Blaming “victimhood culture” ignores plight of the underprivileged

Arthur Brooks’s column, published late last month in The New York Times, pulled no punches in criticizing inaction by policymakers and activists on both sides of the political spectrum. He claimed American society has fallen to “victimhood culture,” in which leaders are too busy fighting over their status as under attack to engage in productive discussions about policy solutions.

Brooks’s concerns aren’t unique; over the past year, discussions over victimhood have become a common issue, especially in American universities. Misunderstandings over “safe spaces,” forums where marginalized groups can engage in meaningful dialogue without dominant stereotypes, have fractured student bodies at universities like the University of Missouri and Claremont McKenna College. Political candidates are consistently accused of tapping into middle and lower-class Americans’ resentment of social inequality and instilling fires of political revolution. It’s not hard to view American politics as, in his words, a “grievance industry.”

Brooks’s complaints, however, fail to provide a solution and downplay the concerns of real victims behind his overarching commentary on victimhood culture. Similarly, rhetoric about victimhood culture neglects harsh political realities where marginalized students are granted less respect. Steps toward healing must begin with a recognition of victims’ stories, not a criticism of their tone.

One of the author’s most interesting conclusions instructs citizens to fight for real victims, yet conflates the safe space struggle with fatalistic complaint. This skepticism is too familiar; university administrators have consistently decried that what seems to be a new oversensitivity to offensive content censors and disrupts learning. But these arguments deny broader contextual factors, like years of resentment built up over glaring inequities across college campuses. The emphasis on student “coddling” repeatedly referenced in public media also results in shrunken cultural centers or legacy admission cycles that reify privileges of wealth and race outside of college. Neglecting victims perpetuates cycles of inequities that spill over into public discourse.

This has real implications. The “coddled collegiate” stereotype, where students are too busy policing their learning environments to actually be challenged, reflects a world where people assume all students have protected, cookie-cutter experiences in higher education. Steps toward healing begin with a recognition of victims, not a weak delineation of “true” and “fake” victim advocacy that filters out what does not want to be heard.

The opportunity to look at social change from a perspective motivated by “hope and opportunity,” as Brooks puts it, is an advantage not afforded to many, especially the underprivileged. He identifies victimhood with apathy toward progressivism, citing a social experiment where subjects wrote essays expressing how they had been wronged in their lives and then engaged in collaborative tasks. His analogy highlights a personal distance between his own narrative and that of actual victims; writing about being wronged is, in any sense, incomparable to histories of political activism. Painting this work as a selfish maneuver to police public forums is merely a refusal to believe in the accounts of the marginalized.

Most of those who proxy as the neutral chorus decrying victimhood have the luxury of describing this victimhood without attachment to their personal experience. The value of truth in victims’ claims is obvious, but a response forcing them to interrogate their own “complaints” belies a history of disrespect that denied the claims of marginalized people. For instance, stereotypes of welfare queens that dominate food stamp debates made arbitrary delineations between the “good” and “bad” recipients to justify reductions. In addition, anti-rape activism on college campuses arose from a culture in which victims’ stories were routinely discounted, not a “shutting out” of different voices. The responsibility lands on listeners to trust victims, not victims to prove themselves.

Specifically, according to a New York Times article by Judith Shulevitz, college students are not just “hiding from scary ideas” with an armor of victimhood. All too often, their ideas are discredited in public forums or by university administrators. Almost 90 percent of American full-time faculty are white, and only a third are women. Unacceptable rates of unaddressed campus sexual assault and male-dominated faculty are why some students have trouble approaching the “scary ideas” of college. A solid majority of graduates from top law schools like Harvard and Yale come exclusively from the top 10 percent of American earners. Only 5 percent come from the bottom half. University spaces are consistently uphill struggles for those without socioeconomic privilege; first steps toward reform are impossible without a basic trust in the stories of these students.

USC is not excluded from these accusations. The University is blessed to have a diverse student body and campus leaders who are passionate about respect and dignity for faculty, workers and students. Safe spaces where students have been able to fully explore their identities and the histories behind them have been integral for scholars and activists on campus. If victimhood culture means anything, it is not the locking out of voices but rather the empowerment of marginalized ones. It does not result in the reduction of people into “aggrieved masses,” but rather a charge to the “hope and opportunity” Brooks supports.