Using the masters tools to dismantle the masters house

Something that I never considered was the effect economics had on the LGBT community. As this article describes, capitalist society only serves to widen the gap between already divided groups. Racial, class, and sexual disparities only progress as access to capital is reserved for elevated individuals.  Professor Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century argues that, “there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of human capital over financial capital, and that there is inherent in the dynamics of capitalism a natural and destabilizing tendency toward inequality of income, wealth and opportunity.” For the LGBT community, even as legal equality is reached, there are still cultural and economic barriers to overcome.

Audre Lorde explains a similar situation in the equality of women. Where as heteronormative white women are slowly elevated in a capitalist dominant culture, the minority groups are left behind. Lorde explains the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. For her, upper class white women were reaching levels of equality in society while the unwanted were not considered to join in. These women were simply perpetuating the White Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchy rather than breaching its values. Conferences were held with limited token representation from some minority groups while ultimately any efforts for women's rights was really only directed toward one category - able bodies upper middle class white women. 

Piketty's theory of economics can be applied to Lorde's critique showing that the White Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchy (WSCH?) encourages a widening gap in the already wide gap of race, class, and sexuality. For the LGBT community, some already on the margins of the society, equality in law will not be enough. As Lorde says, you cannot dismantle the masters house with the masters tools. Our government lawmakers are the WSCH and it is this hierarchy that is perpetuating the issues people are fighting so hard to solve.