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Making Sense of the White Male Stigma of Not 'Getting It'
| Article
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12156 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1994 |
6,144 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. |
A primary rhetorical device used by theorists and enforcers of political correctness in their crusade to eliminate differences between people is the image of the self-as-victim. In their view, only statements made by victims are credible. Claims to victimhood are used by individuals and groups as a vehicle for self-assertion, group solidarity, and the acquisition and use of power.1 All of this is premised on the subjectivist fallacy that the truth or falsity of a person's statements and arguments is determined by the person's motives, character, or ethnic, gender, or life-style characteristics.2 Conflicts over whose interpretations and evaluations should prevail are a direct expression of this fallacy.
The intensity of these conflicts also results from the fact that the self-as-victim approach entails attitudes that undermine any sense of shared vision, values, or beliefs. Judith Eaton has identified those attitudes as "denial of personal responsibility, insistence on society's full responsibility for any personal problem one may have, a lack of commitment to resolution of the problems that created the [alleged] victimhood status, a need to continue to feel oppressed or have enemies, and a tendency toward oral bullying."3
The cultural enemies of those who propagate the self-as-victim viewpoint are everywhere because they are the very foundations of our civilization. In the realm of ideas, their enemies are reason and rationality; in the political sphere, individual rights and limited government; in the economic sphere, capitalism. In public discourse they wage their attack by substituting rhetoric for logic and by transforming descriptive terms into moral categories that appeal to people's emotions rather than their rational judgment. For instance, in the self-as-victim ideologists' construction of the unnecessary dichotomy between the social and the individual, the category "social" is seen as necessarily morally praiseworthy, while the category "individual" is vested with moral disapproval .4 The concept "theory," which broadly refers to thinking ordered by the principles of logic, is defined as the equivalent of "conceptual imperialism" over everyday life5 and dismissed as "a form of policing."6 The truth claims of "apolitical objective knowledge" are depreciated as arrogant prejudices of Western philosophy and science.7 Individual rights and limited government are defined as mechanisms that perpetuate racism, sexism, and ageism. Capitalism is defined as inherently unfair and an instrument of greed and exploitation.
The source of all these threats, they claim, is one group: productive white Christian males. Their
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