hn-classics/_stories/1989/16199541.md

---
created_at: '2018-01-21T19:36:02.000Z'
title: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)
url: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/02/magazine/the-joys-of-victimhood.html?pagewanted=2&pagewanted=all
author: imartin2k
points: 93
story_text: 
comment_text: 
num_comments: 68
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1516563362
_tags:
- story
- author_imartin2k
- story_16199541
objectID: '16199541'
year: 1989

---
A SHAME THERE ISN'T A MA-chine, the sociological equivalent of a
seismograph, that registers fundamental shifts in social attitudes and
concerns. In the absence of such a machine, we all have to operate with
our own often rather primitive social radar, taking our signals where we
find them. When one's dentist, for example, begins to say ''pasta''
instead of spaghetti or noodles, one knows that the interest in cookery
has fully swept the middle classes. When one sees Mafia men jogging and
worrying about their cholesterol, one knows that anxiety about health
really is endemic. What began as a fad becomes a trend, which becomes a
shift, which finally becomes a serious change in the way we live and
think about ourselves.

My own fairly low-voltage radar has been pinging away for some while on
another such shift, and last summer, while I was watching the Democratic
National Convention on television, it began to bleep furiously in my
mind. The noise could no longer be avoided when, at the moment that Ann
Richards, the Texas State Treasurer, completed her strong keynote
speech, the commentator on the television network I was watching
remarked (as near as I can recall), ''Ann Richards is a divorced mother
of four who has undergone rehabilitation for an alcohol problem.''
Earlier in the campaign, Kitty Dukakis had announced that she had
undergone treatment for an addiction she had to diet pills. During his
speech at the convention, Jesse Jackson, in speaking of his own origins,
declared that he was an illegitimate child, and then he wove a speech
around the metaphor of the Democratic Party being a quilt both made by
and supplying warmth to all those elements in American life - minority
groups, homosexuals, American Indians (or Native Americans, as they're
now known), welfare families, and many others - who, in Mr. Jackson's
reading, were America's victims. Eight and even four years earlier, the
Democratic Party had advertised itself as the party of concern. Last
summer, though, the Democratic Party seemed to have cut out the
middleman and gone from ''caring persons'' straight to victims. The
logic of the convention seemed to call for Michael Dukakis, on the night
of his nomination, to arrive in an iron lung and announce that he was a
lesbian mother.

Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to
identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life. Why
this should be so isn't very complicated: to position oneself as a
victim is to position oneself for sympathy, special treatment, even
victory. It's not only individuals who benefit. In international
politics, one sees the deliberate strategy of positioning for victimhood
played out in the Middle East. Although Israel is a country of fewer
than four million Jewish people surrounded by Arab nations numbering
some 200 million people, very few of whom mean the Israelis well, the
Arabs have somehow been able to make themselves - or at least the
Palestinians as their representatives - seem the great victims in the
Middle East. Every time a woman or a small child is injured in the
organized riots known as the intifada - one might ask why small children
are allowed anywhere near such danger - the victimhood of the
Palestinians is reinforced and their cause, as victims, made all the
stronger.

Gandhi was the great teacher of the art of victimhood, of setting one's
victimization on full public display. Part of the genius of the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was to recognize the value of Gandhi's lessons
for the American civil rights movement, and most especially the lesson
of nonviolent resistance, which not only highlights victimhood but gives
it, in a good cause, a genuinely moral aura. Their moral and physical
courage lent civil rights workers in the South an appeal that was
irresistible to all but the most hard-hearted of segregationists.
Americans, all of whose families began in this country as immigrants,
have a built-in tradition of having known victimhood, at least
historically, and hence a strong tendency toward sympathy for victims.

Yet it was the civil rights movement, by my reckoning, that changed the
tenor, the quality, the very nature of victimhood in the United States.
I happened to be living in the South in the early 1960's, working as a
director of the antipoverty program in Little Rock, Ark., while the
civil rights movement was under way in full earnest. What I saw was a
number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts
of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws.
One really had to have nailed shut the shutters to one's heart not to
have been moved by the spectacle of men and women risking everything to
gain only what in fairness was coming to them. It was immensely
impressive, on every level. Why? Because the early civil rights
movement's appeal was unmistakably not to the guilt but to the
conscience of the nation.

