The ways we define crisis allow us to attach the language of calamity to whiteness, men, or other seemingly dominant groups, while at the same time making it harder to see the suffering of women, immigrants, people of color, and other persons who do merit a “crisis of authority”—because they are supposedly built for it, or because they have lived with crisis all along. This logic suggests that men need to be on top because they embody no skills for acting otherwise; and everyone else, to paraphrase an important book about women-of-color feminism, are born with bridges called their backs.
