I was 17, working at the rec center watching over the few remaining kids waiting for their parents to come pick them up from the after-school program. I sat on the bench watching them play tag or something similar along with a coworker who was also a neighborhood friend. Not a particularly close friend but the kind of friend that comes with playing pick-up basketball with the same people 4-5 times a week for the better part of a decade. At the time, I had just been accepted to college and was looking forward to adulthood, so I asked my friend who was also about to graduate high school where he was going to college after this year.
He gave me a look of casual disdain and replied “I ain’t going to no college. What I look like, going to college?”
I had played ball with this guy for a long time. I had been working with him at the rec for only the past year. In that year, I saw that he was a lot smarter and more grounded than I had assumed when we were just pick-up friends. At this point in my life, I was still very much in a “good Black” vs “n-word” worldview and I had naturally assumed that any reasonably intelligent Black kid who wasn’t directly involved in the same street shit that so many of my other friends were would want to go to college. Even if it was a smaller less prestigious school or even trade school or community college.
It wasn’t just the words, it was his face and demeanor. He wasn’t trying to be a dick about it, it was just that the thought never crossed his mind that college could ever be a place for a person like him. And it's not like I knew anything about his life when I asked the question, but his instant dismissal of even considering higher education an option led me to form an opinion about him. At that moment, I believed that my coworker could have gone to college but a victim mentality was holding him back.
Friday the 13th
In which a group of insatiable teenage camp counselors brings gruesome death upon themselves by giving into their carnal desires.
For as long as I can remember, I have been hearing about how a victim mentality was the principal, if not only, thing keeping Black communities from prospering in America. By now you may have heard that environmental conditions such as crumbling schools, racist over-policing, concentrated poverty, and racist hiring practices, among other things represent a concerted system of oppression for Black and other unfavorable minority peoples. But for many, this is a lie and the truth is that if Black people simply try harder, these obstacles will simply melt away in the face of good old-fashioned American can-do-it.
I feel quite safe in assuming that the majority of people who read this substack don’t believe that racial equality is as simple as Black people rejecting victimhood. You probably don’t believe that women who stay in abusive relations are responsible for their own abuse by not leaving their partners or that women who wear suggestive clothing are responsible for whatever sexual harassment or assault they may suffer. And yet, this sentiment remains prevalent in conservative circles and perseveres even in nominally liberal spaces.
When we talked about anti-Blackness, I noted how the patron saint of Black Excellence - former President Barack Obama - was very much a proponent of bootstrapping Black America into material equality with white people:
He supported welfare-to-work requirements. He created My Brothers Keeper, essentially a mentoring network for young Black and Latino men. He emphasized school metrics produced by standardized tests and promoted school choice. He criticized Black kids for wanting a gold chain over a bank account. He cited Chris Rock’s “Niggas vs Black people” routine. He told Morehouse graduates that Black men were out of excuses. He once told Michael Eric Dyson that he “doesn’t see himself as a victim”.
The idea that people who see themselves as victims are responsible for their own victimization is fundamental to our foundational American myth. The idea that once kings and queens were removed from the equation, America provided a context where a person’s fortunes, good or bad, were entirely dependent on their individual ability and choices. What was once an aspirational story of people being able to decide their own fate, quickly became a dogmatic hegemonic worldview. With dissenters to this particular just-so tale of American exceptionalism worthy of ridicule and dismissal.
Now obviously at the time that the American religion of individualism was being formed, this story did not apply to Black people (or any other demographic that America’s white male progenitors believed weren’t fully human). For Black people at the birth of America, victimhood was not a state of mind but the terms of employment. But that did not mean that the enslaved people building the fortunes of masters should feel any sort of anger or despair at their circumstances. Instead, they should feel gratitude for being introduced to civilization, Christianity, and the joys of backbreaking labor.
The American view of victim mentality has never been just a rhetorical justification for the continued marginalization of Black people. It's a part of our national consciousness and thus affects the way that anyone steeped in American culture sees themselves and the world around them. It's the reason why every single professional athlete positioned in front of a microphone will inevitably mention the adversity they had to overcome on their path to greatness. It’s the reason why people who lose everything in a house fire or a hurricane will make sure to communicate to news reporters how grateful they are to be alive. It's why efforts to organize labor for better pay and working conditions are dismissed as the product of ungrateful agitators who are jealous of successful people but refuse to work for themselves.
From a narrative point of view, it's not hard to see why this is appealing to a great number of people. Who doesn’t want to be the master of their own destiny or be able to brag about the obstacles they’ve overcome on the way to personal success? Functionally, however, this way of thinking obscures a very basic fact about society. That within every context there are very real material constraints on a person's ability and choices. You can choose to eat healthy foods, but you can’t exactly choose whether a grocery store is within a reasonable distance to your house or whether you have the time after work for preparing a meal from scratch.
