
Understanding Victimhood Culture - jseliger
http://quillette.com/2018/05/17/understanding-victimhood-culture-interview-bradley-campbell-jason-manning/
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hguhghuff
Seems to me that even acknowledging these truths invites attack.

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eveningcoffee
This is a very good overview of the victimhood culture.

It compares it with dignity cultures and honor cultures and specifies some
specific characteristics of the victimhood culture.

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skybrian
I thought this was good, interesting, intellectual reading, and I'm glad I
read it. But it's also pure politics without any particular tech or business
angle. Don't things like this usually get flagged off Hacker News?

~~~
ac29
From the FAQ:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

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dfee
A long but worthwhile read. I find the dignity culture most appealing, the
honor culture most traditional, and the victim culture most segregating. If I
had to cast my lot between the three, I’d go with the first, but I’m unaware
of other alternatives, the weaknesses of dignity, or whether the system could
be considered multidimensional. This field is obviously not my area of
expertise.

I wonder if there is a philosophy similar to dignity culture but where order
is earned and not granted - a mix of libertarianism (no obligation to
participate) but credit on behalf of productive engagement.

Alas, I do feel that social media enables tribalism and thus identity
conflict. And, I think that’s why I’m not on Facebook anymore. At least, I
didn’t find participation to be productive, but rather ranking by popularity,
momentum, and signals of the newsfeed’s algorithm.

Complex stuff, but I hope that’s a statement others can engage with as I’m
genuinely curious about understanding the landscape by looking through other
lenses.

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ebcode
We (in the US) live in a culture of white supremacy, where the state has a
"monopoly on violence". So it makes sense that any non-white-male would have
some kind of history, whether individually or as a member of a group, of
violent oppression by a member, or members, of the dominant group.

It is unfortunate that the authors seem to be tip-toeing around white
supremacy, and instead choose to invent a new term like "victimhood culture"
to neatly label what is actually a wide-ranging and diverse counter-cultural
movement.

Their stance could almost come across as sympathetic to this movement.
Instead, they end with "And finally, it’s important to combat victimhood
culture and to deal with the problems it creates ...".

To me this reeks of the same old white privilege and condescension that have
led our society to this point. We desperately need to address the _dominant_
culture and the problems it _has_ created and continues to create, the latest
of which appears to be this book.

Labeling the dominant culture a "dignity culture" is, at this moment in
history, beyond the pale.

~~~
b6
> We (in the US) live in a culture of white supremacy

What does this mean? I was born in and grew up in the US and I have no idea
what you're talking about. I'm guessing Obama being president does not throw
even some slight wrench into this notion?

~~~
mayniac
>What does this mean? I was born in and grew up in the US and I have no idea
what you're talking about

That basically proves his point. If you haven't noticed any discrimination
then you're likely in a position of supremacy, whether or not you want to be.

Talk to minorities, especially in impoverished neighbourhoods, and ask them
how they feel about the police. Most of them will have likely felt
discrimination at some point. And that's just the quantifiable stuff, there's
far more under the surface that makes minorities feel very, very persecuted.
There was a good read on HN about this a few weeks ago [1] which I fully
recommend reading, it's eye opening.

>I'm guessing Obama being president does not throw even some slight wrench
into this notion?

Well if Obama threw a wrench in, Trump took it back out. And as much as I
admire Obama, after the initial high of America finally having a black
president wore off after the first year of his first term, _not much
happened_. Dealing with decades, if not centuries, of institutionalised racism
in the US is not an easy task, especially when you have to answer to
congress/senate and try and appease Republicans who more often than not stood
in the way of Obama's goals.....well you can see why he may not have been the
end of discrimination. Interracial marriage only became acceptable to a
majority of the population in the late 90s, there's still a massive amount of
progress that needs to be made.

White supremacy in this context does just mean "whites have an advantage" by
the way. Nobody is accusing all white people of being white supremacists. I
personally hate the term "all whites are racist" or whatever people say
nowadays, it has the same intention but is hugely misleading.

[1] [https://lithub.com/walking-while-black/](https://lithub.com/walking-
while-black/)

edit: should've had more coffee this morning. Privilege would be a much better
word than supremacy in this context.

~~~
ehvatum
It's interesting to consider the result of anti-white stigma in South Africa,
a once prosperous nation, and Zimbabwe before it. Why is Botswana quietly and
miraculously successful, while nations so deeply steeped in racial group
identity politics, possessing the finest farmland in the world, starve?

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MarkMc
A little off-topic, but I find it interesting to see ad on the page showing me
various Amazon books I might like to buy. It seems that the Amazon ad network
is out-competing Google's AdSense for the right to place an ad in the middle
of this article.

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CM30
Well, it's an interesting read, though there is one aspect I question about
their definition:

> People generally eschew violent vengeance in favor of relying on some
> authority figure or other third party.

My experience with people involved in this is that vigilante behaviour seems
to be growing in popularity with this crowd. For example, note how many times
you'll hear about people upsetting someone on Twitter, and then see them lose
their job after thousands complain to the company about it or track down their
home address/personal details or what not. Trying to have some blacklisted
from the internet or their industry for some perceived slight definitely seems
like taking the law into their own hands, even if its perhaps a bit less
violent simply by virtue of being online.

I'd also certainly consider behaviour at protests from some of these people as
violent, with actions by groups like antifa at protests against right wing
figures speaking in colleges being violence inspired by victimhood culture.

