So - by and large I agree. If we're comparing the struggles of most people - trying to dismiss one person's suffering is not okay. For instance, if a person pretends a white person who's poor doesn't struggle because they're white, then yeah, that's stupid. I feel that's a very Tumblr, teenage social justice view, though, I honestly don't think, for instance, most people would say poor white people have no problems - I think the intersectional argument is that they might have less problems, but intersectionality should only be used as a heuristic by people who actually know what it is and care - it doesn't guarantee anything about a person, it's just a loose guideline.
I'd like to point out that there are a few complications to this view, though. For one, people can have basically "false suffering". Yeah, in some sense, a teenage girl is suffering if her father cuts her monthly credit card allowance from $15k to $10k. But I would argue that, when compared to the plight of say, a child born into poor family in an inner city - this sort of suffering can indeed be disregarded as unimportant. So I think there is an element of exactly how much and what kind of suffering is at hand, and that some kinds can be dismissed, or said to be less important than others.
This is not as clear to me. I think it is both possible and rather common that attention paid to one person's suffering can eliminate the attention paid to another's. Especially when Y has grievances that are worse than X's. If X's grievances gets so much of the spotlight that Y is ignored - then yes, taking X more seriously is coming at the expense of Y.
I'm going to quote Martin Luther King Jr. here, because I think it's very relevant:
Particularly, the last line: 'who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."'
I think that, yes, by placing front and center the suffering of X - you can definitely put Y so far on the backburner their suffering is never addressed. And I think that's the relevant idea: it's not about the truth of whether X suffers, it's about the attention given to it, and if that attention blocks out other urgent voices.
I'm not going to say there wasn't a large block of voters who voted for Trump because of serious grievances. Lower income white people have been suffering, and that suffering is very real. But they aren't the voice of the Republican Party. They thought Trump was, but Trump's a liar. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats actually care about their grievances. Nor do the Democrats do all that much to help minorities. I mean, they do more than nothing, but they don't do that much. The voices that you actually hear - the most prominent ones, are not people reflecting the voices of people in America. Universally, if you're disadvantaged in any way, no one listens, no one cares.
Which leads me back to the discussion of Republican voters. Do you think a majority of GOP voters are suffering? In what way are they suffering? Do you think they deserve more attention, or less, compared to, say, poor whites or blacks?
That's what Black Lives Matter was about, by the way. It wasn't saying "white people don't matter, hehe". That's what the right-wing strawman of it was. It was actually about having a voice, reflecting the feelings of Martin Luther King Jr: that if black people waited around forever waiting for white people to pay attention to their suffering, they never would, because wealthy white people historically only pay attention to themselves. And look at what the reaction was: "blue lives matter", "all lives matter". It was about taking the discussion off of that topic, to draw discussion away from suffering black people.
And that's the problem. It's not about the fact of whether white people suffer, it's about attention.
As regards Jones' post about the progressive stack, the progressive stack is a malformed, stupid approach to tackling the problem. It's not about creating specific rules to police who can talk and when.