The Oppression Olympics are a one-upmanship dynamic that can arise within debates about the ideological values of identity politics, intersectionality and social privilege. They have been described as "verbal banter between marginalized groups who are trying to determine the weight of their many intersectionalities of oppression (race, gender, socioeconomic status, disability) to determine who has it the worst.
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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 race, gender, sexuality, among other stated identities.
People's stated identity "become fetishised" within the group, with the person's stated identity being judged in preconceived essentialist terms. There is a dynamic "of agreeing with the most marginalized in the room".
Stoyan Francis described "The gold medal of the Oppression Olympics is seen as the commanding spot for demanding change, for visibility and allocation of resources".
Criticism
The dynamics of the Oppression Olympics have been criticised as being "intellectually lazy, lacking political depth", and "leads towards tokenization". These dynamics surrounding identity politics have been criticised within anarchist thought for their social hierarchy building, with anarchists fundamentally being against notions of hierarchy.
Academic Ange-Marie Hancock has criticised the energy spent upon the Oppression Olympics within progressive circles as being an impediment to wider collective action in furthering social change. She opines that "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".
Usage
The origins of the phrase are unclear. It was the title of an Everyday Feminism article in 2012, in an article by Holly Combe in UK Webzine The F Word in 2010, and it was used in the title of a presentation to Rutgers University by Ange-Marie Hancock in 2009. Before these examples, however, the term saw use on "social media".
Current Hierarchy
Ange-Marie Hancock and other writers have suggested that the previously dominant class of Afro-Caribbean/Asian women are currently being replaced at the top of the hierarchy by Trans men and women and that their subsequent frustration results in the "Oppression Olympics" phenomenon.
Scholarly Work on Oppression Olympics
In her work Dialogical Epistemology - An Intersectional Resistance To The "Oppression Olympics", Nira Yuval-Davis addresses the issue of Oppression Olympics and argues that categorical intersectionality provides a solution to this problem.
In her work Solidarity Politics for Millenials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics, Ange-Marie Hancock argues that the core causes for Oppression Olympics are the desire to one-up other professional victims, and blindness to the plights and disadvantages of other groups.