Freedom In Wickedness

Intersectionality is a simple yet profoundly important concept which was developed by feminist women of color in response to the second wave feminist movement’s refusal to address issues beyond the needs of upper-class white women. It posits that civil rights / social justice movements cannot focus exclusively on any single form of discrimination because oppression is not neatly modular.

Intersectionality is built around the fact that those who experience multiple forms of oppression are always left behind by single-subject movements. This is because single-subject movements inevitably absorb every form of discrimination which they do not examine, and also because single-subject movements are inherently blind to the ways in which multiple forms of discrimination interlock and reinforce each other.

Intersectionality becomes especially complex when dealing with interactions between people who experience different sets of oppression and thus are simultaneously more privileged and less privileged than each other. For example, white people are privileged over people of color and men are privileged over women — so a woman of color is strictly less privileged than either a man of color or a white woman, but a white woman has white privilege and a man of color has male privilege.

Oppression Olympics is an argument which is used by people in a position of privilege to dismiss the importance of their privilege and silence the discussion of any form of oppression which they deem unimportant. It is mostly used by white people as a means of suppressing awareness of intersectionality and maintaining a monopoly over any civil rights movement they participate in.

Oppression Olympics involves silencing less privileged people within a civil rights / social justice group by accusing them of engaging in non-constructive, self-pitying “my oppression is worse than your oppression games” whenever they bring up an issue which is deemed unimportant by more privileged members of the group. It is a fundamentally hypocritical argument because it relies on saying that all issues are equally important while meaning that only issues which relatively privileged people care about are actually important.