An appeal to conscience is an appeal to one's ethical nature, to one's
sense of fair play; it is fundamentally an appeal to act upon the best
that is in one. An appeal to guilt is almost entirely negative; rather
than awaken the best in one, it reminds one what a dog one is.
Conscience seeks its outlet in action, or right conduct; guilt seeks
assuagement, or to find a way to be let off the hook.

The civil rights movement, like a spiritual oil spill, left a vast
residue of guilt in its wake. Suddenly, if you were white you couldn't
possibly be in the right. Such civil rights figures as Stokely
Carmichael and H. Rap Brown - and not they alone -were endlessly
reminding everyone that their forebears were brought to this country
against their will in chains by our forebears. (That my forebears
themselves fled a 25-year conscription in the czar's army and your
forebears fled the peril of another potato famine was judged beside the
point.) This abundant stirring up of guilt may have produced little in
the way of direct social change, but it did without doubt strike its
target - so profoundly that social scientists began to write about a
''culture of guilt.'' The guilt that was loosed, moreover, was of a kind
that had no outlet. What are you supposed to do, after all, if someone
blames you for slavery, a hideous institution, to be sure, but one
defunct for more than a century? Say you are sorry it ever happened?
Should you clear your throat and announce that there are historical
reasons for some of these things?

And yet if you couldn't fight 'em, you could, spiritually at any rate,
attempt to join 'em. The most efficient way to do so was not to deny the
claims of militant blacks but instead set out claims of your own to
victimhood alongside theirs. One saw this happen straightaway with the
student protest movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Many
students of those days not only claimed victimhood but claimed it
precisely on the black model. Students were powerless, they said, they
were exploited. Powerless, exploited, thoroughly alienated. Those were
the claims of one group after another - 60's students, feminists,
homosexuals, Vietnam veterans, the handicapped, even artists. Yea,
verily, they would all overcome, except over whom? Who was left to be
overcome? It soon began to seem as if there wasn't anyone in American
life who couldn't find grounds for claiming to be a victim.

Small wonder, too, for victimhood has not only its privileges but its
pleasures. To begin with, it allows one to save one's greatest sympathy
for that most sympathetic of characters -oneself. Of the various kinds
and degrees of pity, easily the most vigilant is self-pity. To stake out
one's own territory as a victim, or member of a victim group, also
allows one to cut the moral ground out from under others who make an
appeal on the basis of their victimhood - to go off singing, as it were,
''You've got your troubles, I've got mine.''

THE PLEASURES OF VICTIM-hood include imbuing one's life with a sense of
drama. The drama of daily life is greatly heightened if one feels that
society is organized against one.

To feel oneself excluded and set apart is no longer obviously or even
necessarily a bad thing. A victim cannot properly be thought bourgeois
or middle-class in any significant way, which in some circles is itself
meritorious. Excluded, set apart, alienated, the victim begins to sound
like no one so much as the modern artist.

Artists have for some while now liked to think of themselves as victims.
Whole books - usually overwrought, rather boring books - have been
written about the alienation of the artist in modern society. The bill
of complaint states that the artist is undervalued, underappreciated -
like the soft drink Dr Pepper in an old television commercial, so
misunderstood. Best-selling novelists are driven in limousines to give
lectures whose main message is that the artist in America has no place
to rest his head. Painters with serious real estate holdings rant
against a vile and philistine coun-try. Artists meanwhile maintain
permanent victim status, which, it is understood, no public recognition
or financial success can ever hope to diminish.

