The Problem Is Victimhood Culture

The Problem Is Victimhood Culture

It’s been a slow summer here at “The Victimhood Report,” and we’ve missed a lot while we’ve been away from the blog. Just a few posts ago (and a few months ago) we were talking about The Atlantic’s firing of Kevin Williamson, and just recently the outrage over a poem in The Nation, but we missed the Roseanne firing, the James Gunn firing, and probably much more. The Twitter mobs have been busy.

The latest controversy is about Sarah Jeong, a tech writer just hired to the New York Times editorial board. The back and forth on Twitter is mostly about whether Jeong should be fired over a series of racist tweets. The Times has a bit of a habit of hiring people and then firing them — Razib Khan, Quinn Norton — so firing her wouldn’t be unusual, but I’m more interested in what the hiring of Jeong by the New York Times — and so far, their support for her — says about the larger culture. Victimhood culture, even in its most extreme form, is spreading beyond campuses, and a lot of folks are missing this.

Here are the tweets people are talking about:

She talks about “dumbass fucking white people,” about the joy she gets “out of being cruel to old white men,” celebrates that white people will “go extinct soon,” and tweets out the hashtag “#CancelWhitePeople.”

The New York Times is is defending Jeong, though without actually defending the content of the tweets:

The claim is that after being harassed online, she was “imitating the rhetoric of the harassers.” They say she “regrets it” and “understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times.”

Jeong says more or less the same thing, that her tweets were “counter-trolling” and “intended as satire.” She claims the tweets were “not aimed at a general audience”:

Both statements are rather vague, leaving those who want to support Jeong, but not the tweets, able to claim she’s fully apologized and the tweets were never intended as they look, while others defend the tweets themselves. So while some were taking her at her word that it was satire, others were out arguing that it’s just fine to talk that way about “white people”:

The takes of a lot of conservatives, centrists, and libertarians focused on the dangers of the online mob. That’s one way of looking at it, and a world where hiring and firing decisions are based on Twitter outrage doesn’t sound pleasant. You can certain focus on it from that angle and lament the hypocrisy of those who seem to take different positions from one day to the next about whether it’s okay to fire people for offensive tweets. But that’s not the only story, and not all the cases of mobs wanting people fired are alike.

At Reason, Robby Soave compared the case with the recent firing of James Gunn. Now Soave is always worth reading and almost always right, but I think this is very wrong:

I strenuously objected to Disney’s firing of Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn over his offensive tweets about pedophilia. Gunn was obviously joking; he was trying to provoke or amuse, not communicating something he actually believed. Similarly, Jeong claims her statements were satire. She was responding to harassing tweets she had received by mimicking their tone and structure and substituting “white people” for whatever slur the trolls had directed at her. This was not an especially wise course of action, and it’s one she regrets…. That ought to be enough.

I agree about Gunn. The tweets were jokes. Disney shouldn’t have fired him. What I’m baffled by is that Soave so easily accepts that Jeong’s tweets were satire. He goes into more detail about it than either she or the New York Times did, saying that she mimicked the tone and structure of those and substituted “white people” for the slurs she received. Is there any evidence of this, even if you take Jeong’s explanation at face value?

What’s especially strange is that Soave understands that Jeong’s tweets look quite a lot like other stuff coming from the radical left lately:

Indeed. Jeong sounds a lot like the professor who said a white American college student killed by the North Korean authorities after being accused of stealing a propaganda poster “got what he deserved,” that he was just like the “young, white, clueless, rich males” she teaches. Or like the professor who tweeted, “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” Or the professor who posted, “I now hate white people” on Facebook. Or like the Stanford students who put the phrase “no crackers” on their residential community’s bus.

And if that kind of anti-white rhetoric is “literally taught at some liberal arts colleges,” as Soave says, isn’t it more likely that Jeong got it from the same sources than that she independently invented it as satire?

So what’s going on with the campuses? What’s going on with the culture? If it’s not satire, why would a professional, college-educated woman say such things? And why would others defend her?

In The Rise of Victimhood Culture, Jason Manning and I discuss the emergence of a new kind of morality. Victimhood culture centers moral discourse around oppression, and victimhood in this context becomes a new kind of moral status. Victimhood culture rejects the ideals of dignity culture, which were based on recognizing the inherent worth of all human beings. In a dignity culture we’re told to avoid giving offense, avoid taking offense, and to distinguish words and violence, but in a victimhood culture all such advice depends on whether you’re considered a victim or oppressor. Even unintentional verbal offenses against members of victim groups are said to harm them, and to be literally acts of violence. But this doesn’t apply to even the most offensive speech about oppressor groups. From this perspective racist rhetoric about whites isn’t even racism, because racism is about institutional power.

 

Some of the opponents of victimhood culture err in calling activists snowflakes and the like. They err because while hypersensitivity to certain kinds of slight is a feature of victimhood culture, other kinds of slights are no problem at all. We must take care to avoid offending some people (victims); but others (oppressors, the privileged) we can offend at will. So it’s not that the activists are just unable to deal with life. They have an ideology that leads them sincerely to believe they’re combatting oppression.

From their perspective Jeong did nothing wrong. Of course these are ideas most people don’t accept. Most people haven’t even heard of them. The New York Times won’t defend them, but they think nothing of hiring someone who’s said the things Jeong has said.

Some opponents of victimhood culture also err when they mock campus activists as unable to cope in the real world. Just wait till they get out of college, they think, and this kind of thing won’t get them far.

But the editorial board of the New York Times is pretty far.

(Photo By Haxorjoe [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons)
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