You think your rights are being denied? Here’s a little Oppression 101 | Helen Ubiñas

It seemed the show was over.

After a week of mostly sellout performances by owners and supporters of a South Jersey gym that opened in defiance of stay-at-home orders, Atilis Gym was shut down on Thursday.

The Bellmawr, Camden County, gym had been doing business since Monday, until the state Health Department stepped in.

Before the curtain came down, owners and members were issued citations for defying Gov. Phil Murphy’s shutdown order, a gym member was gingerly arrested before being promptly released, and lots and lots of cameras thirstily captured supporters enthusiastically playing the role of the oppressed.

They, at least, were more committed to their parts than local law enforcement has been.

“Formally, you’re all in violation of the executive order. On that note, have a good day. Everybody be safe,” a police captain told the crowd outside the gym before walking away to cheers. The police chief from nearby Clementon issued a near-verbatim announcement to a Baptist church that also defied the shutdown orders to hold in-person services.

I’m no acting coach, but it feels as if these cops are really phoning it in.

Look, I am sympathetic to small businesses struggling to hold on while big-box stores are thriving during the coronavirus outbreak. The rules often seem arbitrary and unfair.

Why can Home Depot welcome shoppers when a smaller family-owned shop that might actually exercise safer social distancing have to remain closed?

Last month I wrote about barbers who felt forced to choose between following the rules and feeding their families. That, as I said, is not a choice.

But it is beyond reprehensible for anyone to frame inconvenience as oppression, and then endanger first responders with these idiotic freedom protests with few masks and even less social distancing.

Time for a little Oppression 101:

Not being able to get in your 500-pound leg presses at the gym is not government oppression. Voter suppression, and disproportionately being targeted, incarcerated, and killed by law enforcement, is. So is lack of recognition for your marriage or sexuality or gender, or no access to decent and affordable health care and housing and day care and schools.

Not being able to shop at Costco or any number of stores without a mask is not corporate oppression. Being paid less than your white male colleagues for working the same damn job is. So is getting denied a loan from a bank, or paying more for insurance because of your race or neighborhood.

And let’s talk COVID-specific oppression, shall we? If you really wanted to protest actual oppression during the pandemic, then why not protest the environmental, health, and economic disparities that make people of color more likely to have preexisting conditions? Or more likely to work frontline service jobs where they have a greater chance of contracting the virus and less chance of getting quality health care?

What oppression is not, was not, and never will be is a convenient costume that you can put on and take off in some warped version of cultural appropriation.

COVID cosplay, anyone?

What is playing out are entitlement and privilege that not everyone gets to enjoy in the same way.

In California, Black protesters of stay-at-home orders got the riot treatment while predominantly white demonstrators mostly got a pass from law enforcement.

Back in South Jersey, Atilis Gym reopened Friday without incident only to be forced to close again after a judge that night ordered the gym to remain temporarily closed until the state lifts its closure order. The gym owners vowed to fight. After all, co-owner Ian Smith has been telling reporters, he’s merely a man fighting for the constitutional rights of all struggling small-business owners.

Turns out, he’s also a man who went to jail after a 2007 drunken-driving crash that killed a teenager — something he has expressed remorse for since the gym theatrics put him in the spotlight.

Irrelevant! you say. How dare you? What does any of that have to do with anything!?

Oh, my faux freedom fighters: If you want to play oppressed, then you better crack open those manuals. You’ll find this tactic somewhere between redlining and stop-and-frisk.

Those who are truly oppressed are routinely vilified by getting their pasts dredged up to excuse and explain all kinds of heinous acts committed against them.

Just last week, police in Georgia released video of a three-year-old shoplifting arrest of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger gunned down in February by a former police officer playing vigilante, as if that would somehow explain being hunted down and killed for the color of your skin.

Can you imagine that kind of ingrained, systemic injustice?

We are a lot of things right now. We are annoyed and angry, scared and impatient. But we are not oppressed.

To the new social-justice warriors: You’ve experienced your first small taste — and trust me, it’s a small taste — of what it’s like to feel that society treats you unfairly and sees you as expendable and unworthy.

Hold on to that shock, so that when we emerge from this, we can address real oppression.