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Racism's Victims
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20139 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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2 / 1992 |
5,625 Words |
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Stephen L. Carter
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In the fall of 1990, locked in a bitter reelection battle against a popular black opponent, Sen. Jesse Helms began using television commercials and campaign speeches aimed at persuading North Carolina's white voters that they were losing jobs to less qualified black applicants. The villain of his tale was affirmative action, which, to hear Helms tell, it was being foisted on the state by Sen. Edward Kennedy--although what Kennedy has to do with affirmative action or either one had to do with Harvey Gantt, Helms' opponent, was left unspecified. What Helms was telling the voters was that they were affirmative action's victims, a role that must have pleased them since he came roaring back to win the election with relative ease.
Less than a year later, when President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court, some opponents charged that Thomas, a critic of affirmative action, has engaged in "blaming the victim"--a charge that is often leveled at people who argue that black people must shoulder some of the responsibility for the state of black America. A principal claim of the modern civil rights movement, easily buttressed with statistics and hard historical fact, is that black people are victims of the nation's racist history. Thomas has attacked civil rights leaders for relying too heavily on this history. When the Senate Judiciary Committee reconvened to hear Professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual misconduct, however, it was Thomas himself who angrily, but with no apparent sense of irony, charged that he was the victim of a racist attack. So there it was again: Donning the mantle of victimhood becomes an essential part of the argument over racial justice.
In America, the struggle for racial justice has always had aspects of a morality play, and as the drama continues, both black people and white people often prefer a rhetoric that casts them in the role of victims. Writing about a celebrated seventeenth-century trial in which the public took side on whether the defendants were criminals or saints, the legal historian Brian Simpson observed, "Society likes its folk heroes to be one thing or another." Certainly our society does, especially when the talk is about race. It is very much in the nature of folktales that clear and unambiguous symbolism replaces complexity, and the battle over who gets to wear the mantle of victim provides an excellent example.
Nowadays, it seems, everybody wants to be a victim--black people who demand affirmative action often characterize themselves as victims, and so do white people who claim to have lost jobs because of it. The
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