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Intersectionality in the Classroom: From Empathy to Indoctrination

Intersectionality, a framework coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, purports to illuminate how overlapping social categories such as race, gender, class, and sexuality compound experiences of discrimination or privilege. Emerging from Crenshaw’s analysis of Black women’s marginalization within both feminist and civil rights discourses, the term has since evolved into a pervasive lens for examining interlocking systems of power.

In a recent Grade 12 lesson plan from Prince George, British Columbia, students are tasked with crafting personal definitions of intersectionality, mapping their identities onto a “wheel of power/privilege,” and connecting these to daily life and global citizenship. This exercise, ostensibly designed to foster empathy, exemplifies how the theory infiltrates education—reducing multifaceted human experience to a grid of predetermined oppressions and advantages. Yet beneath its academic veneer lies a mechanism for sowing division, one that demands scrutiny for its role in perpetuating grievance over growth.

At its core, intersectionality falters by collapsing the rich tapestry of individual lives into rigid identity matrices, sidelining agency, character, and shared humanity in favor of immutable traits assigned at birth. By framing privilege as an unearned inheritance tied to one’s position on the proverbial wheel, the framework risks breeding resentment among students, who learn to view peers not as collaborators but as bearers of systemic guilt. Empirical observations from social movements underscore this fragmentation: alliances crumble when identity eclipses common purpose, as seen in fractured coalitions where tactical solidarity yields to performative purity tests.

Even within leftist traditions, critics decry how intersectionality dilutes rigorous economic analysis into cultural essentialism, obscuring material inequities under a haze of subjective hierarchies. Far from empowering, this lesson in Prince George transforms the classroom into a theater of suspicion—where adolescents dissect their “intersecting identities” not to build resilience but to catalog wounds, fostering a generation primed for perpetual victimhood rather than principled action.

This pedagogical sleight of hand reveals intersectionality’s deeper allegiance to identity politics, a doctrine that elevates collective affiliation above individual merit and moral accountability. In the lesson’s directive to “identify aspects of my personal and social identity” relative to privilege, students are subtly coerced into prioritizing group-based narratives over personal narratives, echoing a broader cultural shift where loyalty to tribe trumps universal ethics. Such politics, by design, atomizes society into silos of grievance, undermining the Enlightenment ideal of judgment by deeds rather than descent.

The result is not enlightenment but alienation: white students branded as inherent oppressors, marginalized peers cast as eternal victims, all while the lesson’s “bonus” nod to global citizenship rings hollow amid the induced tribalism. Verifiable accounts from educators and observers confirm this corrosive effect, with classrooms devolving into echo chambers of accusation rather than forums for frank exchange.

Worse still, intersectionality’s Marxist undercurrents betray its origins in class warfare, merely repackaging economic antagonism as identitarian strife to sustain endless conflict without resolution. Drawing from dialectical materialism’s emphasis on oppositional forces, the theory substitutes proletariat–bourgeois divides with fluid yet perpetually clashing identity classes—oppressors versus oppressed—fueling a zero-sum battle that mirrors historical agitprop but swaps factories for feelings. Critics within the Marxist canon itself lament this dilution, arguing it retreats from revolutionary class consciousness into liberal fragmentation, where cultural skirmishes supplant systemic overhaul.

In the Prince George curriculum, this manifests as students pondering how their “wheel” positions them in global hierarchies, unwittingly internalizing a narrative of inevitable clash that excuses inaction while justifying radicalism. By promoting such identitarian discord, intersectionality does not liberate; it entrenches a spectral class war, audible in its echoes from the Frankfurt School to contemporary campus upheavals.

In place of this divisive doctrine, educators should pivot to a lesson grounded in universal human rights, drawing from the Enlightenment’s timeless assertion of equality before the law irrespective of ascribed identities. Students might begin by studying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)—articulating core tenets like dignity and non-discrimination—and then apply them to case studies that transcend identity silos. Group debates could explore how these rights galvanize cooperation in pluralistic societies, extending into civic duties such as community service that bridge divides through shared endeavor.

This alternative, far from ignoring inequities, confronts them through aspirational universality, fostering citizens equipped for concord rather than combat. By centering verifiable principles over subjective grids, such a curriculum honors truth’s pursuit, arming youth against narrative warfare with the unyielding shield of human solidarity.

References

• Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989(1): 139–167.
  — Foundational essay introducing intersectionality in the context of Black women’s employment discrimination cases.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.
  — Expanded articulation of intersectional theory applied to social and legal contexts.
• Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976.
  — Influential analysis of how ideological movements replace class analysis with cultural moralism.
• Fraser, Nancy. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Review 212 (1995): 68–93.
  — A left-wing critique of intersectionality’s turn toward identity over material class structures.
• Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
  — Core Frankfurt School text examining how ideology replaces substantive rationality; relevant to intersectionality’s theoretical lineage.
• United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted December 10, 1948.
  — Primary document grounding an alternative civic and moral education in universalism rather than identity determinism.
• Lilla, Mark. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. New York: Harper, 2017.
  — Liberal critique of identity politics and its corrosive impact on civic cohesion.