intersection

Oppression Olympics

The competitive ranking of suffering that keeps marginalized communities divided

Elizabeth Martínez named it in the early 1990s, in a dialogue with Angela Y. Davis about how to build coalitions across difference. She was not describing something rare or abstract. She was naming something she watched happen constantly: groups that should be building power together instead spending energy arguing about whose suffering counts more.

Her framing was direct: “the general idea is no competition of hierarchies should prevail. No ‘Oppression Olympics’!” (Martínez & Davis, 1993).

The term names a dynamic, not a deliberate position. Nobody decides to play the Oppression Olympics. It tends to emerge from real pain, real history, and real competition for limited resources in a world that does not offer enough of either. That matters. The people caught in the dynamic are not the problem. The dynamic is.

What makes it destructive is the logic underneath it. Oppression Olympics treats justice as a zero-sum game: recognizing one group’s suffering appears to diminish another’s, so everyone has to compete to be the most aggrieved. The result is that marginalized communities end up fighting each other rather than the systems doing the marginalizing.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework, developed in 1989, offers a different account of how oppression works. Oppressions are not stacked in a hierarchy waiting to be ranked. They interlock, overlap, and mutually reinforce each other. A person who is both disabled and Black is not facing two separate oppressions that can be measured and compared. They are living at an intersection where both shape experience in ways neither can explain alone. Once oppression is understood as interlocking rather than hierarchical, the idea of determining which is “worse” stops making analytical sense. You cannot hold an Olympics without a scoreboard, and intersectionality takes the scoreboard apart.

Key Aspects

The zero-sum error at the heart of Oppression Olympics produces recognizable patterns wherever it appears.

The scarcity assumption. The dynamic usually runs on the belief that resources, attention, and recognition are so scarce that groups must compete for their share. This belief leads to hierarchical ranking of oppressions as more or less legitimate, competitive performance of suffering to establish credibility, and gatekeeping of who is “marginalized enough” to deserve inclusion. The scarcity framing rarely reflects reality. Dismantling ableism does not require dismantling racism first. These are not opposing claims on a single budget. The sense of scarcity is itself partly a product of the systems being challenged, which benefit from keeping the communities most capable of challenging them occupied with internal competition.

How it appears in neurodivergent communities. The dynamic takes specific forms in neurodivergent spaces: debates about which diagnoses represent “real” neurodivergence and which are “just personality”; arguments that some conditions are not disabled enough to warrant accommodation; pressure on people with ADHD, dyslexia, or less-visible differences to prove they face genuine discrimination; internal hierarchies between Autistic people based on support needs, with higher-support and lower-support presentations each sometimes positioned as more authentic than the other. These debates drain energy from shared goals and reproduce a logic that only certain minds are worth protecting — which is neurotypical-adjacent thinking dressed in disability language.

The coalition alternative. Martínez’s framing was practical as much as critical. She was not only naming a problem; she was pointing toward what works instead. Effective coalition-building does not require erasing difference. It requires resisting the temptation to turn difference into a competition. Davis extended this argument: working flexibly across difference, without establishing a hierarchy of whose cause matters most, is how coalitions stay together over time. Strategic essentialism, associated with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, offers one tool for this: temporarily presenting a simplified shared identity for political purposes, not as a claim that the group is uniform, but as a tactical choice held alongside recognition of internal complexity. That is different from Oppression Olympics. The difference is that strategic essentialism is chosen and temporary; Oppression Olympics is usually neither.

In Their Own Words

In disability spaces, I’ve felt the pressure to prove my disability is severe enough to count. When I describe what ADHD actually does to my life, I sometimes get responses suggesting it’s not ‘real’ discrimination compared to people with more visible conditions. So instead of finding solidarity across our different but connected struggles, I find myself defending my right to even be in the conversation. — ADHDer and disability advocate, 34 ‡

I’ve watched real harm happen in Autistic community spaces when conversations turn into arguments about whose autism is more authentic or who faces more significant barriers. Both sides walk away exhausted and nothing changes. The systems that are actually doing the harm don’t care which of us wins that argument. — Autistic community organizer, 41 ‡

In Everyday Life

The Oppression Olympics dynamic tends to consume whatever it enters:

The damage is consistent across each version of this: the opportunity for shared action gets consumed by internal competition. The people who designed the inaccessible systems in the first place are not affected. The people trying to change those systems are.

Why This Matters

Oppression Olympics does not just produce bad feelings. It does structural work on behalf of the systems marginalized communities are trying to challenge. When disabled communities compete for recognition, they leave the conditions producing inaccessibility unaddressed. When neurodivergent people argue internally about who counts, they do not build coalitions capable of changing anything.

Davis made this point in the same dialogue where Martínez named the concept: effective work across difference requires flexible thinking about how groups come together, and that flexibility collapses when groups are competing to establish whose suffering outweighs whose.

For neurodivergent communities, moving past the Oppression Olympics dynamic creates room for coalition-building that can hold both shared experiences of ableism and genuine differences between communities. Ryan Boren at Stimpunks Foundation connects this to a rhizomatic model of community organizing — a structure where no group needs to occupy the top of a hierarchy to contribute or be counted, where ideas and power move laterally rather than through a ranked chain of legitimacy (Boren, 2023).

The alternative is not pretending all experiences of oppression are identical. It is building coalitions that can hold real difference without converting it into a competition.

History

Note: “Oppression Olympics” was coined by Elizabeth Martínez as a critique, not a neutral description of a fixed behavioral category. It names a dynamic that can emerge in any marginalized community, often driven by genuine pain, real resource scarcity, or political frustration rather than bad faith. The concept is most useful as a diagnostic for examining group dynamics, not as a way to dismiss the real grievances that give rise to it. The term originates in cross-community coalition organizing, not specifically in neurodivergent spaces, though it has been applied to and within neurodivergent communities extensively.

References