Thýma is Greek for “victim.”
I was looking for a way to encapsulate an idea I named the ‘Victimhood Competency Hierarchy’ in a 2019 post. I suggested development of a spreadsheet to clarify who has the biggest claim to victimhood, and therefore power, in such a hierarchy. This is important to white, heterosexual, males who need to know how hard to tug on the forelock.
For a few seconds, I thought I’d coined a word to describe the politico-cultural regime being urged upon us by the Axis of Woke. But a search revealed one example from 2013. Oh well. Is there a participation prize?.
This came to mind because a very good Areo article I noted last Friday used the term ‘Matrix of Domination.’ A way of rank ordering oppressors and victims. I like the term, but it clearly grants too much agency to oppressors. In practice, the dominators could remove victims from power by simply oppressing some other group more than the incumbents.
That’s hardly the only problem in establishing the Thýmarchy, though. I pointed out many difficult to define variables for the Grid of Grievance in the post on VCH.
Today, I found David Bernstein examining a few of them in an article at Reason, using Kamala Harris as an example.
He notes that we have a government here to help – with some official guidance for developing the VCH into something that can replace the Electoral College.
The guidance only helps with race classification, however, and not all of those.
And for scoring we would still have to depend on BLM, Antifa, the SPLC, LBGQT activists, AOC, Big Bird… et. al..
In 2000, OMB [Office of Management and Budget] provided guidance for civil rights monitoring enforcement regarding individuals who check off more than one racial category as follows:
• Responses that combine one minority race and white are allocated to the minority race.
• Responses that include two or more minority races are allocated as follows:• If the enforcement action is in response to a complaint, allocate to the race that the complainant alleges the discrimination was based on.
• If the enforcement action requires assessing disparate impact or discriminatory patterns, analyze the patterns based on alternative allocations to each of the minority groups.I’ve misplaced the citation, but I recall that other federal guidelines state that if a person checks black/African American and another box, she is deemed African American for statistical purposes.
In short, under American law, no one could deny Harris’s right to assert that she is half-Indian and less-than-half of African ancestry, but so long as she considers herself, and is considered by others, to be African American, for legal purposes she is black. The major exception would be if she filed a discrimination complaint based on her Asian ancestry. In that case, she would be considered considered legally Asian for purposes of resolving the complain [sic]. What, at least at this point, she cannot be is legally Indian, legally mixed-race, or legally no race at all.
That’s the government ‘helping’ to employ more government workers.