The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (review)

Alyson M. Cole's first book examines the rhetorical campaign against traditionally "victimized" groups in American culture. The campaign, which Cole argues has escalated over the past three decades, both blames victims for avoiding personal responsibility for their choices (and, writ large, for the perpetuation of affirmative action laws, the welfare state and other emasculating influences in American society) and, ironically, reclaims the status of "victim" for True Victims, i.e., those who have missed out on the privileges of victimization because they do not fall into a protected class. With attention to overtones of anxieties related to race and especially gender, Cole investigates the growing body of literature in which "victim-hatred" crosses into "victim-envy" (20) and which inevitably "participates in the phenomenon it criticizes" (22). The book begins with an overview of oft-heard complaints from recent authors in the "anti-victimist" mold—most notably Dinesh D'Souza and Alan Dershowitz—but proceeds quickly to primary sources for its analysis of the ways in which would-be victims situate themselves as over and against the victim identities that conspire against their expressions of independence and individuality.

In two related chapters, Cole addresses anti-victimist campaigns as they figure in post-second-wave feminist writings and therapeutic literature, respectively. In response to hard-fought battles over society's tendency to "blame the victims" of abuse and rape, she suggests, contemporary authors such as Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia have emphatically resisted what they see as the attempt to gain power through powerlessness.

Most interesting and a bit out of place is the provocative fourth chapter on Black Power veteran Julius Lester's conversion from "militant black anti-Semite to Jewish critic of black anti-Semitism" (80). Rich in psychosexual analysis, this chapter frames Lester's appropriation of his Jewish heritage (through his great-grandfather) as a "search for a pure victim position" (80-81), as evidenced by Lester's intense interest in the Holocaust and in the narrative of Jews as survivors. Cole reads Lester's autobiographical Lovesong: On Becoming a Jew (1988) as an attempt to publicly separate himself not only from his militant anti-Semitic past but also from his blackness. Writes Cole:

By leaping into the void and becoming a Jew (i.e., symbolically non-black) Lester may also suppose he is becoming a better 'black,' for he imagines that as a black Jew he preserves his role as the eternal outsider, the role he claims other African Americans have abandoned. He therefore employs Jewish identity not only for the purpose of making his blackness fade but also because the hybrid of the black Jew will secure for him the status of ultimate pariah, forever hung between two worlds…

(91).

With this passage, Cole connects the chapter to the book's general argument about the simultaneous rejection and appropriation of various components of victim identity; however, the chapter presents such a methodological and theoretical departure from the rest of the book that it probably deserves separate treatment in an independent piece.

The book concludes with a chapter on the rhetoric of the 9/11 attacks as emblematic of a national attempt to frame victimhood in terms of a "manly heroism that is deeply ambivalent about suffering and sacrifice" (162). Here Cole discusses Mel Gibson's popular movie The Passion of the Christ (2004) as the latest iteration of American Christianity's pursuit of more masculine images of Jesus that lend themselves well to the "war on terror" and the myth of American exceptionalism that drives our "millennial struggle for freedom" (167)—freedom not just from terror but from the victimists who undermine national strength and unity. The Cult of True Victimhood weaves together current themes from religious studies, rhetoric, and cultural studies that provide a useful explanation of the linguistic stances that inform American discussions of victimhood.