Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America

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“Whaaat? That’s racist!” is quite possibly one of my favorite lines from Role Models. It’s a great movie and you should go see it. Hilarity will ensue. Not surprisingly, this movie has nothing to do with what I’m going to write about. Well it kind of does. Victimology.

What is victimology?  Author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, John McWhorter, explains:

“Approaching victimhood constructively will naturally include calling attention to it and is healthy.  However, much more often in modern black American life, victimhood is simply called attention to where it barely exists if at all.  Most importantly, all too often this is done not with a view toward forging solutions, but to foster and nurture an unfocused brand of resentment and sense of alienation from the mainstream.  This is Victimology.”[1]

So essentially victimology is calling attention to achievement gaps as we so often do, and other disparities but in a tone of defeat and failure and not one of, “Here’s the problem. How can we fix it?”. I’m sure we all know someone who is a victim of victimology. Why didn’t they get the job? The Man. Or a situation such as: She got fired because they were racist not because she stopped showing up to work.

Victimology becomes a problem when we use it as a crutch. Instead of identifying a problem and then addressing it, victimologists dwell on it and embrace it. McWhorter identifies some of these problems as the myths that most black people are poor, blacks are paid less than whites for the same job, the US government put crack in South Central Los Angeles, and the number of black men in prison is because of racism.

You’ll have to read the book to see his rationale for dispelling these ‘myths’. I don’t think his logic is secure in all of them and I don’t think he did a bang up job explaining all of them but even if these were true, we should not use them as crutches to justify our laziness or our supposed incapability to succeed.  Whether or not you want to hear this, this kind of victimology thinking is also a reason why many black people (as in the African diaspora[2]), do not like African-Americans.

I won’t lie, it was hard for me to hear that the first time. While I cannot make a blanket statement and say with pure confidence, “All Africans, Hatians, Jamaicans, etc hate African-Americans”, I can tell you that many non-African-American blacks do not like African-Americans. I asked an African (Nigerian) friend of mine to shed some light on this issue. Basically she said that people (black, white, and otherwise) come to America and make something of themselves. They become doctors, lawyers, etc. While the blacks here complain about everything that is holding us back.

An example of this is the new piece of victimology that has come with our new Black President.  People took one of two stances. Either:

1. We have a black President. We have officially overcome. Racism has died and achievement gaps are closed.

“I got you, homie. No more taxes.”

-Or-

2. Barack Obama’s Presidency means nothing. New Orleans is still left in despair from Hurricane Katrina. World hunger hasn’t been solved. People still follow me around department stores. Lil Wayne is still going to jail. We’re no better off now than we were 50 years ago.

“219 years without a Black President. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

McWhorter touches on this subject as well saying, “Insisting that black Americans still lead lives of tragedy forty years after the Civil Rights Movement is a desecration of the brave and noble black Americans who gave their lives for us.”[1, pp. 47]

I have a middle ground opinion between these two extremes. Agreeing with opinion 1, Barack Obama has done a lot as far as getting a dialogue going about race relations in America but it by no means has ended racism or closed any achievement gaps. He’s not a messiah, people. And with opinion 2, while it has done a lot it also hasn’t done enough. (It being Barack Obama the symbol, not the person; what he stands for, not what he has consciously set out to do.) We are still a long way away from bridging the gap on education, finances, and other aspects but we have to acknowledge how far we’ve come.

McWhorter continues explaining how being ungrateful for the past actions of Civil Rights Leaders is wrong, “Martin Luther King did not sit in those jail cells so that black professors could make speeches about the hell they live in and then drive to their $200,000 homes in Lexuses and plan their summer vacations to Antigua… Every time a black person outside of a ghetto calls herself oppressed because of scattered inconveniences, as opposed to the brute horrors that our ancestors lived with daily, she is saying that Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King didn’t accomplish anything but get some signs taken off some water fountains and allow us to sit where we want to on the bus. That, if you ask me, is sacrilege.” [1, pp. 47]

McWhorter’s book[3] is a great read. I did not agree with everything he wrote but I still enjoyed it. It’s about victimology so obviously it’s going with the tone of “everything isn’t racism”. But on his journey to change the mindset of ‘victims’, he ironically uses the same faulty logic of people who blame everything on racism and instead explains everything through statistics and evidence. In other words, it appears as though he refuses to account for racism.  He throws in obligatory “Yes there might be an occasion where racism prevails” comments here and there but overall he doesn’t seem to believe in racism.

With that said, it really is a great book and we should all make a conscientious effort to not fall victim to Victimology.

Do you think Black people too often blame everything on racism and other external factors or do we not often enough acknowledge the unfair advantages that our white counterparts are privileged to experience?

[1] Losing The Race: Self-Sabotage In Black America. 1st edition. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2001.

[2] Defined here but you can google “African Diaspora” if you want to learn more about it.

[3] R-E-A-D  A  B-O-OKAYYYY. Props if you know what I’m talking about. Thumbs down if you don’t.

Article by Michelle Huxtable

Michelle Huxtable is a little Michelle Obama and a little Claire Huxtable. You can catch more from her at www.michelle-huxtable.com. Follow at Twitter.com/MichelleHux

Michelle has written 21 article(s) for us.