Like other victim groups, artists can be exceedingly touchy. I once sat
in a room where grants in the arts were being discussed, and I had the
temerity to wonder aloud about the usefulness of a series of grants to
support places where writers might meet to discuss their own and one
another's work. Did writers truly need such institutions, I asked, being
in the trade some years myself and never having felt the need of them.
In response, a rather famous novelist replied with a lengthy exegesis on
the loneliness of the writer who spends months, often years on the same
project, filled with doubt, encouraged by no one, stirred only by the
passion to create something that no one may eventually want. . . . Did
she, I wondered (this time to myself), show slides with that talk? It
reminded me of H. L. Mencken's remark that whenever he heard writers
complain about the loneliness of their work he recommended that they
spend a few days on the assembly line, where they would have plenty of
opportunities for camaraderie with their mates.

Sometimes it must be difficult for the spokesmen for victims to keep up
the anger - Jesse Jackson in an expensive suit, Gloria Steinem at a
socialite party at the New York Public Library - but, whether simulated
or real, the note of outrage always seems to be there when they need it.
A victim, especially a professional victim, must at all times be angry,
suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout
for that touch of racism, sexism, or homophobia that might show up in a
stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. With victims
everywhere, life becomes a minefield in a cow pasture - no matter where
you step, you are in trouble.

As if all this isn't nervous-making enough, there has come into being a
large number of people, many of them in universities, who, if not
victims themselves, wish to speak for victims or rouse other people to a
sense of their injury as victims. They are the intellectual equivalent
of ambulance chasers.

Perhaps the best place to see the traffic of victims and ambulance
chasers in full flow is in the contemporary university. I don't think
it's stretching things to say that nowadays if you cannot declare victim
status, or find some way to align yourself with putative victims, in the
contemporary university you don't figure to have much standing.
Victimisme, to Frenchify the condition, is very much where the action is
in universities. Women's centers, African-American studies programs,
student gay and lesbian programs, and those ultimate intellectual
ambulance chasers, academic Marxists, all hammer cheerfully away at
revealing what a perfect hell life has been, and continues to be, for
almost everyone in the world. And yet they all seem so happy in their
work: the young man wearing a smile and a black T-shirt with the pink
triangle that Hitler forced homosexuals under the Nazis to wear; the
young female professor and her graduate student sharing an intimate
scornful laugh at the hopeless sexist assumptions of an older male
professor; the recently tenured Marxist theorist in the black leather
jacket and Bertolt Brecht haircut. Happy victims all.

One might conceivably be a victim if one works in a coal mine or a steel
mill or in the fields as a sharecropper, but no one who works as a
teacher in a university, or for that matter is a student there, is a
victim. To have a teaching job in a university is to work roughly seven
months a year in a generally Edenic setting at intellectual tasks
largely of one's own choosing. Relativity of relativities, a victim
among university teachers is someone who isn't permitted to teach the
Shakespeare course, or who feels he has stupid students, or whose office
is drafty, or who doesn't get tenure (which is lifetime security in the
job) and therefore must find another job within (usually) the next 16
months. These are not exactly the kinds of problem faced by, say, boat
people fleeing Cambodia.

Yet an increasing number of university teachers nowadays teach one or
another branch of victimology -what might not unfairly be called Victim
Lit. The more prestige-laden the school, the more victimological studies
are likely to be a strong component in its curriculum.
''Unfortunately,'' writes a black Harvard graduate named Christopher H.
Foreman Jr. in a letter to The New Republic about ethnic sensitivity
training at Harvard, ''the psychological comfort of being simultaneously
privileged and oppressed seems too enticing for many people to forgo.''
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and other only scarcely less august
institutions compete among themselves lest they be caught without a
goodly supply of angry teachers of victimological subjects. Irony of
ironies, nuttiness of nuttinesses, the scene thus presented is that of
the fortunate teaching the privileged that the world is by and large
divided between the oppressed and the oppressors, victims and
executioners, and that the former are inevitably morally superior. As a
tuition-paying parent, I used sometimes to think, writing out those
heavy checks to universities, that the only true victims in this entire
arrangement were those of us who helped to pay for it all.

Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental
confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language
itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact
women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed
victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly
minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people),
are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in
affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then,
is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.

