Post by ck4829 on May 29, 2017 10:21:07 GMT
Susan Ladd: The convenient fiction of victim-blaming
If you don’t want to help others, you have two choices.
You either accept the fact that you can be judged as a bad person for not wanting to help, or you make the person who needs help look bad to convince others they don’t deserve help.
It is discouraging to see our elected leaders consistently choosing the latter.
Victim-blaming is a convenient fiction.
If the victim is at fault for his or her situation, it absolves others of the responsibility and obligation to help them.
Consider last week’s remarks by Ben Carson, former brain surgeon, GOP presidential candidate and current secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He said, in essence, that poverty is determined by attitude.
“You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there,” Carson said.
“You take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world — they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom,” Carson said.
He offered no evidence to back this up, other than his own experience as the son of a mother who worked her way out of poverty and gave him the opportunity to become a brain surgeon.
“If everybody had a mother like mine, nobody would be in poverty,” Carson said. “She was a person who absolutely would not accept the status of victim.”
Though he didn’t say it outright, this amounts to a convenient justification for not giving aid to the poor.
Carson’s remarks reflect a view of America as a meritocracy — a society in which the most talented people rise to the top. This mindset, particularly popular among those who do make it big, encourages the belief that the people who achieve wealth and success deserve those rewards, while those who fail do not.
Everyone wants to believe they succeed solely on their own merits — not because they may have had advantages that others did not, including inheritance, education, family support, geography, class, contacts and even sheer luck. But without equality of opportunity, meritocracy is a myth.
Meritocracy can, in fact, be used to promote policies that increase inequality. If success is a matter of sheer will, talent or, as Carson said, attitude, why do people at the bottom need help? Help, they argue, actually holds back the poor and disadvantaged by making them adopt the mindset of victims.
Make the homeless too comfortable, Carson has said, and they may want to stay where they are.
Similarly, Republican politicians who are championing Trumpcare are increasingly pushing the idea that if people are sick, it’s their own fault. When you have a health care plan that severely disadvantages people with pre-existing conditions, blaming people for their own sickness is the only way to keep from looking like a heartless cretin.
U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, explained that requiring people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool was fair because it reduced the cost “to those people who lead good lives. They’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.”
Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the high-risk pools in the American Health Care Act ensured that “if you get cancer, you don’t end up broke,” but added, “That doesn’t mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly and gets diabetes.”
This statement ignores the fact that heredity plays a huge role in who gets diabetes, as the American Diabetes Association was quick to point out. Heredity is also a large determinant of high blood pressure and many other common, pre-existing conditions. Education and income also have a major impact on health, according to research sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
It’s very easy for those who aren’t sick or homeless or poor to see those conditions in others as the result of poor choices, character flaws or lack of effort.
Can you find people who fit that description? Certainly. Can you find people who don’t fit that description? Absolutely.
You can find an anecdote to prove anything, just as you can find another anecdote to disprove it.
Which is the exception, and which is the rule, or are the causes far more complicated?
Do we care enough to find out, or would we rather believe what is convenient in furthering or explaining our own success?
More than anything these days, I fear that we are becoming a society incapable of compassion and indifferent to anyone’s suffering but our own.
If we allow that kind of thinking to shape our laws and policies, we are truly lost.
www.greensboro.com/blogs/around_town/susan-ladd-the-convenient-fiction-of-victim-blaming/article_cafbdf8e-c0d9-567b-9862-489cbfcbc373.html
If you don’t want to help others, you have two choices.
You either accept the fact that you can be judged as a bad person for not wanting to help, or you make the person who needs help look bad to convince others they don’t deserve help.
It is discouraging to see our elected leaders consistently choosing the latter.
Victim-blaming is a convenient fiction.
If the victim is at fault for his or her situation, it absolves others of the responsibility and obligation to help them.
Consider last week’s remarks by Ben Carson, former brain surgeon, GOP presidential candidate and current secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He said, in essence, that poverty is determined by attitude.
“You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there,” Carson said.
“You take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world — they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom,” Carson said.
He offered no evidence to back this up, other than his own experience as the son of a mother who worked her way out of poverty and gave him the opportunity to become a brain surgeon.
“If everybody had a mother like mine, nobody would be in poverty,” Carson said. “She was a person who absolutely would not accept the status of victim.”
Though he didn’t say it outright, this amounts to a convenient justification for not giving aid to the poor.
Carson’s remarks reflect a view of America as a meritocracy — a society in which the most talented people rise to the top. This mindset, particularly popular among those who do make it big, encourages the belief that the people who achieve wealth and success deserve those rewards, while those who fail do not.
Everyone wants to believe they succeed solely on their own merits — not because they may have had advantages that others did not, including inheritance, education, family support, geography, class, contacts and even sheer luck. But without equality of opportunity, meritocracy is a myth.
Meritocracy can, in fact, be used to promote policies that increase inequality. If success is a matter of sheer will, talent or, as Carson said, attitude, why do people at the bottom need help? Help, they argue, actually holds back the poor and disadvantaged by making them adopt the mindset of victims.
Make the homeless too comfortable, Carson has said, and they may want to stay where they are.
Similarly, Republican politicians who are championing Trumpcare are increasingly pushing the idea that if people are sick, it’s their own fault. When you have a health care plan that severely disadvantages people with pre-existing conditions, blaming people for their own sickness is the only way to keep from looking like a heartless cretin.
U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, explained that requiring people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool was fair because it reduced the cost “to those people who lead good lives. They’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.”
Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the high-risk pools in the American Health Care Act ensured that “if you get cancer, you don’t end up broke,” but added, “That doesn’t mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly and gets diabetes.”
This statement ignores the fact that heredity plays a huge role in who gets diabetes, as the American Diabetes Association was quick to point out. Heredity is also a large determinant of high blood pressure and many other common, pre-existing conditions. Education and income also have a major impact on health, according to research sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
It’s very easy for those who aren’t sick or homeless or poor to see those conditions in others as the result of poor choices, character flaws or lack of effort.
Can you find people who fit that description? Certainly. Can you find people who don’t fit that description? Absolutely.
You can find an anecdote to prove anything, just as you can find another anecdote to disprove it.
Which is the exception, and which is the rule, or are the causes far more complicated?
Do we care enough to find out, or would we rather believe what is convenient in furthering or explaining our own success?
More than anything these days, I fear that we are becoming a society incapable of compassion and indifferent to anyone’s suffering but our own.
If we allow that kind of thinking to shape our laws and policies, we are truly lost.
www.greensboro.com/blogs/around_town/susan-ladd-the-convenient-fiction-of-victim-blaming/article_cafbdf8e-c0d9-567b-9862-489cbfcbc373.html