Black victimhood

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views January 5, 2004]

As the civil rights movement of the 1960s shifted its strategy from principled protest to pragmatic politics, which involved the acquisition of material gains such as housing, welfare, and health care, black leaders imputed the disadvantaged circumstances of the black underclass and lower-income groups to the entire black community. The effect was to disguise the achievements of individual blacks and the advancement and expansion of the black middle class that had been underway long before Rosa Parks refused to go the back of the bus. [See Section "When We Were Colored."] But the claim to victim status has been a significant characteristic of each stage of black activism. It legitimated the integration movement's politics of redemption as articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. It was also present in the black power movement's politics of retribution and the black identification movement's politics of exclusion and racial solidarity. Today, it finds expression in the politics of sensitivity, compensation and remediation.

Black gains are seen as only symbolic in relation to white Americans; blacks are urged not be dissuaded by arguments that they are making progress. Such pessimistic assessments of black progress are most often offered by people whose own lives and careers are falsifications of those assessments. One of the ironies of black victimhood is its appeal to people who have already made significant progress toward assimilation. Such upwardly mobile ethnics, says John Higham, are already strongly enough positioned to imagine that permanent minority status might be advantageous.

Black journalist William Raspberry has been one of the few observers of the black community to criticize the laments of black deprivation proponents. "It has become the new orthodoxy for black Americans -- particularly those doing pretty well -- to deny that anything has changed for the better," writes Rasberry. He views such denials as being motivated by the fear that an admission of progress "will take white America off the hook, reduce guilt, and preclude further advances." There is also the persistent feeling that the fragile prosperity of middle class blacks might blow away with ill economic winds, as well as their uncertainty of their status either in the white community or the black community.

Since the indices of black progress plainly show the disparity in the advances of middle-class and lower-class blacks, what purpose does it serve to emphasize the plight of the lower class as the sine qua non of the problems and status of the entire black community when it is evident to everyone that this is not the case? What function does the denial of black improvement have for its proponents?

As the upward mobility of middle-class blacks increases in the socio-economic realm, they lose claim to what John M. Cuddihy calls "the charisma of a continuing victim status" in the cultural realm. The fact of their progress, however measured, threatens to dispossess them of the psychic and material benefits of victim status. Clearly, the denial of progress disguises black success, and enables proponents of victimhood to justify their claim to the privileges of official victim status. It also enables middle-class service deliverers, spokesmen, and patrons to use the suffering of the unfortunate as a pretext for their own drive for power. For, as the quest for privileges and security under welfare-state capitalism has increasingly depended on organized power, it has become more advantageous to present oneself as a permanent member of the deprived.

-- Anne Wortham, Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University. Excerpted from "Black Victimhood Versus Black Individual Responsibility," Libertarian Alliance (UK), Political Notes No. 92.

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