General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is" [View all]Tom Rinaldo
(22,912 posts)Religion and class are examples of those. In some places at some times a straight white male Jew may not start out with the lowest difficulty setting relative to Christians who are not straight and/or white and/or male. In Northern Ireland, leading up to and including "The Troubles", a lesbian white female Protestant might have started out with a lower difficulty setting than a typical straight white male Catholic. A straight white male born in a poor off the grid hollow in Appalachia might overall start out with a higher difficulty setting than a straight black male born to an upper class family in a "University town". The salient difference regarding race though must always be acknowledged. A "poor" man might be able to "clean up" and don garbs sufficient to pass for being upper middle class. A white Catholic stranger at a train depot in Northern Ireland may not be immediately recognizable as not being Protestant. Anyone though with sufficient skin pigment will always be viewed instantaneously by all as non white.
I don't mention this merely to be contrary, because I fully accept the premise of this OP as true. There are practical applications to fighting discrimination in understanding how and where these overlapping grids function though. Class variables offer a good historic reference. In circumstances when ruling economic interests achieve overwhelming dominance over those who labor for a living, and class inequalities are extreme to the point where a high proportion of people must struggle to literally survive, organized labor sometimes managed to forge coalitions of laborers across racial and gender lines. And while those almost invariably began as narrow tactical alliances, common struggle has at times broken down those divisions and began to dissolve underlying racist and sexist attitudes among those fighting for a common cause.
By way of explanation I should add that I am now in the midst of reading the autobiography of "Big Bill Hayward", a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. He was a great man who instinctively fought against all racism, with some considerable success, due to his vision of common humanity reinforced on a daily basis by the harsh inequities he confronted.