Archive for February 2020
This sign was recently spotted in the window of a café in Oakland, CA:
It’s a perfect example of what is known as the “progressive stack,” a ranked hierarchy of minority groups, with those deemed to be the most oppressed given the highest status.
When the term “progressive stack” first appeared a few years ago, it specifically referred to the waiting list for speakers at left-wing meetings, with minorities being allowed to speak first ahead of white men. But disputes arose as to which minorities got to speak ahead of which other minorities
, so a formalized ranking of minority demographics evolved, with those higher on the list getting priority over those lower down. (Needless to say, white cisgendered able-bodied straight men by definition are at the very bottom of the progressive stack, and are ranked so low that they are always excluded from the list altogether.)
From its humble beginnings as a guide for who gets to cut in line for the microphone at socialist gatherings, the progressive stack has evolved into a new caste system, a complete re-ordering of social classes intended to reverse historical mainstream norms, with straight people, white people and men now deemed to be the new Untouchables.
Because no one person or organization is in charge of the progressive stack, it is always in flux, with the ranking of each group’s oppression-level constantly shifting up and down according to current social trends and fads. So it’s wise to check in every now and then to see where the rankings currently stand, since these rankings determine the rules for all social interactions in 21st-century America.
The sign (which even appears distantly in Google Street View) lists the progressive stack rankings as of February 2020 like so:
# Take Care of
Muslim
Black
Women
Queer
Latinx
Native
Immigrant
P.O.C.
Trans
Disabled
L.G.B.T.Q.+
Low Income
Activist
Refugee
Undocumented
IncarceratedFriends, Family & Community
There is an immense amount of overlap in the labels — someone who sneaks across the southern border would count as “Latinx” and “Immigrant” and “P.O.C.” and “Undocumented,” and possibly “Woman” and “Low Income” as well.
Significantly, “Trans” and “Queer” both appear on the list twice — first as separate standalone categories, and then for a second time as the “T” and “Q” in “L.G.B.T.Q.+.” Yet there is no standalone category for “Lesbian” and “Gay” — they get relegated to mere abbreviation status in a longer acronym. This too reveals current social trends: Transsexuals (“Trans”) and people of nonstandard self-defined gender status (“Queer”) are trendy now in the victimhood Oppression Olympics, whereas mere lesbians and gays have fallen in stature, being now perceived as having become comparatively privileged due to their decades-long prior success at being normalized.
A new category appears in this year’s progressive stack: “Activist.” Since the progressive stack was created by white people as a “virtue signal” to impress other white people, and yet since its enforcement only ends up penalizing those very same white people, sneaking “Activist” onto the list allows white people to be kind to each other, by assigning even the most privileged upper-middle-class trustafarian Antifa member a new “oppressed” minority-group membership.
Ironically, at traditional meetings and performances
, the early speakers are considered unimportant “warm-up acts,” while the most important speaker is always the climactic last speaker — so the leftists who devised the progressive stack as a guide for who gets to speak “first” unwittingly reinforced old-fashioned values, by ensuring that white people always got the final say. Ooops!
Note that even the sign’s concluding line contains its own mini progressive stack, in which the order of the encompassing categories is also ranked according to priority: “Friends” are more important than “Family,” which is not surprising considering the Left’s relentless quest to delegitimize the nuclear family as the building block of society.
This sign, and the current progressive stack ranking it reveals, is a tactile real-world implementation of “intersectionality,” the academic term for how to manage the awkward assemblage of minority grievance-demographics which comprise the leftist coalition, which until now have often distrusted, disliked or competed against each other. The progressive stack functions as a sort of official left-wing caste system for keeping everyone in their place.