Happy Death Day
In which a young woman who finds herself trapped in a cycle of violence, decides to avoid personal responsibility and blames scientific advances for her problems.
The interesting thing about the use of victim mentality and the abdication of personal responsibility as a political cudgel is that it’s frequently invoked against people who are actively trying to do something to change their circumstances. There is a notion that those who seek changes to our socioeconomic structures are avoiding the tough process of self-improvement when in reality these two things are not diametrically opposed. It is possible to improve oneself while also seeking to improve society. Often on an individual level, these two goals are interlinked.
For any political movement to achieve even the slightest measure of success it requires a lot of hard work and dedication. It requires that people not only feel responsible for themselves but responsible for the people around them. It’s not easier than keeping your head down in a 9 to 5 while cycling through passive income schemes on your lunch break. It's not anymore an abdication of responsibility than leaving matters of social construction and modes of economic production to a cadre of self-interested elites.
But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? For those who find the current state of affairs beneficial, there is an incentive to find moral failure in those who seek to change them. When those people also have control over the bounds of acceptable political conversation, both through privately controlled media and the bully pulpit of political office, their personal justifications for their own success become a cultural paradigm.
Victim mentality tends to be applied as an epithet to those without power. Workers who complain about low pay and terrible working conditions have a victim mentality but CEOs who complain about taxes and (what’s left) of the regulatory state are merely voicing valid concerns about systemic disincentives to free enterprise. Black people who complain about over-policing and brutal law enforcement tactics are engaging in the rhetoric of victimhood but cops who assert that crime is rising because protests have hurt their feelings are communicating real public safety concerns. LGTBQ people are embracing a victim mentality when they talk about the increasing marginalization and dehumanizing rhetoric coming from the political right but conservative Christians who are mad at beer companies for specialty cans and department stores for ads marketing to queer people are just standing up for their values.
Who gets to be a legitimate victim versus who is cynically employing victimhood for selfish ends or to escape accountability is mostly dependent on power. This isn’t just a thing with conservatives. Liberals tend to find it hard to see the stereotypical racist “working class” Trump voter as a victim of economic policies that have deindustrialized large swaths of the country and removed traditional paths to economic security that the white working class had previously enjoyed.
I mean, we all told them they should learn to code, right?
The vast majority of people do not want to be a victim, but how one perceives the things that negatively affect their lives tends to depend on whether they identify with the current structures of power or not. Accusing a political opponent of embracing a victim mentality is a way of sidestepping any substantive critique of socially reproduced problems. It’s literally the way that most scams work, especially multi-level marketing schemes.
MLMs have long been an obsession of mine. I’ve been to a few “parties” where friends and casual acquaintances have tried to sell me on a unique business opportunity. MLMs have a bit of competition these days in the recent trend of online “passive income” schemes, which typically involve using platforms like Amazon to market scammy products. What MLMs and their more digital cousins have in common is that they lure people into them by promising an easy way to make money, a highly attractive proposition for many in an economy where financial stability is increasingly hard to come by.
In reality, the only people who make any real money with MLMs and passive income schemes are those who sell others on the scam. For people who actually attempt to make money by following the system sold to them, 99% fail and end up losing money. However, when people for whom these systems are failing to deliver on the promise of easy money complain to the people who promote them, suddenly the script will flip. No longer are MLMs and passive income schemes something you can do in your spare time that will net you large profits for low effort, instead people are told that they have to work hard in order to make money and those who fail to make millions selling shitty yoga pants or scammy ghostwritten books on Amazon are engaging in a victim mentality.
High Tension
In which a young woman sees herself as a victim to avoid taking responsibility for her own self-destructive worldview.
Here is where I may lose a bit of my audience because this last point about the state of political victimhood is an equal critique of both the left and the right. A “both sides” argument if you will. While many accusations of victim mentality are meant to obfuscate and sidestep valid criticisms of unfair systems, sometimes people who claim victim status are doing so to avoid substantiating certain actions and positions.
Country music singer Jason Aldean’s recent polarizing single “Try That in a Small Town” is evocative of this dynamic. The song positions Aldean and his hypothetical small-town compatriots as being under threat from a purposely undefined horde of violent extremists and criminals and promises that they will defend themselves against this potential victimization.
Now I’m not breaking any new ground here by pointing out the hypocrisy of conservatives criticizing others for their victim mentality while claiming it for themselves. And we did just discuss how whether you see someone as a victim or a self-saboteur depends on your relationship with systems of power. However, there is a universal problem with victimhood that affects both left and right discourse.