Still, the rest of the article makes sense, and jives pretty well with
reality.

~~~
tscs37
I think that specific definition was more meant towards "relying on an
authority figure or other third party to resolve the conflict without ruining
the life of either".

I don't think the author wanted to cover vigilante behaviour under that.

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zaarn
Interesting. I can see a lot of my countries culture in the dignity culture
itself... quite a neat food for thought.

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mayniac
I honestly don't think these interviewees know what they're talking about.

The most objective argument I have to support this is that they keep talking
about "whites" as a race. Never "white Americans", "caucasians", "white
europeans" etc etc, just "whites" or "white people". Which is hugely
problematic considering the entire concept of white as a race is incredibly
modern. Before the 19th century, there wasn't a concept of whiteness, you
belonged to a nation rather than a race. And it kind of makes sense, since
where do you even draw the line on white? Are Egyptians white (Rami Malek...)?
What about much of the middle east, many Syrians could pass for either white
or Arabic? Or some western Asian countries, like most of the -istans?

Ultimately, the idea of a white race was created on classist principles. The
Irish were accepted as whites, despite being persecuted for centuries, as they
were seen as "better than black". They weren't seen as white at all since that
concept had not been created until mass immigration to the US. There's a good
quote on this: [1]

>The Irish, arriving poor, were in direct contact and competition with the
African Americans whose social class they shared. They managed to become
identified as white through their complicity in the oppression of blacks.
Despite, or perhaps because of, calls from Daniel O’Connell in Ireland for the
Irish in America to support the abolition of slavery, the American Irish felt
their tenuous position in America would be weakened further if they were to
associate themselves (or allow themselves to be associated with) the plight of
the Africans in America.

My point isn't really to start a debate on whiteness or anything like that. My
point is that throughout this entire interview, where they say the word
"white" in various forms eighteen times, and use phrases like "white
supremacy", "whitesplaining", "whites cannot be the victims of racism", they
never _once_ mention that whiteness is a concept that was made specifically
for discriminatory purposes. Even if that doesn't fit their agenda, mentioning
the origins of the "white race" should be a prerequisite to talking about race
hierarchies at any such length. It's like an electrical engineer not knowing
what electrons are.

A lot of this interview just reeks of Jordan Peterson-esque pseudo-
intellectual tripe. They even mention him in passing, and the site seems to
have multiple articles on him. I probably won't have the patience today to
actually debate any of this in length, but I implore anyone who is taking this
article seriously to look up the troves of valid criticism of Peterson [2],
because a lot of it applies to this article too: I honestly do not think the
authors are qualified to discuss the sociological concepts they're talking
about, and this is coming from someone who freely admits he does not have the
qualifications to discuss it either. We shouldn't be giving a platform to
people like this.

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130428181555/http://www.polsis...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130428181555/http://www.polsis.uq.edu.au//dialogue/vol-1-2-4.pdf)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LqZdkkBDas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LqZdkkBDas)

~~~
DanAndersen
I take issue with your claim that Irish were "not considered white." Such an
argument only makes sense given a prior assumption that "white" only means a
vague definition of acceptability in society. Under that stand-in definition
(and frankly a modern revisionist definition), the Irish immigrants who were
considered outsiders would be tautologically "not white," but that's not how
people at the time thought of it.

As evidence I present the Naturalization Act of 1790 [0], which restricted US
citizenship thusly:

>That any alien, being a free white person,Alien whites may become citizens,
and how. who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction
of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a
citizen thereof

Note that this was far before the period of "mass immigration to the US." The
"free white" requirement remained in US law until the mid-19th century. I've
never known of any case in which an Irishman was denied US citizenship during
that time period on account on "not being white" (I would be happy to be
proven wrong here). There were several signers of the Declaration of
Independence that had Irish ancestry! [1] An outsider group, yes, and one that
took time to be integrated as a full part of the in-group, but the idea of
people of the time looking at an Irishman and saying "he's not white," would
not have made sense.

You're right that the concept of "white" as an identity group is relatively
recent (on the order of several centuries) and was largely born in the
American colonies as a way to distinguish an in-group from an out-group
(mainly, colonists from various areas of Europe wanted something to
distinguish themselves from the Indian tribes and black African slaves). But
that's the way of all these categories ("black" can be similarly deconstructed
as a recent American ethnogenesis).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790)

[1] [http://thewildgeese.irish/profiles/blogs/the-irish-
american-...](http://thewildgeese.irish/profiles/blogs/the-irish-american-
signers-of-the-declaration-of-independence)

~~~
mayniac
The Naturalization Act is actually quite interesting. Hadn't heard of it
before being non-American. Looking into it, it seems like the act caused a
load of confusion over race and nationality from the start, all the way up to
the early 20th century. [1]

I agree with what you're saying about the Irish and "whiteness" having looked
into it further. A lot of sources indicate they were seen as "white" but not
in the same way as other Europeans, mainly being generally lower-class and
Catholic.

Regardless, I think this discussion should have been present in the interview,
or at least mentioned: this was just meant to be one example of points they
have completely glossed over or ignored. I'm honestly quite saddened that this
type of article is being upvoted on HN, there are a lot of flaws in the post
which are not being discussed in the comments.

[1]
[https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/summer/i...](https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/summer/immigration-
law-1.html)

