Blaming the Victim [Mass Market Paperback]

William Ryan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0394722264 | ISBN-13: 978-0394722269 | Publication Date: July 12, 1976 | Edition: 2

The classic work that refutes the lies we tell ourselves about race, poverty and the poorHere are three myths about poverty in America:– Minority children perform poorly in school because they are “culturally deprived.”– African-Americans are handicapped by a family structure that is typically unstable and matriarchal. – Poor people suffer from bad health because of ignorance and lack of interest in proper health care. Blaming the Victim was the first book to identify these truisms as part of the system of denial that even the best-intentioned Americans have constructed around the unpalatable realities of race and class. Originally published in 1970, William Ryan's groundbreaking and exhaustively researched work challenges both liberal and conservative assumptions, serving up a devastating critique of the mindset that causes us to blame the poor for their poverty and the powerless for their powerlessness. More than twenty years later, it is even more meaningful for its diagnosis of the psychic underpinnings of racial and social injustice.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An impassioned, often brilliant expose of middle-class ideology.”—Herbert Gans“An illusion-shatterer of the first order…if you are concerned, you must read this book. It will stop you in your tracks.”—Library Journal

From the Publisher

"An impassioned, often brilliant exposé of middle-class ideology."--Herbert Gans

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 2 edition (July 12, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394722264
• ISBN-13: 978-0394722269
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 0.7 x 6.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #235,611 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Timeless Classic, February 22, 2001

By 

Michael P. Vimont (Norton, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blaming the Victim (Mass Market Paperback)

The first chapter in this book, alone, makes this a classic for understanding how social problems are dealt with in our individualistic ideological society. His formula for "Blaming the Victim" covers just a couple of pages but is than intellectually expounded upon in this book by analyzing various social problems. Some may consider William Ryan an ideologue; however, I find him to be a practical fellow. He doesn't view the formula for "Blaming the Victim" as inherently evil as some radicals might - he simply finds it as the root cause for not solving social problems in our society. If the root cause of a social problem is the social structure, yet we seek to solve the social problem through, strictly, rehabilitation of the individual, the social problem is left unsolved.

I have taught several classes on poverty, social problems and social welfare and am able to utilize Ryan's book in all of these classes. His presentation is put forward in a common-sense manner, and he provides a rational refutation on commonly held beliefs on problems ranging from poverty to child abuse. This is a book worth getting if for no other reason to reevaluate how we look at problems and more importantly how to go about solving them.

11 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fix the social arrangments that make weaknesses crippling, February 19, 2003

By 

Bruce E. Nevin "BN" (EDGARTOWN, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blaming the Victim (Mass Market Paperback)

Everyone has weaknesses. In the best of circumstances these flaws are inconsequential and invisible. But when we are in distress, they get in the way or cause outright harm.

Institutions and customary social arrangements can ease the causes of distress. If we create institutions that alleviate people's predicaments, their flaws and weaknesses do not surface. As a demonstration on a relatively small scale, consider Milton Mazer, People and Predicaments.

The issue here is not welfare, in the sense of labor-free livelihood. Everyone knows only the most wealthy deserve that. Think public transportation that works. Think medical care. Think intervention into abuse. Think Head Start, an enormous success for very little money. Think paying teachers commensurately to their training and their contribution to society.

Our institutions and customary social arrangements benefit some people more than others. It's an obvious but oddly ignored truth that those benefited most are least aware of it. That's just the way life is for them, so it must be so for everyone. Consequently, it seems to them that another's unsuccess must be due to a failure of intention or even to willful parasitism.

This is what Ryan identifies as blaming the victim.

Does "destructive behavior underpin poverty" or does institutionalized poverty expose and amplify human frailty with destructive consequences? The question is, if you want to change matters, what is effective. Shaking one's finger and instructing people in proper values has never had much effect. To say that failure is due to ineradicable character flaws obviously goes nowhere, unless to euthanasia.

The proposition that the poor are "held back by lack of work ethic and strong family values" is profoundly insulting to the vast majority of working poor who work very hard indeed. (Consider Ehrenreich's experience, reported in Nickel and Dimed.)

The defense of Banfield by the second reviewer, couched as an attack on "Ryan and his ilk", is of only historical relevance to Ryan's book today. I do agree that framing the issues in racial terms is a weakness of the book. The problem reaches farther and deeper than either its ethnic or ethical physiognomy suggests. Consider Z. Harris, The Transformation of Capitalist Society.

