Victimhood Groups Get Into Squabble Over Who Is Most Oppressed

‘Students of color’ conference at University of California reportedly dissolves into a fight over who is most oppressed
By Thomas Lifson

Nobody saw this coming, apparently, because no conservatives were consulted. Kate Hardiman reports on The College Fix:

This year’s University of California Students of Color Conference unproductively devolved into something of an “oppression Olympics” between different minority groups, prompting arguments between participants and ultimately leading to some canceled sessions at the annual event.

First question: Are there actually students at UC who have no color at all? Are they transparent? This arrogation of the concept of color as being limited to designated victim groups is disturbing to me. Nobody ever calls me a “person of color” even though my skin has a distinct pinkish cast to it.

UCLA student Jacqueline Alvarez told The College Fix as much in a recent telephone interview, standing behind an op-ed she wrote in the Daily Bruin campus newspaper detailing the same.

She described the conference not only as an “oppression Olympics” but also “a safe space gone wrong” in her opinion article.

Ralph Washington, president of UC Student Association, which organized and hosted the conference, confirmed there were “tensions” at the mid-November gathering, and that its schedule was altered.

It sounds as if the organizers caught a lot of flak. Washington continued:

“…this year there was a lot of harm thrown around to the various organizers, and some people came into the conference without understanding what the theme of the conference was. There are constructive things that we can do to prevent this happening in the future.”

So what was this theme that caused harm to be thrown around (whatever that means)? American Thinker readers probably can guess:

The crux of the debate centered around the conference theme: “Fighting Anti-Blackness.” Apparently it was not communicated to students that the conference would have a particular theme this year. At the event, held at UC Irvine, students of different minority groups began arguing when it became known that the conference would focus almost exclusively on discrimination against the African American community.

In one of the larger workshops, one of the students raised a question about why the only issues being discussed were those involving anti-blackness, prompting an African-American student to respond that black students are the most oppressed, to which a Muslim student made a comment about her people being bombed in the Middle East, according to Alvarez.

There is a basic principle at work here that is invisible only to leftists who deny the reality of human nature. If oppression is the currency of social advantage, there will never be enough oppression to go around.