Northeastern Prof: Elizabeth Warren Is the First ‘Intersectional’ Candidate

Democratic presidential hopeful Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren reacts to supporter
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images

Northeastern University Professor Suzanna Danuta Walters, who is perhaps best known for her Washington Post column entitled “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” is back this week with a new column in which she claims that Senator Elizabeth Warren is the first “intersectional” candidate for president.

A new column in the Nation this week from Northeastern Professor Susanna Danuta Walters makes the case that Senator Elizabeth Warren is the first “intersectional” candidate for president. Walters serves as the editor-in-chief of a popular feminist academic journal called Signs.

Breitbart News reported in June 2018 that Walters had penned a column entitled “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”

“Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power,” Walters told men in the column. “We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you.”

It is quite bizarre that Walters, a prominent feminist scholar, fails to make it clear that she understands “intersectionality.” Intersectionality, a concept formally introduced by critical race theory scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, refers to the notion that certain members of society experience an interlocking form of oppression based on their membership in more than one marginalized group. For example, a black woman may experience separate discrimination based upon her gender and her race.

The column suggests that Walters doesn’t understand this concept. In the column, she makes a list of the various ways in which Warren engages in “intersectional thinking.”

“The key to robust intersectional thinking is to concretely demonstrate the ways in which things that seem to be about one concern are often inflected through others,” Walters writes. She then goes onto provide a list of issues raised by Warren. But, surprisingly, the column fails to mention one example in which Warren highlights “intersectionality” as defined by all of Walters’ peers in feminist scholarship.

As Warren herself said in a tweet outlining her disability rights platform, “All policy issues are disability policy issues, which is why I’ve approached many of my previous plans with a disability rights lens, from criminal justice reform to ensuring a high-quality public education for all, to strengthening our democracy.”

When Warren addresses the debate about guns and links it to domestic violence, she is signifying precisely how a different angle of vision illuminates the connection between a culture of unfettered access to guns and a culture of violence against women.

During the New Hampshire debate, as the candidates discussed racial inequities in criminal justice and in wealth acquisition, Warren pointed out how her proposal to levy a wealth tax is not a simple “class” issue but in fact would address racial inequality in substantive ways by, for example, getting rid of student debt that unduly burdens people of color, who tend to be more in debt and take longer to pay it back.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story

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