a religion, asserting that all the different forms oppression takes in a society--racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, religious bigotry (There are plenty more.)--intersect.  They do not function independently, but interrelate and feed off each other.

This continues to make sense, but as the belief has become a proper noun, it has become bastardized. That's the way it works with religions.  The word catholic (small case) simply means comprehensive, or universal scope, including or concerning all mankind.  The Catholic (upper case) religion has come to mean something else entirely.  I have Catholic relatives who regularly send me racist and xenophobic attachments explaining how all Muslims are evil.  There are devoted Catholics at the Y who spend every Sunday morning shedding tears for the poor and gathering donations to help orphans from Syria, but spend the rest of the week decrying dangerous immigrants and welfare queens, calling for a wall, desperately fending off the very real fear that pretty soon their country and their religion, a religion that regularly hangs paintings of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus on sanctuary walls, will be overrun by people of color whose babies won't look like the rest of the congregation.

The capitalized version of Intersectionality acts the same way.  For instance, Intersectionalists are at work at The Whitney in New York where Dana Schutz's "Open Casket" has been hung.  It depicts Emmett Till in a casket, evocative of the famous photograph of same.  However, Schutz is white and the Intersectionalists are demanding the painting be taken down because, given the history of white oppression of black people, a white artist has no right to depict anything from the black experience, and certainly doesn't have the right to make money from such a depiction.

Intersectionalism was at work at Middlebury College in Vermont when protestors shouted down Charles Murray, who was there to talk about his new book, because back in the 70's he co-authored "The Bell Curve," an unfortunate work that included a chapter explaining with lots of charts and numbers that one of the reasons blacks don't do as well as whites is because  black IQs tended to be lower.  The findings in that chapter were absurd and thoroughly debunked, but Murray's fall from grace, his stupid assessment of black intelligence, was enough to permanently exclude him and his ideas from any other discussion.  He was persona non grata at Middlebury and was shamefully shouted down.

Whenever an idea, no matter how harmless and self-evident, gets capitalized, starts attracting followers, starts alienating the non-followers, it begins to take itself too seriously and ends up doing damage.  The basic underlying universal acceptance in the word catholic becomes an unyielding standard by which to judge anyone who is not Catholic.  There is a natural tendency to think you and your group have a handle on things people not in your group don't.  There is a tendency to think you know all the answers to all the important moral and ethical questions.

This is particularly dangerous on a college campus.  Let's face it, if there is anyplace on earth where folks believe they have all the right answers, it is a college campus.  Smugness is a defining characteristic of a college kid.  Those kids at Middlebury were armed with the knowledge and certainties they gained in the classroom.  They knew how politically correct people ought to behave.  They knew what politically correct people ought to believe, and like college kids all over the country, they made noise and demanded change whenever a new belief, a new piece of knowledge threatened their certainties.  It is an easy call.  Intersectionality says that anyone who transgresses in any of those areas of oppression at any time, automatically and irrevocably disqualifies himself from any discussion on any college campus.

This, of course, transitions to the political realm where Democrats and Republicans are capitalized true believers.  A small case democrat is simply an individual who adheres to the "principle of social equality and respect for the individual within a community."  An upper case Democrat is an entirely different animal where the respect for the indidual and the community get eroded by loyalty to a party whose main goal is, has to be, getting reelected, maintaining power (or trying to get it back).  The small case word republic simply refers to a group of people working as equals and holding the supreme power in a political order.  It sounds a lot like a democracy, but stick a capital letter at the front and it becomes a party that demands loyalty just like the Democratic party and looks askance at anyone who doesn't belong, who doesn't toe the party line.  In any event, Democrats and Republicans take no prisoners.

Those students at Middlebury take no prisoners.  The outraged folks at The Whitney take no prisoners.  Donald Trump.  Paul Ryan.  Mitch McConnell.  Bill O'Reilly.  Sean Hannity.  Rush Limbaugh.  Bill Maher.  Nancy Pelosi. Chuck Shumer.  Hillary Clinton.  Bill Clinton.  All these people are upper case partisans and none of them take prisoners.

And it is all because of capitalization.  Intersectionalists from both sides of the political spectrum are armed with a whole list of capitalized words--Patriotism, Duty, Faith, Charity, Humanism, Originalism--they use at will to describe all sorts of feelings, attitudes, shoulds, and shouldn'ts.  With all those buzz words and speaking points at their disposal, they don't have to think.  All they have to do is point a finger.