In an interview with Rolling Stone, Emilia Clarke spoke about her experiences with sexism in Hollywood, comparing it to racism. The actress who portrays Khaleesi in the wildly popular HBO series, Game of Thrones  said, “I feel so naive for saying it, but it’s like dealing with racism,” she said. “You’re aware of it, and you’re aware of it, but one day, you go, ‘Oh, my God, it’s everywhere!’ Like you suddenly wake up to it and you go, ‘Wait a f—ing second, are you … are you treating me different because I’ve got a pair of tits? Is that actually happening?’ It took me a really long time to see that I do get treated differently. But I look around, and that’s my daily life.”

Clarke’s experiences as a white woman in a male dominated society are not to be discredited. The inequality in pay and opportunity between male and female actors in Hollywood is real.  Like all ‘isms,’ sexism comes with its own burden of prejudice and discrimination, but to be clear, racism – it is not. The problem with equating the two is as stale as the argument itself.

Historically, white feminists have been all too enthusiastic to appropriate the black struggle in the fight for their own equality but by-in-large that's where the intersectionality ends. Sojourner Truth called her white sistren out on this contradiction in her famous "Ain't I A Woman?" speech given at a women's rights conference in Ohio in 1851. It is this same tendency toward selective intersectionality that inspired architects of the feminist and suffrage struggles of the early 1900’s to adopt the imagery of chains as a representation of the emancipation of white women. White women were never in chains. White women never suffered the humiliation of slavery or the heart-wrenching loss of having their children sold for profit. White women have not inherited the burden of systemic racism, but they are the disproportionate beneficiaries of Affirmative Action and other hard-fought gains paid for by black people.

Even in the context of Clarke's argument, white women are still the most powerful minority in Hollywood. To be fair, the actresses comparison of sexism and racism reads to me as more an attempt to highlight the pervasiveness of both forms of discrimination than it is an attempt to equate the two. I get it. The problem is, she is only qualified to speak to one.