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Politics as Victimhood, Victimhood as Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2018

Robert B. Horwitz
Robert B. Horwitz*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Abstract:

The victim has become among the most important identity positions in American politics. Victimhood is now a pivotal means by which individuals and groups see themselves and constitute themselves as political actors. Indeed, victimhood seems to have become a status that must be established before political claims can be advanced. Victimhood embodies the assertion that an individual or group has suffered wrongs that must be requited. What seems new is that wounded groups assert a self-righteous claim that they stand for something larger than their particular injury. The article explores how and why victimhood has become such a powerful theme in American politics. It suggests that victimhood as politics emerged from the contentious politics of the 1960s, specifically the civil rights movement and its aftermath. Key factors include the reaction to the minority rights and women’s movements, as well as internal dynamics within the rights movements.

Keywords

Victimhoodcivil rightsgroup rightsU.S. politicsidentity politics
Type
Critical Perspective
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 552 - 574
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

1. Dean, Carolyn J., Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim After the Holocaust (Ithaca, 2010).Google Scholar See, of course, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which revered the soldiers who gave their lives so that the nation could live. http://www.gettysburg.com/bog/address.htm.

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7. In this respect, many theorists of the politics of recognition revisit Hegel’s articulation of the struggle between master and slave as formulated in The Phenomenology of Mind.

8. The ur-text here may be Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

9. Sykes, Charles J., A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character (New York, 1992), 12.Google Scholar See also the denunciation of victimhood by the art critic Hughes, Robert, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (New York, 1993).Google Scholar A parallel, but differently motivated critique of victimhood has been conducted within feminist scholarship. The most compelling presents the argument that, after struggling to achieve recognition and liberation, groups utilizing the state to protect them and other subordinated groups from discrimination can form “wounded attachments” to the injured identities so constructed. Referring to women in particular, Wendy Brown warns that they risk being inscribed as victims, weak and dependent on the state. “Wounded Attachments,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), 52–76.

10. Sykes, A Nation of Victims, 25–53. In a somewhat different but parallel vein, see Glendon, Mary Ann, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

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16. “The worst part of my job is being a target for those who would harm me and my employer, the Fox News Channel.” Steele, Emily and Schmidt, Michael S., “Bill O’Reilly Thrives at Fox, Even as Harassment Settlements Add Up,” New York Times, 1 April 2017.Google Scholar

17. For one recent ethnographic account, see Hochschild, Arlie Russell, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York, 2016).Google Scholar

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20. The social science perspective weighed heavily in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). In this instance, the perspective rested on a model of psychological damage—“stigma”—suffered by black people on account of white supremacy and segregation. The psychological ramifications of stigma due to segregation in education meant that separate could never be equal. The social science cited in Brown showed that black girls preferred white dolls, interpreted as an indicator of the black girls’ ingrown sense of racial inferiority.

The relationship between racial politics and social science is complex, the contours of which change in different historical periods. In the period after World War II, liberal intellectuals used damage imagery to dispute widespread beliefs in the innate inferiority of African Americans. Slavery and racial segregation effected real damage on black lives. Operating within an integrationist worldview, liberals made psychologically based claims about the “impaired” black matriarchal family and the prevalence of black rage, including the rage of self-hatred, in the effort to induce race-conscious public policies. They attempted to do so by galvanizing the humanitarianism (and pity) of middle-class whites.

This included the (in)famous Moynihan Report. Written for the Department of Labor in 1965, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action noted very high rates of illegitimacy, welfare participation, and single-parent families among African Americans. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due simply to a paucity of jobs but rather to a destructive trend in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery, racism, and Jim Crow discrimination. These had produced a “tangle of pathology” of delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and, most devastating, fatherlessness. To the extent that social policy provided welfare payments to families with fatherless dependent children, the policy added to the undermining of the basic socializing function of the family. Moynihan suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of African Americans due to the history of slavery and discrimination. “In essence,” he wrote, “the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male, and in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” Blacks were not like every other immigrant group that had engaged in self-help to become, over generations, upwardly mobile. The ultimate aim (often forgotten in the contentious debate about the report) was to justify race-based preferences in the employment of black men.

