Are We Blaming the Victim Instead of the Oppressor?

Three Thesis Statements:

1. While the rich oppressors are crushing the poor, far too often, Americans stand on the sidelines, blaming the victim, condemning the 'lazy, dysfunctional poor'.

2. Well meaning scholars who operate out of an implicit or explicit 'blame the victim' theory instead of a blame the oppressor theory are more dangerous than the Klan type bigot.

3. Most white American evangelicals who do not have a biblically based theology of oppression end up, wittingly or unwittingly, using a blame the victim theory in regard to poor, urban blacks.

William Ryan, author of Blaming the Victim (1971), once defined blaming the victim theory as a way to "justify inequality by finding defects in the victims of inequality."

Without a clear understanding of social evil/oppression/injustice, it is almost inevitable that most Americans, including most Christians, even most sociologists and theologians, will end up blaming the oppressed---the victim---for their own fate. Or at best they will go only half way in understanding the problem. Some do this deliberately; some do it out of ignorance.

I, a white evangelical, only took my first steps in understanding at the age of 42. Now, at the age of 87-88, I have reached new depths in my understanding; for example, that oppression can cause post traumatic oppression syndrome, that external forces cause most cultural dysfunction.

But I am not the only slow learner; listen to William Ryan:

"This book [Blaming the Victim] grows out of my own experience, both professional and personal. As a psychologist and a social scientist, I have spent some years in clinical work and more recently have engaged in research and planning for the solution of urban social problems. Over these years I have found myself forced, painfully and gradually, to discard one supposed social fact after another, facts that made up some of the core of my own professional identity. My own process of relearning and rethinking has been accelerated by many, many years of activity as a citizen on the battleground of what used to be called the civil rights movement. During these years, I have come to know some of the people who have been victimized and lied about---at meetings, on picket lines, in confrontations with landlords, in living room talks, and at coffee sessions around kitchen tables. The realities I have experienced are very different from the myths and untruths dealt out by politicians and bureaucrats and even by some of my fellow social scientists."

What are the implications of a blaming the victim theory? Ryan explains:

"I have been listening to the victim-blamers and pondering their thought processes for a number of years. That process is often very subtle. Victim-blaming is cloaked in kindness and concern, and bears all the trappings and statistical furbelows of scientism; it is obscured by a perfumed haze of humanitarianism. In observing the process of Blaming the Victim, one tends to be confused and disoriented because those who practice this art display a deep concern for the victims that is quite genuine. In this way, the new ideology is very different from the [old] open prejudice and reactionary tactics of the old days [Klan type bigotry]. Its adherents include sympathetic social scientists with social consciences in good working order, and liberal politicians with a genuine commitment to reform." I would add that well meaning but ignorant theologians who talk about the plight of the poor but do not talk about the need to release the oppressed are equally misguided. Is the primary focus on changing the victim or releasing the oppressed?

Finally, Ryan comments on why white American oppressors or those whites who benefit from oppression fail to see or admit the real cause:

"We cannot comfortably believe that WE are the cause of that which is problematic to us; therefore, we are almost compelled to believe that THEY---the problematic ones---are the cause and this immediately prompts us to search for [their] deviance."

Enter Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. Even though Alexander is black, brilliant and a civil rights lawyer, she says that for years she missed what was really going on in the drug war, the mass incarceration of young black and Latino males. Only around the age of 40, and after extensive research, did she catch on that it wasn't primarily internal deviance and dysfunction, but the primary cause was external systems of oppression. The criminal justice system and the Supreme Court were a part of the problem. Now Alexander, though gentle in spirit, is sounding like an Old Testament prophet. The following quotation comes an interview by Phillip Smith (March 10, 2014) titled, "The New Jim Crow Author Michelle Alexander Talks Race and Drug War," Instead of blaming the victim, Alexander, at her very best, explains:

"There is an implicit assumption that we just need to find out what works to lift people up by their bootstraps, without acknowledging that we're waging a war on these communities we claim to be so concerned about. The initiative itself reflects this common narrative that suggests the reason why there are so many poor people of color trapped at the bottom---bad schools, poverty, broken homes. And if we encourage people to stay in school and get and stay married, then the whole problem of mass incarceration will no longer be of any real concern.

"But I've come to believe we have it backwards. These communities are poor and have ailing schools and broken homes not because of their personal failings, but because we've declared war on them, spent billions building prisons while allowing schools to fail, targeted children in these communities, stopping, searching, frisking them---and the first offense is typically for some nonviolent minor drug offense. . . . We saddle them with criminal records. . . . We have stood back and said, "What is wrong with them?" The more pressing question is "What is wrong with us?"

In other words, why do white Americans never really end systems of oppression, only redesign them? And why is the church not on the front lines waging war against systems of oppression, releasing the oppressed?

Even in 2014, most American whites still don't have a clue what is really going on. According to the October 31, 2014, The Week, in an brief paragraph by Jamelle Bouie titled "Exposing the racial divide," whites say "they don't buy into that nonsense about discrimination, are tired of being pushed around." "Polls show that 75 percent of white Americans have all-white social networks and that just 16 percent of whites believe minorities face significant discrimination."

In other words, most whites refuse to believe that there are current systems of oppression at work that benefit them and damage minorities. In listening to most white evangelicals talk about race, I find the same level of ignorance and denial. Why? One reason is ignorance to the biblical teaching about social evil. Stephen Mott, in an article titled "Biblical faith and the reality of social evil," asserts:

"Evil exists externally to the individual not only in the order of society [cosmos], but also in the oppressive social and political roles of powerful supernatural beings. . . . The necessary stability of society requires being able to build on the solutions of previous generations. But as a consequence the evils of those generations pass on too. . . . with relatively little dependence on conscious individual decision-making or responsibility. . . . Our institutions are not just a constraint on sin; they themselves are full of sin. The structures of social life contain both good and bad."

Mott clearly documents the social evil message of the New Testament; I would add the concepts of ethnocentrism and oppression and the widespread condemnation of the rich oppressors. Most white American Christians are biblically ignorant, historically ignorant and sociologically ignorant, blind to their participation in either sins of omission or commission as far as the urban poor are concerned.