I’m talking about the tendency for critiques of women in positions of power to be dismissed as sexism or for Black people to wave away prejudices against other minority groups by invoking our own long history of marginalization. Believing oneself to be a victim can be used to justify immoral and harmful acts. It’s a prominent feature of narcissism, as a certain former president continues to aptly demonstrate. Just because victim mentality is often used to derail substantive critique doesn’t mean that it's not a real pitfall for some.
This destructive application of victimhood is rooted in our national religion of individualism. There is a tendency for some to see systematic victimization as a personal attack, instead of a circumstance of social construction. This is the difference between a Black person saying that racism is the reason why Black people are concentrated in poor and environmentally hazardous neighborhoods and a wealthy and famous Black man claiming that racism is the reason why people have a problem with his habit of drugging and raping women. It’s the difference between pointing out that sexism prevents women from getting proper characterization in movies or giving women a chance to direct and claiming that critiques of bad movies that feature women as main characters are only because of misogyny.
Victimhood is subjective. And we’ve used many words to state that simple fact. But the takeaway should be that one’s position as a victim should never be enough to support or condemn them. Like with everything, context matters. People working together to address inadequacies in social structures, dismissing those efforts as the product of entitled laziness, and cynically deploying victimhood to escape criticism are traditions as old as human civilization. There are no simple metrics with which to differentiate who is a true victim deserving of justice or restoration and who is looking to escape responsibility. Often we are just using our own personal political valances to make those distinctions.
I don’t know if my rec center coworker saw himself as a victim for not seeing college as an attainable goal or if he simply didn’t think spending tens of thousands on higher education was a good choice for him. At the time I let my own beliefs about meritocratic advancement frame that 30-second conversation. Since then, my views on college and socioeconomic permeability have dramatically changed, and I don’t think passing on university is a sign of a victim mentality. At the same time, we have a system of higher education that is designed to reproduce a stratified class structure, which victimizes people who would benefit from a college education but face arbitrary barriers to accessing it.
Whether or not you see yourself as a victim is less important than what you do when you feel victimized. Do you use that victim status as a rallying cry for substantive social change or do you use it as a shield from personal criticism? Are you using victimhood to explain the root causes of harmful behavior with the goal of addressing those causes or are you trying to minimize social problems? These questions should apply equally to the left and the right and even then they may not be enough to fully grasp a particular situation. Nuance is hard. But in the absence of nuance, when everything is flattened to the simplest moral standards, reality itself becomes the victim.
Solidarity Forever.
::Liberals tend to find it hard to see the stereotypical racist “working class” Trump voter as a victim of economic policies that have deindustrialized large swaths of the country and removed traditional paths to economic security that the white working class had previously enjoyed.
::I mean, we all told them they should learn to code, right?::
Yeah, so why didn't they learn to code? Isn't all that Poor White Bigoted Trash always going on about "personal responsibility" and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"? Seems to me they're finally getting the reckoning that's been coming to them for a LONG time.... Those are the very White men and women who form lynch mobs (and I should know, some of them are my relatives!), so my sympathy for them kind of went for a jog and never came back.
That said, I get your point—and I agree with adin thayer below that Clinton NeoLiberalism is what sent a LOT of well-paying Blue-Collar jobs to other lands so the bosses could get richer...at least until the Robots take over. I hear it in my youngest brother's voice when he had to stop driving long-distance trucks because of decades of repetitive stress injuries, and in my kid brother's voice when he works more than full-time as a "consultant" so the companies that hire him don't have to pay medical benefits to someone with a synthetic heart valve. Of course, I also hear my kid brother's injured tone when his Latino shift foreman didn't appreciate his "Messican" jokes and he was let go from his last job, too....
(I wish I was making that last one up.)
I'm with adin on reading more about your take on why Trump is the hallowed victim/champion of people he sees as nothing more than suckers.
hey, there's a lot to chew on here. i wholly agree with the last section of your argument. i think liberals are ready to swallow stories of victimhood easily and present their/ourselves as their champions. i find myself in tough corners sometimes sounding unsympathetic when i'm pointing out the way this victim is also a harmer, or is using victimhood to obscure other reasons for failure.
there's more to say, and i hope you will, about trump as victim in chief and how the legions of blue collar white men who see him as their champion identify with his capital V as a description of their own status. you might saying i'm doing the thing you're arguing against, ie seeing their identity as victims more clearly than the ways in which their economic decline makes them actual victims of capitalism and neo liberal policies promulgated by clinton to send their jobs elsewhere where others in poorer countries could become victims of foreign bosses who cared nothing about them. but the experience of themselves as victims has also enabled them to accept and employ violent rhetoric and actions against people who are not victims. so i hope you write more about the particular way in which trump, a perpetrator of the first degree, has succeeded in becoming their hallowed victim/champion.