Claiming victim status from vaccine exclusion converts identity-based oppression into status currency.

Evidence

I have no doubt that, while vaccine passports were in effect, people who had not gotten the shot felt like victims of discrimination or even, for a time, like social pariahs. And there could and should have been clearer exceptions available for people with medical conditions that made mask-wearing and vaccines higher risk. Yet witnessing how many of the loudest voices laying claim to this treacherous form of discrimination were, like me, well-off white women, I couldn’t shake the feeling that part of the reason why they were making these choices was that they believed that being outside the Covid health consensus conferred on them a powerful kind of victim status—this at a time when the spotlight on racialized violence was causing plenty of white women to question ourselves and our roles. Did being a white woman count as a basis for discrimination at a time when everyone was railing against the archetypal Karen? Well, maybe, if a Karen can convince herself she is actually a Rosa in disguise, denied access to restaurants and transportation and shunned by friends and family. Surely, by laying claim to that abrupt loss of status, that would raise her status—which, let’s face it, is not an entirely outlandish thing to believe at this stage of neoliberal capitalism, which has done a fine job of transforming identity-based oppression from a basis for solidarity and shared analysis (the original intention of identity politics) to its own form of currency. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 831

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Karen/Rosa inversion theme running through the book and to the broader diagonalism thesis about the right metabolizing identity politics. — connects to: Adopting a derogatory label as one’s own identity can transform oppression. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 694
• ADDENDUM: The conversion of oppression into status currency parallels how identity politics functions as a cudgel in class/status signaling, resonating with the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ theme of dress norms as class/identity signaling.