THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER: VICTIM vs. BEING SPECIAL

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER: VICTIM vs. BEING SPECIAL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 28, 2008

“No preacher is listened to but time; which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have tried in vain to put into our heads.”

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Ireland.

A WRITER WRITES:

Over four years ago you emailed this to us. It seems to be a deeper exploration of the victimology concept you described recently, but it has a different tone. It shows more empathy for the plight of those who see themselves as victims. And, consistent with your core, it does not absolve the self-pity.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I am flattered that you keep hold of things that I've written so long ago. It is humbling and also reassuring.

You are perceptive to note a seasoning in me, which, I believe, comes with age. It is the reason I am just now writing my South Africa book forty years after experiencing that country and time. I was not ready before as I told BB today.

You are remembered fondly and I pray that the bump in the road has turned out well for you. It is all in a life. As you have expressed so well, it is a spiritual journey.

THE REFERENCE ARTICLE

Everyone!

My daughter is a communications major and junior in college, and she asked me a question: Do you believe white privilege exists? If so, what can we do about it?

I asked her if she wanted the long or short answer. She said both. "Let me think about it on my walk," which I did and this is what my walk told me.

The short and obvious answer is "yes," white privilege does exist, why else would most good jobs and opportunities and wealth go mostly to whites, right?

But as I walked I thought it was more complicated than that. Many whites never participate in this privilege as they see themselves as "victims of circumstances."

They see themselves imprisoned in a socioeconomic class in a supposedly classless society.

They see the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. They see their jobs disappearing, their economic stability eroding, and opportunity going elsewhere, not to them. And they have done nothing wrong. But what is worse, they think they can do nothing about it.

Books I've read came to mind, one a scathing analysis, not of white privilege but of black under privilege and how it is essentially a myth.

This book is by a black intellectual admonishing his fellow African Americans to let loose of their defeatism and take responsibility for their lives. It was as if this defeatism was peculiar only to blacks. I've spent most of my life surrounded by whites bemoaning their plight.

I also thought of another book that embraces the rapture of lifelong learning, of grabbing hold of all that you are and finding the maturity to engage its ecstasy.

An old reliable essay also came to mind, which was about embracing life and not waiting for opportunity to knock on your door.

The books were John McWhorter's "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America" (2000) and Charles H. Hayes's "The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning" (to be published in 2004). The essay was "Self-Reliance" from "The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (1950).

McWhorter asks himself this question: Why do so many African Americans, even comfortable middle-class ones, continue to see racism as a defining factor
in their lives?

Instead of seeing racism as a given, he sees it as the ugliest legacy of his people in the form of the disease of defeatism. This cultural virus has three components: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism.

He claims this makes blacks their own worst enemy.

While walking and thinking of this book, I could see it was a disease not only endemic to blacks but to so-called "privileged whites" as well and how defeatism may have taken hold.

I thought of our American history. Some 400 years ago settlers, mainly Pilgrims from Great Britain, came to these shores to practice their religion and establish their culture in freedom sui generis, as a unique society, or class by itself.

Out of this grew a white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) society that knew
survival depended on hard work with no other options. Emerson was to
express this essence in many essays of which one is that of Self-Reliance, where he
wrote:

”There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself
for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of
good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

Calvin Protestantism and capitalism fostered individualism. McWhorter knows this is the base of the American character. Detractors of individualism often view Americans as irresponsible, narcissistic and self-centered. The individualism that has made America great is self-responsibility. And as Emerson has shown, self-responsibility can never be transformed into self-centeredness.

VICTIMOLOGY

Although black Americans have been part of America nearly from the beginning, the ugly hand of slavery has shackled them, but as McWhorter points out, no more. He argues convincingly strides have been made to establish a thriving black middle-class.

Yet he is saddened that many children of middle-class blacks lag behind whites and Orientals academically. Poverty, ghetto living and racism can no longer justify poor performance in the classroom, as these conditions are the exception rather than the rule.

It is also a white problem as well. Many whites excel, but many more do not. Ask any professor in a land grant institution.

Self-responsibility has gravitated to self-aggrandizement. This does not apply only to middle-class blacks but middle-class whites as well. Many have lost the sense of uniqueness and individualism and the self-responsibility therein contained. I wrote in "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend" (1996):

"We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels
inscribed in our hearts. Everyone's life, without exception, are sacred,
unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one
actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the
bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves."

McWhorter writes black students are motivated to impress their teachers while Oriental students are motivated to impress their parents. It is a family affair. He finds this, as it should be. Curiously, he makes no mention of students motivated to satisfy themselves.

Yet he discloses his own satisfaction in being able to acquire graduate degrees from first-rank institutions, confessing his love of learning. It s this love of doing that is missing in the equation. He was the genuine article.

Not a copy. "In The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain" (1995), I ask the question: If you should lose everything, to whom do you turn? Whom do you blame?

During my corporate career, I saw colorblind privilege being usurped from individual workers on all fronts. My reason for writing the books that I have written has been to make them aware of this and rally them to do something about it.

Likewise, the McWhorter, Hayes and Emerson messages are not solutions to problems but ways of defining of them. The heavy lifting is always up to the individual, and that is the manual labor of thinking their way out.

Answers are never with gurus or self-help manuals but always in the individual's own heart, unique, based on a will to prevail. There are no short cuts, no substitutes. When that is missing, victimology becomes a given.

