§41 On ‘victim culture’ and the concentrated rebound of ‘checked’ privilege
The latest phase of victim culture is upon us. While the previous phases can’t necessarily be traced chronologically, we can see periods of certain emphases regarding what constitutes a ‘victim’ in relation to their supposed perpetrator. The ‘calling out’ of ‘microaggressions’ enjoyed its heyday around 2015/16, whereas its extension into concerns around correct pronoun use and concerns about ‘misgendering’ self-identified categories of persons and groups provided a segue to questions concerning ‘compelled speech’ in 2017.
The success of ‘calling out’ and demanding that individuals ‘check’ their privilege however has not in fact stopped microaggressions and (by consequence) “micro-offenses”. Rather, it has allowed what is constituted by the term to proliferate.* As micro-aggressions become smaller, and increasingly micro-scopic, the requirement becomes for every one of us to check our privilege that much closer. In turn, victimhood is not merely understood as a subject-position but rather a cultural phenomenon. With this, a new type of victim has emerged: the privileged victim.
Indeed, the imperatives from the screeching and increasingly militant ‘victims’ and their SJW champions has meant anyone with the slightest hint of ‘privilege’ is required to ‘check it’ at an increasingly microscopic level. In turn, its acknowledgement — “I know I am priveleged, but …” — means the ‘checked’ perpetrator takes their own position as victim.
We have therefore witnessed the way in which cultural commands and programmatic imperatives become concentrated to the point that they rebound and exceed the basis on which they were posed in the first place.
This is the desired result of those that demand it, who, of course, are ostensibly enlightened to their own privilege in the first place. So there we have it, the three ideal-types of our contemporary victim culture: the victim, their privileged saviour, and the victim of privilege. How complete, how negative, how boring!
References and footnotes:
Campbell, Bradley, and Jason Manning. 2014. “Microaggression and Moral Cultures.” Comparative Sociology 13 (6): 692–726.
*A form of this was predicted by the late Christopher Hitchens in the what he saw as the proliferation of feminism leading to male victims speaking in the name of its cause:
Originally published at anowmedia.com on June 29, 2018.
