There is nothing the citizens of the United States do better than competing. Whether it be adjacent shops vying with each other for customers and workers; artists and performers jousting for recognition at annual award shows; or students fighting tooth-and-nail to gain admission to hyper-selective universities, every corner of American society is laced with a feral desire to work hard, win big, and make sure everyone knows about it. It’s no surprise, then, that this occasionally productive competition has easily taken on a more toxic and macabre character, especially as it pertains to experiences with oppression.
Having grown up in the diverse communities of the New South, conversations at school lunch tables and in childhood backyards often veered into the territory of ethnicity and race relations: “Who had it worst?” we asked ourselves. Was it the boy whom school bullies mocked for the bindi painted on his forehead? Or the girl whose wild curls were stroked without permission by every student in class? Or the teacher whose religious headscarf was the subject of irreverent debate during recess? Almost always, talks ended in a draw, with the participants deciding that race was too complex an issue to be handled in between bad cafeteria cookies or games of spike ball. Discerning the “true” victims of racism was a mystery for another day.
While seemingly innocuous at the time, such discussions suggested that individual accounts of discrimination only gained validity after they’d been compared and measured against one another. Our subconscious tournament of trauma pedaled an egregious falsehood — that the oppression of one people group delegitimized that of others — and encouraged our innocent but pernicious narrowmindedness. Indeed, the “Oppression Olympics” — the competition between people for the title of “most oppressed” — attempts to identify one sole casualty of injustice, and consequently establishes an inefficient economy of reform, breeds intersectional resentment, and ultimately perpetuates the very oppression it vilifies.
The term “oppression olympics” was coined in an academic context by scholars of identity politics in the late 90s, but its implications for competition between groups are manifest well beyond the borders of academia and deeply felt by America’s many demographic groups. Among minorities, the University of Chicago found that Black, Latinx, and Asian Americans were more than twice as likely as White Americans to believe that increased opportunities and influence for other demographic groups jeopardized their political and professional prospects. Pew Research Center also found that Black and Hispanic Americans were consistently and significantly more likely to view themselves as oppressed than they were to view other groups as such. In the same poll, four demographic groups identified themselves as “most-discriminated against.”
Such contests of oppression stem from the foundational yet faulty belief that reform and progress — like economic and political opportunity — are scarce resources, currencies that must be allocated wisely and frugally in order to enrich society. Progressive capital, thus, cannot be spent willy-nilly on just every group or person that experiences hardship. No; instead, tokens for reform should be conserved and only redeemed in the most severe cases of oppression. In order to ensure this allocation of reformative capital, then, society and those in power must identify the most oppressed victims and direct their reform efforts to the identified groups accordingly. The “Oppression Olympics” are the outgrowth of this appraisal.
In reality, though, reform doesn’t operate on a quota system: Indeed, just as oppression and injustice have existed in numerous forms at once, so has progress. In its first 50 years alone, the United States saw the rise of the fight for the abolition of slavery, advocacy for the reform of state prisons, as well as movements for the elimination of child labor and the enfranchisement of women — all at once. But these movements did not merely coexist: As decades passed, they shared resources, exchanged leadership, and actively advocated for the objectives of their counterparts in other areas. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for instance, best known for their command of the early gender equality movement, were also integral to numerous other key reform movements of the 19th century in addition to gender equality, including anti-slavery. Frederick Douglass even served as a keynote speaker at their Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights. Evidently, they and their contemporaries did not believe feminism or abolition or any other response to injustice to be at odds.
This multi-movement coordination was ultimately rewarded, and the broad-based coalitions of the 1800s eventually, albeit gradually, heightened pressure on the keepers of the status quo to enact the reforms that society — as a cohesive unit rather than as multiple fragmented and self-interested parts — demanded.
Today, instead, progressive movements are more competitive than collaborative. People of color fighting for anti-racism and LGBTQ rights have expressed concern that the prevailing progressive narrative has focused on the experiences of trans women with violence and public slander, while neglecting the quotidian struggle of cis-gendered women against domestic abuse, rape, and harassment. Feminism at large has also been accused of perpetuating white supremacy by failing to include the struggles of women of color, and the reality of white privilege has left many women disenchanted with the friction between gender and racial equality. On another front, Asian American and Black communities, both stakeholders in the movement for racial justice, have long been pegged as in conflict with one another.
It seems, then, that recent reform movements may have grown insular and hostile, resorting to invalidations of another’s experience with oppression to vindicate one’s own efforts for justice. This is especially true if the movements’ ends are similar or overlapping, as is the case with many social justice initiatives. Considering the inefficiency of such a reform economy, it makes sense: When one is warring for resources, survival involves outsmarting, outdoing, and, in this case, out-suffering one’s competitors. Consequently, discrete reform movements are unable and unwilling to tap into the institutions and resources of their peers, instead perceiving their potential allies as enemies.
In pitting subjugated groups against one another, the Oppression Olympics not only reduce the store of resources to which groups and movements have access, but also breed intersectional bitterness that facilitates further injustice. For instance, in response to perceived gaslighting by the trans community, cis-gendered women may vilify or ridicule their trans counterparts for failing to embody sufficient “womanhood.” Racial minorities may seek to cast the experiences of other communities of color as rosier or less excruciating than their own, fueling generational trauma and denial. When we succumb to toxic games of oppression, we may in fact become an oppressor.
More practically, a disunified front with incongruent interests and festering internal resentments drastically reduces the likelihood that reform efforts will affect change, as has been the case historically. In the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, for instance, leftist movements advocating for a robust social safety net and protections for the working class had a strong organizing apparatus and plenty of man-power, but internal and racial divisions proved their worst enemy. Progressive factions were embroiled in an oppression olympics of their own, split on whose struggles were more severe — the worker or the Black man. Fractured on the subject of race, they were unable to coalesce around their common goal, and policymakers were less likely to listen to their demands. The result? To this day, the United States does not house a legitimate leftist party, has a relatively immature welfare state, hosts only a few stalwart progressive politicians, and has a relatively immature welfare state. This suggests that if society remains divided on which injustices are the most egregious, policymakers will be equally so when formulating, supporting, and implementing solutions.
Looking back on the many lunch-table discussions of my childhood, the adolescent questions about race, the backyard debates about our innocent conceptions of suffering and evil, I wish I could have told myself then that oppression was not a competition anyone should seek to win. In the same way that patients do not compete to be the most ill, that nations do not go to war to become the most poor or the least developed, we too must not turn our experience with oppression into points to be accumulated and used against those suffering alongside us. Instead, we must recognize that our acute awareness of injustice, the shared scars borne, the collective tears cried and grievances voiced, are what unite the once subjugated in solidarity to subvert and unravel depraved systems. Perhaps then, we will leave our olympics behind. Perhaps then, rather than going for the gold, we will simply go — together.
