Pamela Paul on Grievance Culture and ‘Progressive Stacking’

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Just because you’ve been wronged, that doesn’t make your right, much less righteous. That’s the basic theme of Pamela Paul’s latest column which is based around a new book by Frank Bruni.

Frank Bruni’s new book, “The Age of Grievance,” is one sad nod and head shake after another. Building on the concept of the oppression Olympics, “the idea that people occupying different rungs of privilege or victimization can’t possibly grasp life elsewhere on the ladder,” which he first described in a 2017 column, Bruni, now a contributing writer for Times Opinion, shows how that mind-set has been baked into everything from elementary school to government institutions…

Individuals as well as tribes, ethnic groups and nations are divvied up into simplistic binaries: colonizer vs. colonized, oppressor vs. oppressed, privileged and not. On college campuses and in nonprofit organizations, in workplaces and in public institutions, people can determine, perform and weaponize their grievance, knowing they can appeal to the administration, to human resources or to online court where they will be rewarded with attention, if not substantive improvement in actual circumstance.

 As an example of how this can go wrong, Paul points to something called “progressive stacking.”

Consider its reflection in just one phenomenon: “progressive stacking,” a method by which an assumed hierarchy of privilege is inverted so that the most marginalized voices are given precedence. Perhaps worthy in theory. But who is making these determinations and according to which set of assumptions? Think of the sticky moral quandaries: Who is more oppressed, an older, disabled white veteran or a young, gay Latino man? A transgender woman who lived for five decades as a man or a 16-year-old girl? What does it mean that vying for the top position involves proving how hard off and vulnerable you are?

Here I have to disagree with Paul. I don’t think progressive stacking is worthy in theory or in practice. Here’s a sample of the article she linked to.

Progressive stacking is a technique used by group facilitators to ensure minority voices are heard by allowing members of minority communities to speak before members of majority communities, Nolan Cabrera, associate professor of educational policy studies and practice at the University of Arizona, said. Underrepresented groups can include women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community and individuals with mental or physical disabilities.

Alicia Swords, associate professor of sociology and director of the honors program at Ithaca College, said she uses the technique by calling on students whose voices she feels are crucial to the context of the conversation. She calls on these students because of their personal or cultural identities and experiences in order to recognize and combat unbalanced power dynamics in her classroom.

“When I see students in a room, and white students are very eager to raise their hands, I use progressive stacking,” Swords said. “I think that’s a measure that allows us to, in the micropolitics of the classroom, be thoughtful about how we’re treating people and how we’re creating opportunities and noticing power in the classroom.”…

This technique recently gained national attention after Stephanie McKellop, Ph.D. student and teaching assistant at the University of Pennsylvania, posted about their use of the method on their personal Twitter account Oct. 16.

“I will always call on my black women students first,” McKellop tweeted. “Other POC get second–tier priority. [White women] come next. And, if I have to, white men.”

I don’t think there’s any world in which having a teacher exercise an explicitly racist system for who is allowed to speak is going to lessen racism. That does not, of course, mean a teacher shouldn’t feel free to call on a minority student or a gay student or a female student first in class. It’s the insistence on intentionally calling on white people last (and white males especially) that makes this racist. The essence of racism is treating people as members of a group based on superficial characteristics like skin color and then disadvantaging them based on their belonging to that group. That’s what progressive stacking is. Like other forms of intentional racism, it should be burned with fire.

In addition to being offensive, it will never work. Actions like this only create a new class of victims.

If it felt like any of the persecution grandstanding led to progress, we might wanly allow grievance culture to march on. Instead, as one undergraduate noted in the Harvard Political Review, “In pitting subjugated groups against one another, the Oppression Olympics not only reduce the store of resources to which groups and movements have access, but also breed intersectional bitterness that facilitates further injustice.”

This really is the story of the decade so far. The fundamental outlines of identity politics go back several decades. We saw hints it was breaking out in some progressive enclaves a decade ago (the takeover of Evergreen State College campus happened in 2017). But all of this was supercharged in 2020 with the death of George Floyd. That was the moment when every school and seemingly every corporation jumped on the DEI/CRT bandwagon.

And as Paul suggests, the spread of these ideas about group oppression have only made things worse. Telling people they are in a racialized victimization contest doesn’t lessen racism it just creates a marketplace for endless bitterness. Here’s how one commenter put it.

Well said. Prioritizing aggrievement over achievement will divide and diminish us as a society.

I hope this is true but I’m not convinced it is.

The politics of the aggrieved is a movement that has reached its sell by date. The more a group yells about how terrible they have it, the less inclined the rest of us are to listen. Rather than sympathy, the aggrieved are now creating a groundswell of apathy and even scorn and no good will come of it.

I guess we’ll see how grievance politics looks in retrospect at the end of this decade.