People who count and call themselves victims never blame themselves for
their condition. They therefore have to find enemies. Forces high and
low block their progress: society is organized against them; history is
not on their side; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply,
conspire to keep them down. Asked by an interviewer in Time magazine
about violence in schools that are all-black -that is, violence by
blacks against blacks - the novelist Toni Morrison replies, ''None of
those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the
people who run the schools and the city.''

For victimhood to be taken seriously, there has to be a core of
substance to the victim's complaints. Blacks were discriminated against,
de facto and de jure, in this country for a very long while. Women were
paid lower wages for doing the same work as men and they were
indubitably excluded from jobs they were perfectly capable of
performing. Mexican-Americans often worked under deplorable conditions.
A case for victimhood cannot simply be invented, though some people try.
I recall some time ago watching a television program that stressed the
problems of the unwed teen-age father. Greatly gripping though they
doubtless were, I remember muttering to myself: the unwed father,
another victim group - who'd've thunk it?

Even when there is a core of substance to the victims' complaints, they
tend to push it. A subtle shift takes place, and suddenly the victim is
no longer making appeals but demands. The terms lady and homosexual are
out; it's only woman and gay that are acceptable. Public pronouncements
from victims take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the
line between victim and bully seems to blur. At some point, one gets the
sense that the victims actively enjoy their victimhood - enjoy the moral
vantage point it gives them to tell off the rest of the country, to
overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for
their condition, to ask the impossible and then demonstrate outrage when
it isn't delivered.

Apparently, the victims of our day rather like this state of affairs. I
say ''apparently'' because it has been many years since any of the
victim groups have shown anything approaching a genuine interest in
organization. Instead, they seem to function chiefly as loose
repositories for the expression of resentment. A strong sign of this is
the striking absence of leadership in any of the major victim movements
of the time: black, women, gay. The Rainbow Coalition - it might more
accurately be called the Victim Coalition - isn't cutting it. Like the
wild rookie pitcher in the movie ''Bull Durham,'' the various victim
groups are ''all over the place'': blaming racism for black teen-age
crime, male psychology for capitalism, the Government for AIDS. There is
something fundamentally unserious about all of this. Whereas once the
idea was to shake off victimhood through courage and organization,
nowadays the idea seems to be to enjoy it for its emotional effects.

Not many other people seem to be enjoying it, though. The reserves of
guilt that victims once felt they could draw on now appear all but
depleted. White ethnics and others have begun to feel themselves the
victims of affirmative action and other favoritism programs, so that we
have the phenomenon of victims created by victims. Those whom the
victims have been attacking all these years are themselves beginning to
feel like victims. It's a real growth industry. When I recently read, in
The Times Literary Supplement of London, at the close of a review of two
books on adultery, that ''Adultery is built upon, even aimed at, female
unhappiness,'' I wondered if the T.L.S. would one day soon carry an
angry answering letter from a man representing a society of cuckolds.

Just the other day I heard a fresh euphemism for what used to be known
as ''the handicapped.'' Take a moment to breathe in deeply before I set
it out on the page, for I think it might take your breath away. The
handicapped, in this new euphemism, are ''the physically challenged.''
Somebody, obviously, has been working overtime.

Yet I cannot help think of the contempt in which that euphemism is
likely to be held by the people I know who are seriously handicapped.
These people do not in the least think themselves physically challenged;
instead, they know that they have to undergo endless small and
infuriating difficulties that the rest of us have been spared. They have
been kicked, very hard, in the stomach by fate. Without denying or
attempting to disguise the effects of this devastating kick, they
neither whine about it nor protest it.

As it happens, these people are all intensely political (they are
liberals and conservatives), but the last thing I can imagine any of
them doing is using his handicap for political advantage or for that
matter in any public way either to define or advance himself. Because
they neither act as nor think of themselves as victims, in the end they
seem, far from victimized, immensely dignified and quietly heroic.
Although it was never their intention to do so, they make the
contemporary joys of victimhood -the assumption of moral superiority,
the spread of guilt and bad feeling, the shifting of responsibility for
one's own destiny onto others or the ''system'' or society at large -
seem rather dreary, if not pathetic. They also remind the rest of us
that the most efficient way to become truly a victim is to think and act
like a victim.

drawing