established Jim Crow segregation, then
whined when blacks rose up to protest it. They created a two-tiered education system designed to lower education standards
for working-class citizens, then complained of anti-Southern bigotry whenever someone noted the South had the dumbest population
in America.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Americans largely rejected this idiocy and sided with the real victims of southern racism.
The rest of the country understood that white Southerners
felt
put-upon and out of sorts, but Northerners rejected these feelings as delusional. Americans of the 1950s and ’60s, watching
the prejudice and violence of the southern establishment, saw for themselves who the victims were and who they weren’t. And
America told the ever-whiny rednecks to stuff a sock in it.
In fact, I would argue that at a fundamental level, the Civil Rights Movement was a wholesale rejection of victim status as
a good in itself. Young black southern men who sat down at lunch counters knowing they would soon be locked up and beaten
down weren’t whiny crybabies. They took their lumps and came back the next day. And this they did to generate anger, not pity.
Dr. King and his allies who marched toward the barkingdogs and water cannons weren’t worried about hurt feelings. They had concussions and contusions on their minds, but they kept
marching. They weren’t claiming victimhood, they were accepting consequences.
I can’t see the people who suffered and fought back against Jim Crow as victims. To call them so would be, in my opinion,
an insult. “Victim” implies helplessness, neediness, an inability to defend oneself. Black Southerners who challenged segregation
were nothing of the sort. I would no more call Martin Luther King a victim than I would call Mother Teresa a pauper. It’s
demeaning and misses the point.
That’s the impression the Civil Rights Movement left upon me. But something happened between Selma, Alabama, and the creation
of the white man’s Southern Anti-Defamation League today. Forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, being a victim isn’t
an insult, it’s an honor. From the incompetent mom-’n’-pop shopkeeper on the corner (a “victim” of corporate interests like
Wal-Mart) to the idiot spokespeople for various special-interest groups (even fat people have the aforementioned NAAFA, a
lobbying organization opposed, one assumes, to gravity) to entire nationalities (the Serbs and Palestinians come to mind),
everybody wants to be a victim—southern-style.
WHINY, HAPPY PEOPLE
America is now a nation where nothing is ever one’s own fault. And, my northern brethren, you learned it from us. When the
NAACP was boycotting South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag on the capitol dome, I used tomock my fellow South Carolinians for claiming they were “victims” of an unfair boycott. “C’mon, gang!” I told them. “For nearly
a hundred years, that flag has flown over Klan rallies and civil rights counterdemonstrations. What’s the NAACP supposed to
do? Add it to their letterhead? It is our statehouse over which that flag flies, and it is our elected legislature that keeps
it there against all reason and good counsel. Of course, we citizens are going to suffer. We’re supposed to!”
Listening to thick-necked white guys whine about the “bullying tactics” of the NAACP was an absolute laugh. As young men,
many of these same flag supporters overturned school buses, blocked restaurant doors, and shouted “nigger” as the freedom
marchers passed. Today, these same men, older but no wiser, wish us to believe that they are now the victims of a black power
juggernaut.
So like I said, I used to make fun of these simpering Southerners constantly. Then, dear Yankee, I met you.
I met the aforementioned National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance, a group so painfully fat-headed it has
to be headquartered in
whined when blacks rose up to protest it. They created a two-tiered education system designed to lower education standards
for working-class citizens, then complained of anti-Southern bigotry whenever someone noted the South had the dumbest population
in America.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Americans largely rejected this idiocy and sided with the real victims of southern racism.
The rest of the country understood that white Southerners
felt
put-upon and out of sorts, but Northerners rejected these feelings as delusional. Americans of the 1950s and ’60s, watching
the prejudice and violence of the southern establishment, saw for themselves who the victims were and who they weren’t. And
America told the ever-whiny rednecks to stuff a sock in it.
In fact, I would argue that at a fundamental level, the Civil Rights Movement was a wholesale rejection of victim status as
a good in itself. Young black southern men who sat down at lunch counters knowing they would soon be locked up and beaten
down weren’t whiny crybabies. They took their lumps and came back the next day. And this they did to generate anger, not pity.
Dr. King and his allies who marched toward the barkingdogs and water cannons weren’t worried about hurt feelings. They had concussions and contusions on their minds, but they kept
marching. They weren’t claiming victimhood, they were accepting consequences.
I can’t see the people who suffered and fought back against Jim Crow as victims. To call them so would be, in my opinion,
an insult. “Victim” implies helplessness, neediness, an inability to defend oneself. Black Southerners who challenged segregation
were nothing of the sort. I would no more call Martin Luther King a victim than I would call Mother Teresa a pauper. It’s
demeaning and misses the point.
That’s the impression the Civil Rights Movement left upon me. But something happened between Selma, Alabama, and the creation
of the white man’s Southern Anti-Defamation League today. Forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, being a victim isn’t
an insult, it’s an honor. From the incompetent mom-’n’-pop shopkeeper on the corner (a “victim” of corporate interests like
Wal-Mart) to the idiot spokespeople for various special-interest groups (even fat people have the aforementioned NAAFA, a
lobbying organization opposed, one assumes, to gravity) to entire nationalities (the Serbs and Palestinians come to mind),
everybody wants to be a victim—southern-style.
WHINY, HAPPY PEOPLE
America is now a nation where nothing is ever one’s own fault. And, my northern brethren, you learned it from us. When the
NAACP was boycotting South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag on the capitol dome, I used tomock my fellow South Carolinians for claiming they were “victims” of an unfair boycott. “C’mon, gang!” I told them. “For nearly
a hundred years, that flag has flown over Klan rallies and civil rights counterdemonstrations. What’s the NAACP supposed to
do? Add it to their letterhead? It is our statehouse over which that flag flies, and it is our elected legislature that keeps
it there against all reason and good counsel. Of course, we citizens are going to suffer. We’re supposed to!”
Listening to thick-necked white guys whine about the “bullying tactics” of the NAACP was an absolute laugh. As young men,
many of these same flag supporters overturned school buses, blocked restaurant doors, and shouted “nigger” as the freedom
marchers passed. Today, these same men, older but no wiser, wish us to believe that they are now the victims of a black power
juggernaut.
So like I said, I used to make fun of these simpering Southerners constantly. Then, dear Yankee, I met you.
I met the aforementioned National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance, a group so painfully fat-headed it has
to be headquartered in
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