A plea for a more inclusive intersectionality

Leonard Pitts once wrote a column about the Don Imus/Rutgers women's basketball/"nappy headed hoes" controversy that I still think about to this day. Pitts posed the question: Why can Imus get away with making fun of Oprah but not the Rutgers women's basketball players?

He said that the unwritten rule in our society is that you cannot bully. A nationally-syndicated radio host is in a position to bully a group of college female ballers. But when you're Oprah Winfrey, who the hell is Don Imus? He's the dust you brush off your shoulder as you think about your next billion dollar industry to conquor.

I think about this when I think about intersectionality, which I understand as essentially the layers of victims of oppression. The top of this layer is white men, the ultimate beneficiaries of privilege. However, the above example places a black woman in a more privileged position than a white man. How can this be?

I think we're starting to bump up against the flaws of intersectionality, which is that it does not include class, namely the poor. (I realize many definitions include class but I only hear the term deployed in reference to race or gender discrimination.) The broad brush of "white, straight, native-born men" necessarily includes high school dropouts, with no old money, living on welfare. This groups earns a fraction of a penny for every dollar Oprah makes. That's not a wage gap you hear a lot about.

These are bleak times for being in the bottom 20 percent, regardless of race or gender.

For intersectionality to truly be inclusive, it has to include poor people. Even if that means identifying a certain class of white men as victims of systemic classism.