We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa Al-Gharbi

Author:Musa Al-Gharbi [Al-Gharbi, Musa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, African American & Black, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology, General, Discrimination, Social Classes & Economic Disparity
ISBN: 9780691232607
Google: P6kBEQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0D6QDVW24
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2024-10-07T22:00:00+00:00

Stigmata

Only certain types of victimization tend to be honored in a victimhood culture. First, in order to reap the benefits associated with being recognized as a victim, one’s victimhood has to be a product of malevolent actions by others. That is, one cannot merely be a victim of circumstance—there must be someone who can be blamed (and, ideally, punished) for one’s victimized status.23 Second, one’s victimization should appear to be a result of factors outside one’s control. Poverty, for instance, is often a product of exploitation and oppression by others. However, it is also widely perceived as something that is at least somewhat within one’s control. It is a state that people are viewed as being at least partially responsible for bringing on themselves.24 It is also a situation that people can conceivably escape. The most compelling forms of victimhood are tied to immutable elements of a person’s being rather than changeable aspects of their present circumstances. As Richard Rorty explained,

Leftists have helped to put together such academic disciplines as women’s history, black history, gay studies, Hispanic-American studies, and migrant studies. This has led Stefan Collini to remark that in the United States … the term “cultural studies” means “victim studies.” Collini’s choice of phrase has been resented, but he was making a good point: namely, that such programs were created not out of the sort of curiosity about diverse forms of human life which gave rise to cultural anthropology, but rather … to help victims of socially acceptable forms of sadism by making such sadism no longer acceptable.… Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies or trailer-park studies because the unemployed, the homeless and residents of trailer parks are not “other” in the relevant sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely economic selfishness.25

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