Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again: the real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people, or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom, and equality.… If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to twenty-two million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.
That’s intersectionality to me. Muhammad Ali wasn’t Vietnamese. He had never been to Saigon. He—like most Americans at the time—probably couldn’t have found Vietnam on a map. But he identified with what they were going through: their oppression sounded like his oppression. They shared the common experience of being brutalized by those in power, though Ali noted their realities were very different: he wasn’t being napalmed. Ali offered solidarity, hope, and even his own freedom in support of their struggle.
The Olympic protestors Tommie Smith and John Carlos also taught me about intersectionality. Nobody remembers who won all the medals at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, but every time I see that photo of their fists in the air on the medal stand, I’m reminded that it wasn’t just a Black project but a human rights project. When you dig deeper into the history, you learn that they weren’t just standing up for themselves. They were standing with the people of South Africa and Rhodesia, who were living under apartheid. You learn that the all-white Harvard crew team stood with them and even created the buttons they wore on the medal stand, which read, “Olympic Project for Human Rights.”
The Black Panther Fred Hampton also taught me about intersectionality. Everyone should know more about Fred Hampton. He was killed—executed—by the Chicago police, in collusion with the FBI, when he was just twenty-one years old, and his loss continues to be felt. Hampton was so far ahead of his time that we’re still catching up. He saw working with Native Americans, poor white people, and gay people as essential to the Black struggle. He created the first “rainbow coalition”—it was logical to him to find connections between different struggles, but somewhere along the way, since his death, we’ve lost that logic. Today, we are fighting for Black Lives Matter and Black liberation, but we will succeed only if we can figure out how to connect our struggle with every other effort out there for justice and equality. That’s why you see me working with Native Americans, Palestinians, women, and people in Africa and Haiti.
To practice intersectionality, I believe you have to remove yourself from the fear or discomfort of associating with certain groups or issues you’ve been taught to ignore. I know Black people who don’t care about immigrants, men who don’t care about women, and straight people who don’t care about gay people. Why are we like this? Why don’t we care? Maybe we are so divided by tribe that we’re taught that caring for someone outside our assigned category is the ultimate sin, yet I would argue that it’s the ultimate expression of being part of the human family. You grow and come to understand that there’s so much more to this world than just your bubble. You learn that we can’t organize along the same lines that keep us divided.
Intersectionality has to be a part of our thinking if we are ever going to see change. We need to take to heart Dr. King’s words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Right now, being an immigrant—or even looking like you might be an immigrant from what some people call “shithole countries”—means having a target on your back. Muslims, refugees, and Latinos, in particular, are living through terror. Anti-Latino hate crimes have increased by 50 percent in the last five years, with a big spike since the start of Trump’s presidential campaign, when he called Mexican immigrants “rapists.” The school-to-prison pipeline divides us as well, with Latino youth three times more likely to be suspended, expelled, or referred to court than white students who do the same things. You are three times more likely to live behind bars if you are Latino than if you are white. Then there is the issue of wealth: the average Latino household has only 8 percent of the wealth of the average white household, and they make 67 cents on the dollar, compared to white men. A Latina has to work 22 months to earn what white workers of similar educational levels make in a year. Until we confront these realities, how can we possibly tell people that education and hard work alone, without political struggle, are enough to make the change we are so desperate to see? Intersectionality as a political method
