Whenever someone asks me for my “hot take,” I usually say something pretty unserious: men should never wear flip-flops, sparkling water sucks or pineapples should stay far away from everything, especially pizza. Easy, harmless, sometimes funny.

But if I’m being honest, the hot take that rests in the back of my mind is one that I ponder about often, and one that holds more weight. We need to be more honest about how we talk about identity, especially when we throw around labels like “people of color” or “minorities”. Those umbrella terms often blur concrete differences in experience and make it harder to see how privilege and oppression overlap.

Since the pandemic in 2020, politics have been playing out online in a way we have never seen before. Every week, there is some new debate, whether about politics, issues like cultural appropriation or someone’s latest chronically online meltdown. People rush to claim space in these conversations and oftentimes they draw from their own identity, which, don’t get me wrong, definitely makes sense. Lived experience matters. But here’s my problem: the internet, and honestly, even many campus or class conversations, flatten those identities until all nuance is gone. Lived experiences can be powerful, but too often they reduce identities to watered-down phrases.

Take the label “POC”. It is meant to create solidarity but it also erases differences. A Black student, an Asian student and a Middle Eastern student will not have the same experiences with racism. Each reality is shaped by history, religion, gender, class and more. Grouping them all together as “POC” oversimplifies in a way that loses the truth of what each community actually faces.

This happens with gender, too. Conversations about women’s oppression often act like all women share the same struggles. But being a white woman is not the same as being a woman of color. White women face sexism but they also benefit from whiteness. That privilege shapes how they are seen and how they move through the world. And when white women center their own struggles, or rely on what gets called “white woman tears”, that habit of using vulnerability to avoid accountability, it can oftentimes push women of color out of the conversation completely.

That is what intersectionality is meant to address. Identities overlap in ways that create very specific experiences of discrimination and privilege. You can’t just add them up like math and you definitely can’t assume one person’s struggle speaks for everyone else.

This matters because solidarity that ignores differences is not really solidarity at all. When “all women” only means white women or “POC” becomes a vague catch-all, the people who most need to be heard end up silenced. If we actually want to build community across identities, then we have to face the messy truth instead of hiding behind neat categories. It’s also totally fine to just face and accept the privileges you have in society. Seriously, the fragility needs to be addressed already.

So maybe my real hot take is this: we should stop pretending solidarity means we’re all the same. Everyone has their own distinct experiences, some on vastly different levels than others. That is not something to flatten or ignore, it is something to sit with. Real solidarity does not come from assuming you already understand what someone else is going through. It comes from being willing to listen, even when their story does not match your own. It comes from resisting the urge to center yourself and instead making space for the voices that usually get talked over. If we want solidarity to mean anything, it has to start with openness, humility and the patience to hear differences without defensiveness.

Hot take? Maybe. But one we seriously need to sit with.