By Lucretia Hughes
WASHINGTON — The federal government has committed approximately $230 million to grants connected to “intersectionality,” according to a new report examining hundreds of federal spending records.
Yes, intersectionality.
It is another academic word that most Americans never use at the dinner table, at church or while trying to figure out how they will afford groceries. But inside universities, government agencies and progressive political circles, it has become an entire belief system — and taxpayers have apparently been paying for it.
Intersectionality is the idea that a person’s race, sex, sexual orientation, income, disability and other characteristics overlap to determine how much privilege or discrimination that person experiences.
The term was introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s to describe how Black women could experience discrimination differently from either Black men or white women.
But what began as an academic theory has grown into something much larger.
Today, intersectionality is frequently used to place Americans into competing identity categories. Instead of treating people as individuals, it encourages institutions to measure them according to assumptions about oppression, victimhood and privilege.
In other words, the left keeps making up words to make people feel like they belong — but belonging increasingly requires everyone to accept another label.
You are no longer simply an American. You must be classified by your race, your gender, your sexuality, your economic status and every other box an activist can find. Then the system decides whether you are an oppressor, a victim or something in between.
The Defense of Freedom Institute and Legal Insurrection Foundation reviewed federal assistance records containing the word “intersectionality.” The conservative organizations identified 249 grant records totaling approximately $230 million.
According to their report, about $140 million has already been spent, while approximately $90 million remains committed. Federal funding tied to the term reportedly reached $80.1 million in 2023, during former President Joe Biden’s administration.
About 100 of the grants identified in the review appear to remain active, with some performance periods extending through 2030.
The money did not fund one single intersectionality program. The researchers counted the total value of grants whose descriptions or applications incorporated intersectional language. Some financed legitimate medical and public-health projects in which intersectionality was only one component.
That distinction matters.
But it also raises a serious question: Why must cancer prevention, diabetes research and other important medical work be wrapped in political language about identity and privilege before Washington will fund it?
The grants identified by the report included $10.99 million for cancer prevention and control programs through the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services. The program referred to populations experiencing health disparities and an “intersectionality of gender and income inequality.”
The review also identified $7.53 million awarded to the University of California, San Francisco, for an Asian American cancer study; $8.16 million for a diabetes equity research center at New York University; and $14.25 million for a Drexel University program supporting diverse faculty working in health-disparities research.
Cancer is real. Diabetes is real. Poverty is real. Americans living in rural and underserved communities face real barriers to receiving quality medical care.
None of those problems requires the government to rank patients by a progressive hierarchy of privilege.
Research should determine which people are at risk, what prevents them from receiving treatment and which solutions save the most lives. That is evidence-based medicine.
It should not become another vehicle for forcing Americans into ideological categories.
Robert Eitel, president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, said the findings demonstrate how deeply the theory has become embedded in federal grantmaking.
The organizations argue that intersectionality can allow institutions to continue identity-based decision-making while presenting it as technical research. They are calling on the Trump administration and Congress to prevent federal grants from promoting programs that treat people differently according to protected characteristics.
Supporters of intersectional research argue that examining overlapping circumstances can help identify communities overlooked by broader statistics. A low-income Black woman living in a rural community, for example, may encounter a different combination of barriers than someone with only one of those characteristics.
Recognizing circumstances is not the problem. Turning every circumstance into a permanent political identity is.
America’s promise is supposed to be equal protection under the law and equal opportunity for every citizen. It is not supposed to be a government-calculated privilege score based on someone’s skin color, sex or personal life.
We do not create unity by teaching Americans to introduce themselves through a list of grievances. We do not create equality by replacing individual discrimination with government-approved group discrimination.
And we certainly should not spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars supporting an ideology that tells people they cannot belong until they have found the proper label for their victimhood.
People already belong.
They belong because they are human beings created by God. They belong because they are Americans. Their dignity does not come from a professor, a bureaucrat or a newly invented word.
Washington should fund cancer research, disease prevention and programs that produce measurable benefits for the American people.
It should stop funding the labels.
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