[The Atlantic]What the Jussie Smollett Story Reveals

Dairy Ashford · Feb 20, 2019

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...t-story-shows-rise-victimhood-culture/583099/

The Atlantic

What the Jussie Smollet Story Reveals:
It shows a peculiar aspect of 21st-century America: victimhood chic

JOHN MCWHORTER

I was one of many people who found Jussie Smollett’s story a little off from the beginning. Two white men in ski masks are out in 10-degree weather in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of bleach or something like it and a rope that they fashioned into a mock noose. These thugs, who shouted Trump slogans as well as racist and homophobic slurs, seemed to know who Smollett was on sight, meaning they were aficionados of the splashy black soap opera Empire, on which Smollett is a main character. Somehow they were aware that Smollett, prominent but hardly on the A-list as celebrities go, was gay.

Yes, my skepticism made me feel a little guilty. We are justly sensitized to violence against people for being black and for being gay in the wake of incidents I need not name. We are also just past watching legions of people who should have known better refuse to credit Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe fear and trauma distorted Smollett’s memory somewhat? Maybe the media were getting some of the details wrong? Wait and see, I and others thought.

According to CNN, which got the information from two law-enforcement sources—and other news organizations as well—Chicago police believe two Nigerians arrested for their role in the attack were paid by Smollett to stage it. Relevant equipment was allegedly found in their apartment.

Smollett’s lawyers have issued a statement insisting these reports are false. “Nothing is further from the truth and anyone claiming otherwise is lying,” they wrote. But Chicago police have declared a significant shift in “the trajectory of the investigation.”

Until this twist, smart people were claiming that the attack on Smollett was the story of Donald Trump’s America writ small—that it revealed the terrible plight of minority groups today. But the Smollett story, if the “trajectory” leads to evidence of fakery, would actually reveal something else modern America is about: victimhood chic. Future historians and anthropologists will find this aspect of early-21st-century America peculiar, intriguing, and sad.

Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.

Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as “problematic” blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a judgment day when America “comes to terms” with race. Smollett—if he really did stage the attack—would have been acting out the black-American component in this eschatological configuration, the role of victim as a form of status. We are, within this hierarchy, persecuted prophets, ever attesting to the harm that white racism does to us and pointing to a future context in which our persecutors will be redeemed of the sin of having leveled that harm upon us. We are noble in our suffering.

None of this is to deny that racism exists, and that it is hardly limited to acts as baldly depraved as that of Dylann Roof, who attacked worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. However, one might argue—perhaps with the same kind of guilt I had in doubting Smollett’s story—that there is a degree of exaggeration in how Americans today discuss and process race. We operate according to a larger narrative, as it were, that at times renders fussing too much with mundane facts improper, beyond a certain point.

Certainly, the professional martyr is a race-neutral personality type. However, since the civil-rights victories of the 1960s, when whites became open in a new way to understanding black pain, that personality type has been especially useful to black Americans. With positive racial self-image possibly elusive after hundreds of years of naked abuse, the noble-victim position can seem especially, and understandably, comforting. It can also be handy, in a fashion quite unexpected to anyone who was on the front lines of race activism 50 years ago—as a road to stardom.

Dolezal, white, spent years with a spray tan, “identifying” as black and even heading a local NAACP branch, and had fabricated episodes of racist discrimination against herself. As Bryan Cranston’s dentist character on Seinfeld adopted Judaism for the jokes, Dolezal, one might say, took on blackness for the victimhood. She felt that her existence was more meaningful while she was “playing” an oppressed black person than living as a white person despite all the attendant privileges. Few news events more perfectly illustrated that in our moment, a claim of victimhood from a black person is a form of power. Only in an America much further past the old days than many like to admit could a white person eagerly seek to be a put-upon black person out of a sense that it looked “cool.” A Dolezal would have been unimaginable until roughly the late 1990s.

Did it not occur to Smollett that if this blew up in his face, he would be tarring by association actual and legitimate claims of racist and homophobic abuse? As someone seeking to be seen as a concerned activist in the vein of his mother and Angela Davis, could Smollett really not understand that a stunt all about making himself more famous was not exactly the wokest approach?

But that’s just it—Smollett, if the latest reporting is true, was an eager puppy, jumping with joyous inattention into American social politics as he has encountered it coming of age in the 21st century. He would have known that in this moment, very important people would find him more interesting for having been hurt on the basis of his identity than for his fine performance on an interesting hit television show. He would have known this so well that it didn’t even occur to him that his story would have to be more credible than the dopey one he threw together about being jumped in near-Arctic temperatures by the only two white bullies in America with a mysterious fondness for a black soap hip-hopera. (Yet again, I’m assuming the latest reporting is accurate.)

Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting.
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Commodore · Feb 20, 2019

The corollary to presumption of innocence for the accused is a presumption of dishonesty toward the accuser (absent any evidence and/or knowledge of the accuser's reputation).

If you don't have the latter (i.e. if you "believe all women"), you can't have the former.

tinman · Dec 6, 2021

KingCheetah · Dec 6, 2021

French actors are a trip.

tinman · Dec 7, 2021

jiggyfly · Dec 7, 2021

tinman said: ↑

Click to expand...

So now canceling somebody is a good thing?

This is nothing like what Coumo did but whatevs.

SamFisher · Dec 7, 2021

Jurnee Smollett is great btw.

tinman · Dec 7, 2021

tinman · Dec 7, 2021

Lol
They are literally reading his messages

DonnyMost · Dec 7, 2021

Any time I think of political victimhood seekers I always think of this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...d-letter-B-face-robbery-story-police-say.html

Astrodome · Dec 7, 2021

He should take a plea bargain and do his community service. Not sure what he is trying to prove.

dachuda86 · Dec 7, 2021

jiggyfly said: ↑

So now canceling somebody is a good thing?

This is nothing like what Coumo did but whatevs.
Click to expand...

This.

Faking a hate crime isn't grounds for canceling. If anything, we need more fake hate crimes! Especially those which the media can use to paint our political opponents in a false light! Anyone who questioned Jussie is a bigoted Trump supporting racist still even though they were right in the end about it being fake. The narrative is far more important than the truth.

dachuda86 · Dec 7, 2021

Astrodome said: ↑

He should take a plea bargain and do his community service. Not sure what he is trying to prove.
Click to expand...

HIS INNOCENCE! HE IS A VICTIM!

ROCKSS · Dec 8, 2021

On the surface this seems far fetched but hey, lets see what happens, I am surprised he wants his dirty laundry put on public display like this but to each his own

tinman · Dec 8, 2021

tinman · Dec 8, 2021

KingCheetah said: ↑

French actors are a trip.
Click to expand...

tinman · Dec 9, 2021

MojoMan · Dec 9, 2021

Astrodome · Dec 9, 2021

Os Trigonum · Dec 9, 2021

Astrodome said: ↑

Click to expand...

pretty sure you need to add that one to @Rileydog 's lefty conspiracy theorists thread

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