Intersectionality: From Framework to Factional Weapon, and the Call Back to the Kitchen Table

Intersectionality: From Framework to Factional Weapon, and the Call Back to the Kitchen Table

Once upon a time, intersectionality was meant to illuminate complexity, to help us see that a Black woman might face barriers not fully captured by race or gender alone, that people can experience overlapping forms of discrimination or privilege depending on where they stand in society. It was a lens to create empathy and understanding.

But in America’s modern political theater, that lens has been shattered and reassembled into something else entirely, a weapon for tribal politics. What once sought nuance has been hijacked by both sides into a blunt instrument for power, identity marketing, and moral superiority.

The Right mocks it. The Left monetizes it. Meanwhile, the average person, juggling rent, family, health, and debt, has been left staring at a vocabulary that feels alien, academic, and disconnected from daily life.

The Real Intersection: Function and Dysfunction

Forget the ivory-tower talk. The true intersection most of us live in is where function and dysfunction meet, in our bodies, homes, communities, and work. Are we sleeping well? Are we financially stable? Are we telling the truth to ourselves and others? Are we able to cooperate despite differences?

We don’t need a new political theory for that. We need functionality, systems and individuals that work. The family table, the neighborhood project, the small business, the local coalition, these are the spaces where people rediscover the art of making things function together.

When systems break down, healthcare, education, housing, criminal justice, intersectionality should guide reform. But when politics turns it into a zero-sum blame game, nobody gets fed.

The Industrial America We Forgot to Deter

Our real enemy isn’t each other. It’s the interlocking set of industrial institutions that quietly shape our choices while convincing us they’re inevitable:

- The food industry engineering addiction to sugar and seed oils.

- The pharmaceutical giants marketing lifelong dependency.

- The political machines turning every identity into a fundraising segment.

- The information empires keeping us angry and addicted to outrage.

The industrial complexes stole everything humans have done, bastardized the creations, modified them and sold them back.

Make a home-made cinnamon roll, or chili, and evaluate which is less expensive and tastes better, the modified manufactured food or the homemade food created with and for family. Rarely do Americans brag about their store brand recipe, more so, grandmas, or moms secret homemade foods.

If intersectionality meant something real, it would unite us across class, race, and party to expose how these institutions profit from dysfunction and the Great Divide. Instead, we’re fighting over identity and words while billionaires consolidate control of medicine, food, housing, and data in government.

The Return to the Kitchen Table

Before we can fix Washington and LOCAL politics, we must fix what’s happening around the kitchen table. That’s where real democracy lives, not in comment sections or cable panels.

At the kitchen table, people talk like humans, not algorithms. They trade ideas, food, faith, and fear. They don’t need to know the word “intersectionality” to understand that everyone’s struggle is layered. They live it every day.

We need to reclaim that space. To invite people back, even the ones we disagree with, and ask simple but radical questions:

- What’s working in your life?- What’s broken?

- How can we help each other fix it without waiting for institutions that profit from failure?

When America understands that we won’t need politicians to interpret our pain for us.

Closing Thought

Intersectionality was never supposed to divide us — it was meant to help us see each other more clearly. But clarity requires humility, and humility doesn’t trend. So maybe it’s time to drop the hashtags, silence the pundits, and get back to something ancient and revolutionary: sitting down together, breaking bread, and rebuilding what actually works.