The Oppression Olympics is where you argue about which group has it worse – as if there were some kind of special prize for the “winner”.
For example, in the US, do gays have it worse than Blacks? Do Blacks have it worse than Asians? Black men or Black women? What about Muslims, Natives, and trans women? The Irish? Jews? Or what about White middle-aged working-class men – whose life expectancy has been going down and who favour Trump?
It is a common derailment: People who do not want to hear about the injustice done to your group will make it about their group or some other group. “All Lives Matter.” “The Irish had it hard too!” “What about … ?” Etc.
But sometimes it is seriously meant. There is more than enough injustice to go round and people tend to think that done against their own group is the worst, especially if they or their family have experienced it directly.
If you grew up in the US and are willing to listen, you can learn something new, filling in the holes left by a Whitewashed education and media.
But after a point it becomes a dead end:
- Oppression is not one-dimensional. There is no clear way to measure oppression and boil it down to just one number. Some of the side effects can be measured – poverty, unemployment, substance abuse, life expectancy, high blood pressure, police killings, etc. But which measure or what mathematical formula do you use? And some oppression cannot be bottled in a number, like racist beauty standards, stereotypes or cultural appropriation.
- Oppression is not exclusive. In the case of White supremacy, it is fully capable of oppressing more than one group at a time and do it in different ways. In Oppression Olympics, people seem to act as if there can only be one oppression at a time, that highlighting one group’s oppression means downplaying or overlooking another’s.
- Oppression is intersectional. Most Americans are not, for example, rich straight White cis males nor poor gay Black trans females. That means most Americans are privileged in some ways and marginalized in others. Their privileges do not cancel out their marginalizations and their marginalizations can intersect, creating something worse.
A useful way to look at racial oppression in the US is Andrea Smith’s Three Pillars of White Supremacy. White Americans oppress Blacks, Natives and Browns (Latinos, Asians, “Muslims”) each in different ways for different reasons – while at the same time using each group to oppress the others!
For example, Blacks in the US are used for forced labour and medical experiments, even today, and yet live on land they helped to take from Natives. Natives, meanwhile, serve in the military, bringing death and destruction to Asia in American wars of empire. And so on. There is no moral purity of group victimhood to be had in the US.
The gold medal in the Oppression Olympics always seems just out of reach because it is not there.
– Abagond, 2016.
See also:
- The Three Pillars of White Supremacy
- derailment
- cultural appropriation
- stereotype
- intersectionality
- cis
- Donald Trump
- Model Minority stereotype – perfectly designed for starting an Oppression Olympics
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(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFkmRp_G2uo&w=560&h=315)
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Thanks for reminding us that the Model Minority Stereotype was launched specifically to spur a new set of Oppression Olympics, a “new” game we have been in for 50 years now.
But I noticed that the original Model Minority stereotype post says nothing about the actual history of the model minority stereotype, what was actually implied by the launch of the stereotype in the 60s, and how it was resurrected in the 80s to diffuse the Vincent Chin incident and as a white support measure to the War on Drugs, timed to match when the children of the post-60s Brain drain immigrants were entering the universities.
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Oppression Olympics is the result of groups fighting for a piece of the pie. That pie can be summer jobs for disadvantaged youths to places in academia. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that the brayings of Sheriff Harry Lee’s favorite grandson has something to do with his desire to become some kind of guru on “Asian” oppression. In a world of shrinking budget, these battles are inevitable.
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Thank you Kiwi for confirming your family tie to that ‘venerable’ ancestor of yours.
He must be so proud of you for keeping the family tradition of harassing Blacks alive, all the while, claiming: “What, me, racist? Don’t you see the color of my skin and my facial features?”
His White patrons were very amused, so will yours be.
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Like you, dear friend, I’m past the point of caring whether a statement I make about you is true or racist. By the way, doesn’t the term race connote kinship? So what are you braying about?
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When are you going to put your body on the line to stop Obama’s death machine from killing another Arab? You need to emulate that brave soul, Brian Willson, who sat on the track of a train that supplied weapons to the military.
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/28/blood_on_the_tracks_brian_willsons.
I’ll understand if you don’t have the guts of that “loon”.
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I’m saying, show some guts and live out your moral outrage like all the “loons” I referenced in this exchange with you or come clean and admit you are an empty drum making noise.
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Oh wow.
The photo in this post of Obama’s family denotes a group of people related by close kinship.
(https://abagond.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/the-two-race-model/)
https://abagond.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/obama-family-2003.jpg?w=750&h=501
Most native Americans tribes recognize membership by kinship.
Are people now saying race and kinship are the same thing?
Kinship has been part of human culture for hundreds of millennia. Race is relatively a new concept, and differs from place to place and time period to time period.
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@ Jefe
Right. Obama’s closest kin by blood are black, white, and Asian (his half-sister). That’s three races right there, and all kin.
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jefe, Solitaire and Kiwi,
All I have to say to you clowns is get a better dictionary. Kiwi, race=kinship predates the modern notion of race. If you know different, please enlighten me.
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That part about the Irish had it hard too. That reminds me of that clown Mirkwood.
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Murky, Why the reticence, you know we missed your brand of comedy.
How can you let Kiwi usurp your role like that?
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Among the problems or questions I rarely ever see mentioned is not where we are and how much progress we have made ,but also where we are going – apparently to a world where no one ever even thinks of harming another and we all get everything we need.
And although most will die and never know.
but it seems to me the inevitable trajectory of life and then die and start all over again in same but slightly different,infinite unique cycles.
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Typical that an ass-kisser like Kiwi gets butthurt when it’s not ALL about them!! Newsflash Kiki maybe that’s because Asians are always throwing black folks under the bus to look good for white daddy then expect Negroes to rescue when white daddy throws shade on you. I don’t think so, you asked for it you got it now take your lumps and STFU
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This would have been a great workshop to attend that would help to understand the issues underlying Oppression Olympics. It was on memorial day weekend in Washington, DC. Sorry, I just found the announcement now.
(http://smithsonianapa.org/crosslines/)
Crosslines: A culture lab on intersectionality
I would have been interested in this:
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Reblogged this on khushizn.
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[…] nonsense.) using one experience to try to cancel out another smells to me of oppression olympics. as i keep saying, and will keep on saying: “we are all part of one […]
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