Talk:Triple oppression

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Amazing how oppression again disabled people NEVER gets a mention. -- Tarquin 17:13 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

I think it's because it's so hard to crate an -ism for it. Disabledism? // Liftarn

I am not really up on this topic, but isn't triple spelled with just one l and oppression with two p's? This page also seems to be an orphan. Someone is more familiar with this subject should redirect this to Triple oppression (if that is really how it is supposed to be spelled) and link it to a related article. -Frecklefoot

Yes, I got a few hits for "tripple opression", but "triple oppression" seems to be more common. // Liftarn 17:20 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

Like I said, I am not up on this subject, but are speceism or specism really words? I couldn't find them in any dictionary. I left them in just in case I am wrong, but someone up with this subject should give it the once over. -Frecklefoot

A quick googling gives a few hits for speceism and quite many for specism. The word is mostly used within animal rights groups and I don't think it has catched on. // Liftarn
Yes, they are certainly used in the community of animal rights activists, so it may be a 'term of art' in that community. However, in general the usage of that term is strictly perjorative, and doesn't actually specify anything more than semantics (although that does matter).
Increasingly, more specific and positive notions like great ape personhood, and more specific and negative notions like ape genocide, are being introduced to eliminate specism in the concepts of 'person' and of 'genocide', where there is sufficient similarity of individuals (clearly both ape and human beings have their own unique personality and relationships and feelings) to justify the use of terms like 'genocide' and 'personhood', etc.. A humanist would of course fight such usage, as diluting "dignity" etc., but dignity is considered a bad thing by many of the people advocating change in how we view so-called 'animals', especially those very much like ourselves.
It's also worth noting that this is more or less a mainstream view among the experts on apes, etc.. Jane Goodall was appointed a special ambassador by the UN, to cast light on this problem, and a recent National Geographic special, hardly a source of much radical political opinion, flat out said, "if we destroy our nearest relatives, we have little chance to save ourselves."
So, for all these reasons, there should be an article on 'specism' and these specific issues within it, 'genocide', 'personhood', 'animal rights' and etc.

I do not believe the link between oppression of animals and humans belongs here. It is a connection many are willing to make, but for a different reason than the connections between human oppressions. Much of the theory of interconnected systems of oppression rests in their tendencies to reinforce one another: racism helps reinforce classism because a workforce divided by race is more difficult to unite against the bosses; classism helps reinforce sexism because no owner would make a woman the manager of a bunch of sexist men who will not accept her superiority to them. (This stuff should make it into the article, probably.) This is not the case for oppression by species, though, because very few animal rights activists argue that we should fight sexism and racism (breedism?) in animals, and the link between speciesism and sexism (in human relations) is tenuous at best. DanKeshet

All very true, but you have simply proven another point of great interest. Looking more closely at animal behavior and similarities to human behavior is the only objective way to understand which of our 'racist', 'sexist', 'classist' behaviors are rooted deeply in our animal/ape/hominid biology, and which are not. So informed, the race, sex, and class struggles can be radically better at choosing their battles and focusing their limited resources, and can win more battles. This is exactly the argument of those who advocate the term 'triple oppression', that the struggles reinforce each other. The role of the ecologists and anti-specists is to help provide a reality check on what can reasonably done in a population of animals like us, and ensure that hopeless causes (like absolute gender equality in such fields as the military or representative politics) are not undertaken, or don't distract us much from winnable wars.

In the corresponding article in the Swedish wikipedia it is stated that 'triple oppression' is a theory developed by a Klaus Viehmann, 1990, in the text "Drei zu eins", wheras the text continues such as in the English wikipedia. Which is correct I do not know, but examining which is would most certainly be suitable.

hi, i'm from germany and involved in the "Drei zu Eins"-discussions. a few years before the dutch feminist Anja Meulenbelt has written a book with the title "Scheidelinien. Sexismus, Rassismus, Klassismus". But I think, the roots are really in the USA in the discussions by black feminists. -- Schwarze Feder 15:19, 30 October 2005 (UTC)