Thread by @NonHumanMedia1

Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez, American Chicana Feminist and Activist

This is the woman who is credited with coining the term "Opression Olympics"
–cosigned by Angela Y. Davis

🧵1/8

Born in 1925, she grew up in a white neighborhood, went to white schools, worked at white jobs, and married white men (pic 2, 2nd husband)

Keep this in mind, this person grew up and lived her entire life clearly on the white side of the color line, during the era of Jim Crow

Pic 1 is the wiki summary on the first usage of the term, and pics 2-4 are excerpts from that 1993 conversation

Angela Davis: "A "Black" subject was created. We can also create a "women of color" subject." 🚩

Link to the full conversation:culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/inscriptions/v…

Fast forward to 1998 and Elizabeth Martinez is releasing her book "De Colores Means All Of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century"
–Foreword by Angela Y. Davis

De Colores which translates to "of colors" 🤔

By this point even Davis is using the term "Opression Olympics" along with other Feminists and saying utterly stupid things like:

"Native Americans, Africans, Mexicans, and Chinese–of whose blood and sweat this country was founded" 🙄

Martinez wants us to move beyond a "Black-white model" but states:

"Above all, it is not a devious way of minimizing the centrality of the African-American experience in any analysis of racism"

This seems very suspicious for someone who grew up in D.C as white

By 2017, "Opression Olympics" is mainstream and Martinez is celebrated and releases a new edition of the book

And this is how these discourses are created

Academics create these terrible concepts that eventually gets filtered down to general public

So whenever someone accuses Black Americans of playing "Opression Olympics", they are simply regurgitating the babble of a middle-class whi..umm..I mean Chicanx Feminist
#Feminism