Sue Lani Madsen: The intersectionality of vulnerability

To hate requires dehumanizing the “other,” no longer a full flesh-and-blood person with feelings and hopes and despairs and friends, but simply an object to be hated. Or shot. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s statement on good and evil is usually abbreviated into a quick social media meme, but the full quote carries a gut punch:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart … even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an uprooted small corner of evil.”

That small corner of evil is surfacing when whispered reports of anti-Asian attacks cause an American family to encourage their immigrant grandparents to move back to the old country for safety. It affects a Black man in Spokane, outwardly confident yet always conscious of vulnerability due to his “blackness.” It soaks into the soul of an old man aware of his “whiteness” and afraid of another obscenity-laced verbal attack while walking to a medical appointment in Seattle. Both Black and white wonder if next time it will get physical.

None of these incidents are tracked as hate crimes. Hate crime legislation punishes violence after the fact but does not touch that small corner of evil in the human heart. It doesn’t make anyone feel safer. The issue is not criminality but a culture where expressed hate is brushed off as a social embarrassment instead of being called out.

We have let hate become ordinary. It’s aided by a media cycle that insists on swiftly shorthanding every event into a simple narrative of victims and villains.

There is nothing new about group identities; people have always had tribes amid complex webs of identity. What has changed is the use of intersectionality as a political cudgel, an academic tool developed for analyzing patterns of discrimination in marginalized groups. Studying overlapping group identities in a population is useful to sociologists in the same way as anatomical dissection is to surgeons or diagramming sentences to linguists. But if you want to heal patients, you need to study wellness and not just disease. If you want to understand meaning and not just sentence structure, you need to know the context of the words and the inflection of the voices speaking.

To unite a population requires more than being able to divide people into caricatures at the mercy of their identities.

So when a man in Atlanta killed eight people, the noble victims were the six Asian women and the evil villain was the white man from a Christian family. Race was the convenient intersectional lens, but it misses so much. A young Asian woman, frustrated at the lack of interest in attacks during 2020 on people who look like her, told me “I’ve been called so many bad words in the past year, it’s been weird.” But looking only at the lens of race misses all the other issues. Pop culture celebrating sex as an animal act of physical gratification sets the stage. And although the shooter said it wasn’t racial, Asian women in particular fight a stereotype as sexual objects.

Then the sucker punch. Ten people shot in a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado. The victims are all white, the shooter is a Syrian-American immigrant from a Muslim family. Problematic for media outlets used to relying on the race and religion angle. There is an obvious intersection with mental health, although people with mental illness are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence. And so the focus turns to how an evil gun enticed a weak man into buying and carrying it into a supermarket and pulling its trigger, and hate is directed at anyone who does not roundly condemn the tool he chose to pick up.

His choice. Groups do not commit evil acts, tools do not commit evil, individuals do.

It was almost four years ago, and I’d been invited to drop by a left-leaning group gathered for open political discussion in a local coffee shop. One regular arrived late. A corner of evil bled through his voice as he spit out the words “I don’t want you in my world” upon being introduced to the notorious conservative columnist for The Spokesman-Review. Not one of the nice people at the table spoke up in the face of hate.

“Even in the best of all hearts” … we are all vulnerable. Would I have spoken up if the situation were reversed and I was one of the nice people at the coffee shop? Would you? Your choice. Hate stops at each individual’s “bridgehead of good.”

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.