It doesn’t assume there’s a fixed amount of bad shit. It’s saying that if you talk exclusively about oppression against one group, you miss out on the bigger picture. The oppression experienced by black women is similar, yet different to the oppression experienced by black men or white women. Intersectionality came out of the experiences of black women who felt they weren’t being heard or recognized in civil rights movements about women and movements about black people. In the women’s groups, they were marginalized because of racist attitudes that many in the movement tolerated. In black liberation groups, they were sidelined by misogyny.

These intelligent black women recognized these challenges and worked to address this by promoting intersectional thinking in civil rights spaces. They highlighted how there’s no single black experience or single woman experience. There were commonalities, yes but there were also differences. The civil rights movement is diverse, with there not being a single universal experience among them. There are many ways to experience discrimination, so instead of creating cliques of similarity, civil rights movements should embrace the diversity within their own movements.

If you eliminated all police abuse, it would be amazing. It would certainly help things. However, there are still other things to consider in parallel to that. For instance, is abuse in the private sector being addressed? Are companies hiring thugs to intimidate rather than using cops. Are we also trying to end other forms of abuse by the state, like imperialism. If you ended police brutality, it might not even lead to increases in those things, but they would still need to be addressed. Basically our work is not over until all unfair hierarchies are addressed. Police are only part of the hierarchy, and we should listen to those who are victims of other parts of it.