One of the most important realizations that Intersectional feminist thinking smacked me in the head with was: “Just because you have been victimized or harmed by structural systems of oppression does not make you incapable of victimizing others or exploiting systems of power.”
The idea that all of us exist at our own nexus of lots of interlocking systems of structural power, identity, and history — that a person can be a privileged possessor of structural advantage in some ways, AND an excluded outsider or structurally powerless in others — is huge.
So many of the talking points right-wing reactionaries firehose at those they perceive as “identity politics” people or “SJWs” read like a guided tour of the very tangles intersectionality clarifies.
“I’m a poor white guy from the wrong side of the tracks, how am I privileged?!” grats on realizing race, economics, gender & class all matter! Sadly, you’ve decided it means critical theory is marxist bullshit, not that it helps explain both your problems and your advantages.
Incredulity about one’s own ability to harm others or exert structural power — because one has been victimized in the past — is like ground zero of deconstructing how a lot of geek/tech culture ignores its own sins. “I can’t be a bully, I was bullied” FEELS compelling but…