Oppression Olympics
"Oppression Olympics" is a critical term for a type of victim mentality that views marginalization as a competition to determine the relative weight of the overall oppression of individuals or groups. Participants in an instance of oppression Olympics are characterized as comparing race, gender, religion, sexuality, socioeconomic status or disabilities in order to determine who is the worst off and "most oppressed". This characterization often arises within debates about the ideological values of identity politics, intersectionality, and social privilege.
The term arose among some feminist scholars in the 1990s and is used to criticize the view of marginalization as a basis for competition rather than cooperation. The first potential recorded use of the term as a way to theorize comparing oppression was by Chicana feminist Elizabeth Martínez in a conversation with Angela Davis at the University of California, San Diego in 1993. Martínez stated: "The general idea is no competition of hierarchies should prevail. No 'Oppression Olympics'!"
Dynamics
The Oppression Olympics have been described as a contest within a group to "assert who is more authentic, more oppressed, and thus more correct". This may be on the basis of one's class, race, gender, disability, sexuality, among other stated or ascribed identities.A person's stated or ascribed identity "become fetishised" within the group and judged in preconceived essentialist terms. There is a dynamic "of agreeing with the most marginalized in the room".
According to Stoyan Francis, "The gold medal of the Oppression Olympics is seen as the commanding spot for demanding change, for visibility and allocation of resources".
Usage
The term is coined after the Olympic Games and their focus on medals and other competitive achievements. Elizabeth Martínez, in a conversation with Angela Davis on May 12, 1993, responded to a question about coalition building as follows: "There are various forms of working together. A coalition is one, a network is another, an alliance is yet another.... But the general idea is no competition of hierarchies should prevail. No Oppression Olympics!" Davis supported Martínez's characterization and stated, "As Betita has pointed out, we need to be more flexible in our thinking about various ways of working together across differences."Martínez would later write more extensively about the "Oppression Olympics" in her 1998 monograph De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century. In a foreword for the book, Angela Davis writes that Martínez evoked "a term that will be recognized by many who have heard her speak" and states that Martínez "urges us not to engage in 'Oppression Olympics' a futile hierarchy of suffering, but, rather, to harness our rage at persisting injustices in order to strengthen our opposition to an increasingly complex system of domination, which weaves together racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and global capitalist exploitation".
In his book The Holocaust in American Life, historian Peter Novick derived a related term, "Victimization Olympics", to describe how persecuted groups have "competed" to portray themselves as the most grievously oppressed, with Holocaust victims "intent on permanent possession of the gold medal". To illustrate the competition, Novick quotes an excerpt from an essay published by African-American author James Baldwin in 1967:
Criticism
The dynamics of the Oppression Olympics have been criticized as being "intellectually lazy, lacking political depth", and "leads towards tokenization". These dynamics surrounding identity politics have been criticized within anarchist thought for their social hierarchy building, as anarchism is fundamentally against notions of hierarchy.Academic Ange-Marie Hancock has criticized the energy spent upon the Oppression Olympics within progressive circles as being an impediment to wider collective action in furthering social change. In her work Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics, Hancock argues that the core causes for Oppression Olympics are the desire to one-up other victims, and blindness to the plights and disadvantages of other groups. She writes: "Thanks to the Oppression Olympics and the political complexity facing the twenty-first century, standing in solidarity for wide social transformation is increasingly difficult to begin and challenging to pursue."
Research in identity studies has termed this competitive victimhood.