You can only play these games for so long, so I’m glad the whole circus is imploding. The insufferable disposition of white, college-educated liberals is starting to be recognized beyond conservative circles. There’s a paper trail now, and the rap sheet portrays a landed elite who feigns feelings of giving back and service to the underprivileged in the hope of keeping these people tokenized. In a way, you could argue this is a new form of slavery, but one where a liberal white elite needs non-white writers primarily to manufacture endless stories of victimhood to maintain and propagate their warped vision of reality. They need these people to continue peddling stories of racism and disadvantage to feed their desire to be viewed ironically as white saviors.
Guy is going to have a story about how National Public Radio fell into this trap, where stories about non-white communities resonated in just one slice of America: the white, liberal parts.
NPR tried to attract more black and Hispanic listeners by running endless segments centering black and Hispanic voices. Turns out that it was actually white liberals that liked the stories. pic.twitter.com/FiB8Czh0ta
— Yang (@AxiomAmerican) April 9, 2024
Sheluyang Peng wrote in Tablet that NPR isn’t the only area where this cancer has spread and killed its host. In the literary world, the “victimhood culture” is the drug of choice for white progressives, who gobble up this sensationalism at the expense of wholesome stories about how these non-white communities thrive in this supposedly racist, white supremacist land. The white liberal masses drown out tales of how the underprivileged can succeed. For all the hate hurled at Justice Clarence Thomas, his story is indelibly American: a poor black kid who grew up in a shack is now one of the top legal minds in the country serving in our Supreme Court.
Peng’s essay detailed an industry that’s gone off the rails but one that has birthed a sub-genre that mocks the white liberal’s addiction to victimhood narratives that only help soothe their confirmation biases. It’s regressive and offensive that non-white writers must embellish and outright make up stories of persecution to sell books. Peng cites an article from Negro Digest in 1950, where Zora Neale Hurston previsioned the current climate:
There is, of course, a paradox in the demand for “diverse voices”: Rather than seeking an actual diversity of viewpoints, our DEI commissars instead seek a racially diverse group whose members will hold the same viewpoint. This one off-the-shelf sob story is now the only viable route to elite advancement.
In fact, the ubiquity of the victim narrative has led to a new genre of metafictions making fun of these victim narratives themselves. Last year the literary world was abuzz over fantasy novelist R.F. Kuang’s first nonfantasy novel, titled Yellowface, about a struggling white female novelist who takes on an Asian woman’s persona and is able to use her “diverse” status to move up the publishing industry’s ladder. The new film American Fiction features a Black novelist who can’t get his novels repurposing Greek mythology published—but suddenly rises to meteoric fame when he writes a book about poor Black people in the ghetto. Andrew Boryga’s recently released novel Victim is about a young Latino novelist who struggles to get published—until he figures out that he can become famous by making up stories about the experiences of “underprivileged groups.” Each of these works directly mocks the mostly white liberal elite that are addicted to the trauma narrative even while recognizing that its audience is largely composed of the very people they are mocking.
Within this new feedback loop, the self-loathing woke class “does the work” of recognizing their own “tokenization of diverse voices” which in turn leads to further demands to propagate trauma narratives. Take, for example, a scene in Victim in which the protagonist Javi, at the time a teenage boy, receives college-admissions counseling from a nice white liberal named Mr. Martin, who encourages Javi to write an admissions essay for an elite college (a thinly veiled stand-in for Cornell). However, Javi doesn’t see himself as a victim, and is even offended when Mr. Martin asks him to reframe his past lived experiences as sob stories. When Javi finally embellishes his alleged hardships, Mr. Martin says that Javi has “real hardships” unlike the rich kids he also tutors before explaining his rationale for taking this job: “You see, I do this here, at a school like this one, to work with kids like you, because it makes me feel like I’m able to give back.” Mr. Martin then breaks down in tears.
[…]
Our Mr. Martin types are nothing new. In an essay in Negro Digest in 1950 titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” acid-tongued novelist and contrarian extraordinaire Zora Neale Hurston fired a barrage of broadsides against the publishing industry. She opens with the declaration that “I HAVE been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor.”
After chastising the white liberal publishing establishment, Hurston trains her fire toward well-to-do Black writers who repurposed the struggles of poor Black Americans for personal gain: “The fact that there is no demand for incisive and full-dress stories around Negroes above the servant class is indicative of something of vast importance to this nation. This blank is NOT filled by the fiction built around upper-class Negroes exploiting the race problem.”
Peng uses Philip Roth, a prominent American Jewish author, as a role model in creating multi-layered characters that eschew the current liberal ethos—oppressor versus oppressed—on how such pieces should read to their audience. The New Yorker audience lambasted Roth for his short story called “Defender of the Faith.”
…the story centers around the actions of a Jewish soldier, Private Sheldon Grossbart, who repeatedly guilt-trips his Jewish commander, Sergeant Nathan Marx, into allowing Grossbart to have more special perks due to his faith—getting to attend services on Friday instead of cleaning the barracks, getting kosher food at the chow hall, and getting a special pass to leave camp to attend a Passover Seder. However, Marx learns near the end of the story that Grossbart had merely played victim and had lied about his frum-ness.
Roth was accused of being a self-hating Jew, criticism that shook his core. Now, we’re seeing the oppressor-oppressed model in his most heinous form concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the War in Gaza. Peng cites leftist Jews in liberal academia, some working for elite colleges, who are considered persona non grata for supporting the state of Israel. I don’t mean to be comical, but this exercise in intersectionality eating its own was seen during the Chicago Dyke March in 2017—a Jewish woman was asked to vacate the event because her rainbow flag featuring the Star of David was viewed as a symbol of Palestinian oppression.
We all know this conflict is multifaceted, complicated, and riddled with nuance. It’s not black and white, which Mr. Roth tries to convey in his writing, is it?
For all the rantings about how conservatives are horrible, it seems the white liberal elites do the real damage. And they have.