By the late 1960s with the rise of black power discourse (echoing the earlier interwar period of black pride of the Harlem Renaissance), damage imagery was denounced as racist. The liberal depiction of blacks as damaged and thus in need of succor was seen as itself a form of paternalistic racism. What black power advocated instead was both the purge of the image of the oppressed imposed by the oppressor (following Fanon) and the introduction of a system of preference as reparation for past and current injustices. See Scott, Daryl Michael, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche (Chapel Hill, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Of course, direct reparations would constitute group preference—anathema to the always-powerful ideologies of individualism, difference-blindness, and personal merit.

21. Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York, 1984).Google Scholar Speaker of the House Paul Ryan regularly couches proposed cuts to government “entitlements” by warning of recipients’ dependency. See, e.g., Delaney, Arthur and McAuliff, Michael, “Paul Ryan Wants ‘Welfare Reform Round 2,’” Huffington Post (20 March 2012), at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/paul-ryan-welfare-reform_n_1368277.html.Google Scholar

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23. Note that discrimination was not the basis for all affirmative action. According to Skrentny, policies to aid minority capitalists were animated also by the desire to halt urban black rioting in the 1960s.

24. Novak, Michael, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

25. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution, 262–327.

26. See Sugrue, Thomas J. and Skrentny, John D., “The White Ethnic Strategy,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Schulman, Bruce J. and Zelizer, Julian E. (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 177–92;Google Scholar Deslippe, Dennis A., “‘Do Whites Have Rights?’ White Detroit Policemen and ‘Reverse Discrimination’ Protests in the 1970s,” Journal of American History 91, no. 3 (December 2004), 932–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The failure of white ethnics to be included in affirmative action presented new political opportunities. President Richard Nixon used the affirmative-action mandate that federal construction projects reflect the racial composition of their localities to drive a wedge between historically white construction unions and the Democratic Party.

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28. A court-centered approach to progressive activism easily allows opponents to rebuke judges and bureaucrats as unaccountable elites. See Klarman, Michael J., From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (New York, 2013).Google Scholar

29. The crime victims’ rights movement is another manifestation of this general dynamic. The liberal effort to afford arrestees basic constitutional rights by the Warren Court sparked a reaction that they received more solicitousness than their victims—thus triggering the crime victims’ movement. Here again, those who suffered from crime were seen as true victims. This move was more politically complicated, however, inasmuch as it was fed also by a feminist critique of how rape victims typically were treated. Notwithstanding the feminist angle, the main ideological thrust of the crime victims’ rights movement was the righteous call for vengeance on behalf of the victims of crime.

30. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood, 6.

31. Here I borrow the language of Wendy Brown, “Neoliberal Jurisprudence and Evangelical Christianity in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores,” unpublished talk to the London School of Economics (June 2015).

32. Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 2005).Google Scholar

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35. Mettler, Suzanne, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. The late Justice Antonin Scalia perfectly articulated this logic in his comments from the bench in oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder (570 U.S. __, 2013), the case that struck down the central part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Addressing Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Scalia said, “I think it [the absence of congressional votes against the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act] is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.” http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/12-96.pdf (at 47). In this view, protecting the right to vote is equivalent to a racial entitlement.

37. For example, the resentful rural Wisconsinites who backed Governor Scott Walker were certain that they were the victims of massive inequities in the provision of state government programs and benefits. According to Katherine Cramer, the objective measures showed there was no basis for this conviction. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.

38. King, Martin Luther Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (16 April 1963), http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html.Google Scholar See also Chappell, David L., A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Rustin, Bayard, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (Chicago, 1971).Google Scholar

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43. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 248; Lasch, The One and Only Heaven, 378.Google Scholar

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45. This point is made forcefully by Brandon M. Terry, “MLK Now,” Boston Review (9 January 2018).

46. Rustin, , “The Lessons of the Long Hot Summer” [1967], in Down the Line, 197.Google Scholar

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