What is rankism

The remaining posts address this question. Thank you for your interest in this series. Robert W. Fuller , former president of Oberlin College, is an internationally recognized authority on the subject of rankism and dignity.

Fuller has also given more than talks at a variety of organizations, from Princeton University to Microsoft to Kaiser Hospital. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. More Posts from Los Angeles. More Posts from The Middle East. Log In. Powered by CITE. Are we missing a good definition for rankism? Don't keep it to yourself Submit Definition. The ASL fingerspelling provided here is most commonly used for proper names of people and places; it is also used in some languages for concepts for which no sign is available at that moment.

There are obviously specific signs for many words available in sign language that are more appropriate for daily usage. Browse Definitions. Get instant definitions for any word that hits you anywhere on the web! Two clicks install ». Quiz Are you a words master? Thanks for your vote! So, there must be some hidden reason, something other than the traditional ones, that causes humans to behave in ways prejudicial and inimical to others.

Why do we demean, marginalize, and disenfranchise others? Why do we subject others to indignity? Why do we do to others what we would not want them to do to us? In short, why do we put others down? Or, in this language, why do we tolerate rankism? You've probably sensed where this line of questions is going: Why do we sometimes engage in rankism ourselves?

Rankism is a residue of predation. Our species, Homo sapiens, has a long history of predation. We're not only good at it, we're the top of the food chain. Of course, we do more than prey on animals and on each other. We also cooperate with each other, we love each other, we have shown ourselves to be capable of living in peace and harmony.

But through recorded history, we have preyed on other tribes, other states, religions, classes, races, etc. Everyone alive today has predatory ancestors and, what's equally important, ancestors who managed to avoid becoming the prey of other human predators. The twentieth century may go down as the bloodiest of all centuries, but it will also go down as the century in which many millions of human beings threw off centuries of colonial exploitation by a handful of relatively small nation states.

And what is colonialism but one group putting another group down for purposes of exploitation. Colonialism was long justified as we once justified racism in terms of a "superior" people ruling an "inferior" people.

Colonialism was an example of people who regarded themselves as "Somebodies" putting down people they took for "nobodies. We "do" rankism to institutionalize and normalize predation. THAT is why we "do" all the subspecies of rankism racism, sexism, etc.

We practice rankism to put ourselves in a position to prey on others without exposing ourselves to risk. Predators all target the weak, and humans are no exception. The reasons we've given to justify the familiar isms are bogus.

They're actually not reasons at all, they are excuses. They are excuses for putting people down and keeping them down so we can more safely exploit them in future. Or, so they will not compete with us. Or, simply to feel superior. When I was a student at Oberlin College in the s, the student body was one percent black and there were virtually no women majoring in math or physics.

I'd not have made the basketball team if the college had accepted African-Americans in numbers anywhere near their national percentage. The competition for places in graduate school would have been stiffer if women had been encouraged to pursue careers in science. According to Fuller, the abuse of rank is experienced by victims as an affront to their dignity. The Dignity Movement's goal is to overcome rankism in the same way that the civil rights and women's movements target racism and sexism.

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