Identifying whites as privileged is a way of forgiving blacks for underachieving. The irony is that many whites also fall into the same trap.

McWhorter's writes:

"Black Americans too often teach one another to conceive of racism not as a
scourge on the wane but as an eternal pathology changing only in form and
visibility, and always on the verge of getting not better but worse."

It is the porous safety net of non-responsibility of people afraid to make choices, preferring to have choices made for them, and then play the blame game.

When I was a boy my da's Irish Roman CATHolic railroad buddies would sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and crying, "Woe is me!" They were white but had this black disease. They saw Protestant managers putting them down, keeping them in their place. They pulled suspect statistics out of their hats and adopted victimhood as an aspect of identity rather than addressing it as a problem.

McWhorter says blacks are doing the same. In 1960, he writes, 55 percent of blacks lived in poverty; today it is 23 percent. In 1940 only one in one hundred blacks were middle class (middle class being defined as earning twice the poverty rate); today half of American blacks are middle class.

The problem is that victimology is as prevalent among educated blacks with concrete success and ample opportunity. It is a cultural disease (and psychology) that holds on like a chronic virus.

My mother did everything possible to overcome the Irish strain of this virus, which I write about In the Shadow of the Courthouse. She would say, "You're big, beautiful and bright, heads will turn when you enter a room." It wasn't important how true it was. It was important for me to believe it because she was celebrating my uniqueness and saying, "We're going to build on that."

She emphasized my specialness to overcome my da's victimology, and of course realized imperfect results.

McWhorter writes:

"Every time a white person lifts her glass to a black person's Victimology, she is unwittingly contributing to the very interracial strife that she supposed herself to be against -- because Victimology is not about change; it is all about nothing but itself."

With regard to the "Cult of Separatism," McWhorter says, "I couldn't help thinking of how very few black people I have ever met who were so passionately interested in a subject that had nothing to do with being black."

That statement brought a smile to my face. A black clerk at Barnes & Noble sold me McWhorter's book, looking curiously at me and at the book as she rang up the sale.

"Are you a professor?"

I shook my head, "Alas, no."

The suspicion in her eyes said, "Why then are you reading that? What has that
to do with you?"

SEPARATISM

Perhaps without consciously knowing it, she falls into McWhorter's paradigm as Separatism is a direct product of Victimology.

McWhorter is a prominent linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

One of his colleagues, a black professor, invited him to speak on how the use of media had affected the controversy over the O. J. Simpson trial. He responded that he would be glad to speak, but that he might want to know in advance that he thought Simpson was guilty and that Johnnie Cochran (Simpson black trial lawyer) was no hero of his. He never heard from the professor again because, clearly, he wasn't a brother.

The author is not enamored of Louis Farrakan or Al Sharpton either. But he does admit that he probably would be a racist and of another mind had he been born before 1960.

Separatism has many curious dimensions. I can recall interviewing with the CEO of Bristol-Myers in Cincinnati in 1974 for an executive position. The CEO was a part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals of the NFL with Paul Brown the principal owner and coach. He told of visiting training camp and seeing all the rookies, wondering how the coach determined who would make it and who wouldn't.

Coach Brown told him, "Didn't I tell you? Losers and winners hang together. They separate themselves."

(Incidentally, I won the position, but the vice president's job was frozen when OPEC's 1974 embargo hit the US. So, I was hired and fired before ever going to
work.)

Separatism took another form while an undergraduate student at Iowa. There was a core group of us that always had lunch together. We were all what you would call grinds, setting curves and very serious about our studies. Gradually, some peeled away making the core group much smaller. They couldn't party and keep up so they voluntarily separated themselves from the group, never to rejoin it.

McWhorter shows how welfarism and even affirmative action has aided and abetted Separatism. He blames a cadre of white activists who weren't convinced that blacks could work their way out of poverty as whites and Orientals had. He claims white guilt fed directly into Separatist sentiments, making excuses for blacks that whites wouldn't make for themselves.

My da's railroad buddies said they would never play a "CATHolic" boy at the public high school I was scheduled to attend. Yet, they were wrong. I played varsity in football, basketball and track and won seven major letters.

Undaunted, when I planned to go to college, they assured me the railroad was the place for me, "You'll always have a job even if you don't make a lot of money." It was all about SECURITY in capital letters.

Fortunately, I had a Ph.D. uncle, my mother's brother, who was a successful academic and my role model. Having a role model cannot be over emphasized. "Deprived of role models who work, welfare children," writes McWhorter, "cannot help but develop a much less strong sense of work as central to adult existence."

The result is a Separatist sense that work is an option rather than a given when it comes to black people.

Separatism has the ring of self-fulfilling prophecy. McWhorter writes of people who never seem to connect, who are always passed over, who seem stuck in the slime of hate. He writes, "People black, white, yellow, and brown would rather not spend time with people who have something against them."

How true! A young woman once confessed to me she "hated Jews."

I said, "But you are employed by one."

She smirked, "How about that!" She was earning a good salary with benefits, only to one day be "let go."

She came to me wailing, "I never said one word against him, not one." I told her she didn't have to. He felt it. That was enough.

Given McWhorter's attention to these two aspects of his model, it is the "Cult of Anti-intellectualism" in which he reaches his stride. That will be my next missive.

Be always well.

JRF