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Black Victimhood: A 'Paradoxical Sequel' to Civil Rights
| Article
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10121 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
5,126 Words |
| Author
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Anne Wortham
Anne Wortham is associate professor of sociology at Illinois
State University. Part II of this article will be published
in a subsequent issue. |
Most blacks have been direct or indirect victims of racial prejudice and discrimination. Most can cite circumstance in their lives or in those people they know that have been influenced by racial injustice and by attitudes that reflect responses to it. Much of black history has been characterized by efforts to redress the injustice of racial subordination. Since the mid-1950a however, there has existed with in the black community a concerted effort by individuals and groups to transform their victimization into a political advantage--to institutionalize it as a cultural symbol of moral and political status. This article will examine the nature of that transformation and its attack on individual liberty, individual responsibility, and equality before the law.
As this essay is a critical examination of black victimhood, it is necessary to stress at the outset that this is not an attempt either to deny or diminish the victimization of blacks. My aim is to draw the lines of distinction between actual victims and symbolic victims and illustrate how the latter group's beliefs and attitudes, which I refer to as the stance of victimhood, threaten the values necessary for the relief of those disadvantaged by racial discrimination. Its prominence in the public discourse on justice and equality is, to use historian C. Vann Woodward's term, one of the several "paradoxical sequels" to the successes of the civil rights movement.
THE NATURE OF VICTIMHOOD
A victim is a person who suffers from a destructive or injurious action or agency; he may be deceived or cheated, sacrificed or regarded as sacrificed. Some definitions note that one may be victim of one's own emotions and ignorance. Usually, we think of people as victims of another person's action of some impersonal, external agency or force beyond their control, such as catastrophes, accidents, physical handicaps or illness, psychological or physical abuse, or political and social injustice.
Unlike actual victimization, the stance of victimhood is a technique of self-presentation and impression management that involves the symbolic elaboration of actual victim status. Because symbolic elaborations equality of conceptualization and not concrete reality, one need not be an actual victim to make an implicit or explicit claim to victim status. Whether he actually has experienced injustice or not, the symbolic victim presents himself as the embodiment of all the real imagined suffering of his member ship group as a whole. The symbolic victim asks us to ignore the fact that he is not an actual
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