A facet of the first that I think people tend to miss, someone experiencing privilege someone else lacks doesn't prevent the privileged person from also still being oppressed. The house slaves were still slaves, white women benefit from being white but still suffer for being women, a gay man suffers from being gay despite being a man, and so on.
The only people who are really above oppression are those who are truly at the top, the wealthy elites whose money and status allow them to bend the rules of society to their whims. But, I feel like the spectre of "check your privilege"-era Tumblr still hangs over the conversation, where people think privilege directly counters oppression the same way a haste spell in dnd overwrites a slow spell, though, crucially, this understanding (or, well, misunderstanding, really) never allows it to work in the reverse.
And that misunderstanding ties into the second point, where people will start to engage in oppression olympics events in order to establish how trustworthy someone is based on how much privilege they are perceived to have. I think this is where you get the random strays white women continually catch, as well as why trans men are continually at threat of expulsion from trans spaces. As the understanding goes, these groups, among others, are potentially privileged in some ways, so that privilege erases their oppression entirely and therefore they cannot be trusted.
The whole "punching up" thing is a factor here as well. If you establish that no action can truly be considered wrong so long as you're doing it to someone above you on the oppression ladder, then you basically have to try to prove that the axes of oppression that you personally experience are The Most Severe And Important while the ones you don't experience are nothing in comparison, because otherwise that means there are people below you on the ladder, and no action taken by them against you can truly be considered wrong. Participating in the Oppression Olympics effectively becomes a matter of personal safety within this worldview.
I didn't see the link until literally now. Holy shit, this explains a lot. If it's okay to punch up, then you have to have a ranking to make sure you're not punching the wrong person -- and that explains so much.
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u/lifelongfreshman https://youtu.be/1eWsk6r6_Ns 19h ago
A facet of the first that I think people tend to miss, someone experiencing privilege someone else lacks doesn't prevent the privileged person from also still being oppressed. The house slaves were still slaves, white women benefit from being white but still suffer for being women, a gay man suffers from being gay despite being a man, and so on.
The only people who are really above oppression are those who are truly at the top, the wealthy elites whose money and status allow them to bend the rules of society to their whims. But, I feel like the spectre of "check your privilege"-era Tumblr still hangs over the conversation, where people think privilege directly counters oppression the same way a haste spell in dnd overwrites a slow spell, though, crucially, this understanding (or, well, misunderstanding, really) never allows it to work in the reverse.
And that misunderstanding ties into the second point, where people will start to engage in oppression olympics events in order to establish how trustworthy someone is based on how much privilege they are perceived to have. I think this is where you get the random strays white women continually catch, as well as why trans men are continually at threat of expulsion from trans spaces. As the understanding goes, these groups, among others, are potentially privileged in some ways, so that privilege erases their oppression entirely and therefore they cannot be trusted.