The Intoxicating Power Of Powerlessness
The curious case of communal victimhood.
In the beginning, there was oppression. And it wasn’t good.
Black people were enslaved and segregated and killed for being in the wrong town. Gay people were jailed and chemically castrated and killed for falling in love with the “wrong” person. Jews were persecuted and vilified and slaughtered by the millions for reasons even Hitler didn’t understand.
But, just as Martin Luther King promised, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. And sure enough, with time and hard work, the world slowly changed.
Black people became the full five-fifths of a person, gay people won equal access to divorce, and millions of Jews outlived Hitler despite his best efforts to erase them.
But while these older generations looked for hope in the future, it feels like newer generations are too busy looking for pain in the past.
I’m not sure whether to blame therapy-speak or post-modernism or past-life regressions, but there’s a strange idea recently that oppression is a feature of group identities.
That it doesn’t matter whether you’re a teenage girl whose greatest hardship is an unruly afro or a forty-year-old man who just started experimenting with he/they pronouns…
