On “Victim Mentality”

I realized why it bothers me so much when I encounter the claim that regarding oppression as systemic results in marginalized people developing a helpless victim mentality.

It’s because until I stopped blaming myself for every instance of mistreatment I suffered that occurred along a power dynamic, I did feel powerless and helpless. Because it was all my fault and I didn’t know how to fulfull my apparent responsibility to exist in a way palatable to any person who mistreated me. And the cultural messages surrounding us, like the ubiquity in 2005 of people using the word “gay” as a synonym for shitty without consequence, couldn’t have encouraged them to devalue people like me, they just couldn’t help reacting that way.

Acknowledging that some things are completely out of my control—like whether someone will harass me for looking queer, and whether they will suffer consequences for it—was necessary for me to feel any agency at all. I went from believing that all mistreatment was my own fault for appearing too queer or burdening others with having to accommodate my gender or my disabilities, to believing that the people who harmed me were wrong and that I deserve fair treatment.

I have had the opposite outcome from what people who make “identity politics leads to a victim mentality” claim. (You can replace “identity politics” with any other of your favorite sociological terms getting misused by politicians with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, like “belief in oppression as systemic” or “subscribing to the concept of privilege—especially wrt race and gender—as a feature of many systemic oppressions.”)

Perhaps the the idea that you aren’t in complete control of your life trajectory, that the good things in your life aren’t entirely from your own hard work and the bad aren’t completely your fault, is something that people in better starting circumstances than me find restrictive. I guess that’s one benefit of my having struggled to believe I deserved good things—it doesn’t feel threatening to me to acknowledge that my circumstances getting better is more about luck than my own virtue or Hard Work. I find it freeing, and it spurs me toward the hard work of tikkun olam and pursuing justice in the world, even if it causes mild distress in people with more comfortable circumstances than me.

I’m not a victim of things beyond my control like some would claim. I no longer believe that all of the bad things that happen to me are due to my own lack of virtue. And that is freedom.