Gen Z Should Embrace Intersectionality & Mutual Aid

From a rise in xenophobia and forced deportations to a sharp increase in online misogyny and far-right politics, it’s clear that justice is unattainable for many. As social media apps circulate various degrees of oppression, the world can feel unstable, overwhelming and exhausting. How do we, as Gen Z, make sense of it all? Is it possible to collectively combat the oppressions we face every day?    

Intersectionality might be the answer. It's often described as a prism through which one looks at the world, where social change is propelled. It helps us to collectively analyze how different types of oppression — like racism, sexism and classism — don't just exist in a vacuum. Instead, they overlap to create distinct experiences of oppression. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights scholar and professor, coined the term intersectionality in her often-cited essay, but the concept can be traced back to numerous Black Feminist scholars, like the Combahee River Collective, Deborah King and Bell Hooks. 

In 1977, two decades before Crenshaw’s conception of the term, the Combahee River Collective, consisting of Black, queer women, issued a powerful statement.

They declared, “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see our particular tasks as the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” They expressed the alienation that Black women faced in bourgeois feminist organizations. Similarly, male-dominated Black liberation movements reinforced traditional gender roles and failed to address the interlocking oppressions of racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. 

Their influential statement echoed the foundation of intersectionality, as its authors recognized the interconnection between African Americans’ struggle for liberation and the demarginalization of all oppressed people around the world. Intersectionality is the belief that oppressions are interlinked and cannot be solved with a single approach or in isolation.

In his book “Mutual Aid,” Dean Spade proposes mutual aid as a form of political participation in which people voluntarily take care of each other. Mutual aid cultivates an intersectional approach with hands-on participation, as it acknowledges that the systems of oppression in place either cause or exacerbate crises.

A famous example of mutual aid was during the Black Panther Party's survival program which entailed a free breakfast program, ambulance rides, medical services, and a school providing a liberation curriculum.

Historically, mutual aid groups target the most vulnerable and disenfranchised members of society. The Black Panthers’ programs mobilized people by creating spaces where they could access basic needs and build shared analysis about the conditions they were facing. 

J. Edgar Hoover famously wrote in a 1969 memo sent to all FBI offices that “the BCP represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP [Black Panther Party] and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” They curated spaces where shame rooted in being unable to feed children dissipated, instead addressing the root causes of Black poverty. 

Ultimately breaking stigma and isolation while learning about other’s experiences that are molded by multifaceted oppressions. Thus, mutual aid directly addresses real problems in people’s lives which tend to develop an intersectional and solidarity-based approach because their members’ lives are cross-cut by many different experiences of marginalization. 

More recently, pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses demonstrated how mutual aid fed not only the protesters, but also the wider public.

UC Berkeley's encampment donated all surplus goods to local unhoused people in May 2024. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s encampment organizers created a “People’s Kitchen” open to everyone, which was supplied by donations from local communities, restaurants and supportive faculty.  

With an intersectional approach, mutual aid allows organizers to identify vulnerable communities in risk of future crises. It requires valuing the voices of people who are most vulnerable to layered oppression. It looks like lifting up, promoting and supporting the leadership of voices most affected, centering their suggestions and values into any given project. 

Through social media, we participate in mutual aid by fundraising through links or collecting money together to pay someone else’s hospital bills. A website reporting ICE activity keeps communities informed, protected, and helps keep our fellow immigrants safe. 

All these seemingly distinct actions of mutual aid embody the broad act of providing, protecting and caring for each other when the government fails to do so. In order to be educated on how oppression permeates into our lives and molds unique experiences, we must put intersectionality into practice. 

According to The Oberlin Review, Gen Z can incorporate an intersectional feminism in place of a mainstream feminism which centers white women. 

Angela Davis stated, “As long as I have identified as a feminist, it has been clear to me that any feminism that privileges those who already have privilege is bound to be irrelevant to poor women, working-class women, women of color, and trans women. Standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top. How is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom?” 

Mainstream feminisms centering around choice and neoliberalism hyperfixate on the individuality that capitalism praises. They promote the idea that women can ‘girlboss’ their way out of oppression while ignoring the systemic barriers faced by women of colour, LGBTQ+ individuals, disabled women, etc. This idea of succeeding against patriarchal oppression by replacing cis white men in positions of power does not evade the oppression that women can enforce while in positions of power. It focuses on individual ‘empowerment’ without challenging the systems of power in the first place. However, the promise of working hard and going to college has become increasingly hollow. We can try to climb the corporate ladder and shatter the glass ceiling, but the precarious economic landscape, unprecedented inflation, and crushing burden of college debt only call for a deeper analysis of our contemporary systems.

The promise of succeeding in an inherently unjust capitalist society under the guise of feminism will always lack a deeper analysis of how class, race, and ableism intersect with gender. Individual success at the extreme detriment of other (working-class) women isn’t the fight for liberation. As ICE abducts women of colour in plain sight and gender-affirming care is being pushed back for transgender youth, feminism must move beyond token representation. Feminism committed to true collective liberation should cultivate an intersectional framework.

While not everyone experiences inequality in the same manner, it’s vital to confront the framework on which systemic oppressions operate. A Black woman, a transgender teen, or a disabled immigrant may encounter discrimination influenced by every aspect of their identity, not merely one. Intersectionality emphasizes these truths at the forefront. It urges us to pay attention to those experiencing various forms of oppression and to construct solutions that are representative of all our experiences. How do we piece together an intersectional framework that can be emulated?

Firstly, building solidarity through an intersectional prism ensures an ever-expanding commitment to justice that doesn’t leave vulnerable people behind. Prioritizing discussions about racism while avoiding conversations about the patriarchy evades accountability for our privileges. Intersectionality in our day-to-day lives looks like being aware of how our identity and relative privilege permeate our experiences. Similarly, promoting discourse on how misogyny permeates a woman’s experience while ignoring the question of race can devalue the significance of a Black woman's multilayered oppression.

For example, the pay gap exemplifies the multifaceted oppression Black women face. In the US, women earn 83 cents for every dollar a man earns. Yet a Black woman earns 64 cents compared to men, underscoring how race magnifies the gender disparity. Intersectionality highlights how oppression can’t be easily solved by focusing on just racism or sexism.

Intersectionality recognizes the importance of community and amplifies the need for all members to be respected and heard. We should strive to include everyone in addressing the problems we all face, working together and not against each other.

Mutual aid can be beautiful. It feels good to live by our values, spurring real change while surrounded by people who wish to do the same. It’s incredibly nurturing to address the real ways oppressive systems impact our lives and to treat activism as an ongoing quest for liberation, not a pet cause.

It is hands-on engagement that actually enlivens us, as we become more curious, more willing to see the harm that surrounds us, and ask how we can reconstruct our realities.

And as we enter 2026, Big Tech companies continue to violate human rights, and regressive politics are amounting to an avalanche that is hitting the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our societies.

Intersectionality and mutual aid are more than a framework; they call on us to act and center solutions around those most impacted by crises. As Gen Z, we must look deeper to establish movements that liberate all who are oppressed.