Not too long ago, bold young conservatives were tramping from campus to campus denouncing the idea of “victimhood,” suggesting that all those who complained about, you know, oppression, were just crybabies out to blame the world for their problems. Dinesh D’Souza, leading the charge, called for a vigorous assault on the “victims’ revolution” threatening the nation’s universities; he denounced the champions of victimhood as “Visigoths in tweed.”
Maybe–skin excluded–I’m just not sensitive enough. It’s not only the big things–affirmative action, charges of sexual harassment–that are making the Great White uptight, Newsweek reports; it’s the little things as well. “It sounds crazy even to mention them, but they add up,” Newsweek’s David Gates writes, only partly tongue in cheek. “His cash machine asks if business is to be conducted in English or Spanish. . . . He’s passed by a car, more luxurious than his own, booming rap music. . . . At preschool they’re teaching his kids songs in Swahili: what happened to ‘Three Blind Mice’–or aren’t you supposed to say ‘blind’ anymore? . . . He hates the word womyn, and anything with the suffix -centric. He worries that he’s becoming a fascist. He has been thinking about buying a gun.” (That’ll teach them Swahili-singing youngsters!)
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In many ways these exaggerated claims of white-male victimhood are the direct descendant of the attack on political correctness that was so recently all the rage: the Newsweek story chronicling white male paranoia is the logical outgrowth of the same magazine’s “Thought Police” cover story several winters ago.
Despite the uncivil implications of many of his ideas, D’Souza spoke softly, phrasing even his most controversial formulations in neutral-sounding–and surprisingly politically correct–language, coating his arguments with a patina of quiet reasonableness. While attacking affirmative action, he quoted Martin Luther King; he made a number of pointed references to his childhood in Bombay, as a way of reminding those in his audience (if they hadn’t noticed already) that he too is a person of color. This concern with concern is a new thing for D’Souza, who famously started his career, at the Dartmouth Review, as a kind of right-wing pit-bull journalist. The old D’Souza “outed” gay students against their will; the new D’Souza denounces “odious name-calling and jeering” and calls for (or, rather, demands) “civility.”
As a literary enterprise, A Nation of Victims has little to recommend it. The book loses steam about ten pages into the first chapter; the rest offers only endless restatements of the original premise, pedestrian summaries of the ideas of others, and a whole series of pointless digressions (called “chapters”). These chapters leap from topic to topic, from century to century, with no logic beyond that of free association. He can’t sustain an argument for more than a few pages at a time, and 7 of the book’s 18 chapters are ten pages or less–reflecting an attention span short even by TV-generation standards. The book does have, though, a certain utilitarian function–as a compilation of various contemporary conservative ideas, most of them bad, about the notion of oppression.
There are many ironies (one could say contradictions) in Sykes’s book, not least that his notion of “victimism” is almost wholly a figment of his own imagination: if the current terminology is any indication few people actually embrace victimhood with the glee Sykes supposes. There are of course a great many people who can describe the specific ways in which they have been victimized–by racism, by sexism, by ignorance, by governmental neglect. And why shouldn’t they? But people tend to describe themselves as “incest survivors” not “incest victims,” “people with AIDS” not “AIDS victims.” The distinction is crucial. These terms, and others like them, are not simple euphemism; they are assertions of dignity and selfhood in the face of real problems. Sykes and D’Souza could learn from these people–about real sensitivity, and about real strength–if they weren’t so eager to ridicule. Perhaps even Michael Douglas could learn some humility. There is, after all, a difference between suffering and self-indulgence.