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Failed 1960s Leftist Rhetoric, August 11, 2011

By 

Free Speech (South Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blaming the Victim (Mass Market Paperback)

I had to read this book back in college during the late 1970s as required reading, and just found it again. I didn't buy into the author's reasoning in 1978. Now that I have three decades of real world experience, have seen endless examples of how pretending all poor are victims of society, and not poor due to their bad choices is even less believable. Sure, there are people who are truly poor, and or lose everything due to bad breaks, but most poor are people satisfied to take the government handout. Looking back over the decades since this book was first written, all the failed policies of government that emerged due to thinking like this; such as subsidized housing, food stamps, the "fair housing act," and so on, have probably wasted trillions on the indigent without return. I believe what John Lennon said from his own efforts to raise money to help the poor around the world; he said: it doesn't help at all.
Author William Ryan in Blaming the Victim puts the focus on the plight of the poor and the Negro. In his first chapters defines this ideology of blaming these groups for their sorry state as a middle class ideology harbored by the person who is doing "reasonably well" and likes the profit motive as the propelling engine of the economic system. Although in the abstract the middle class liberal or conservative want everyone to do well, the solution to the plight of the poor is not so easily solved, so in the estimation of Mr. Ryan, well meaning Americans rationalize a whole list of reasons why the poor are poor, and thus blame them.
One chapter is about education, and the list of middle class mythology is built: cultural inferiority of ghetto Negroes, culturally deprived Negroes, less exposure than middle class kids to certain kind of experiences, and so on. The descriptions become more and more ridiculous as the chapter goes on. Mr. Ryan tip-toes as not to offend the Negro where he says that Negroes have "certain differences in style of talking and thinking." Really? You mean Negroes talk like Negroes, which is a slang that was for a brief period in the 1990s called Ebonics in Oakland, CA, and is in reality very improper and sloppy English. What he does not want to say is Negroes speak English poorly, and have in most instances made no effort to learn to speak English properly. By 2011 we can safely say that Mr. Ryan was wrong to think what Senator Reed called the Negro dialect is a useful and enriching contribution to American English. No it is not, and those blacks that have reached success outside of the rap music industry have done so by first adopting clear and proper English. Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, and Michael Jordan are all proof. The other major fault of this chapter after all the detailed explanations of why the poor ghetto child is disadvantaged, Ryan never once mentions that parents are ultimately responsible to make the choices and instill the values into their children.
Another chapter on the Negro family Mr. Ryan attempts to convince the reader that three quarters of black kids live with both parents. I still don't believe that is true either. He goes on to say the "broken family is component of a special Negro culture" and is just another "stereotyped wisdom of the negro family." Call it a stereotype, but stereotypes come from true observations. I have met and observed hundreds of blacks in my life, and only a handful came from a solid family. There are also many whites that live in and come from broken families, but not the proportion found in the black population. Again, the author claims this is a reason we blame the victim. I ask, why after decades of trying to redistribute wealth, create program after program to lift the poor, do subsequent generations still follow the path of dysfunction? Maybe it is cultural. I can see Mr. Ryan making his case in the 1960s when Presidents Johnson and Nixon started the war on poverty with new programs. But we know now the programs did nothing. The best thing for the Negro living in Cabrini Green in Chicago was to tear down those monuments of socialist stupidity.
The chapter on crime takes the cake. Mr. Ryan states pretty much everyone we know commits one sort of a crime or another, and the nations' police forces are really just there to oppress - guess who - the Negro. So the real crime is when law enforcement arrests, tries, and incarcerates blacks if they commit a crime, and we should really look the other way, forget about the crimes the poor and the Negro commits, and justify it with a rationalization that one of our upstanding neighbors probably cheated on his income tax. Whatever.
Today I read online another story of frustration by a black mayor no less on the cultural problems of the Negro in 2011:
PHILADELPHIA - Mayor Michael A. Nutter, telling marauding black youths "you have damaged your own race," imposed a tougher curfew Monday in response to the latest "flash mob" - spontaneous groups of teens who attack people at
random on the streets of the city's tourist and fashionable shopping
districts.

"Take those God-darn hoodies down, especially in the summer," Mr. Nutter,
the city's second black mayor, said in an angry lecture aimed at black
teens. "Pull your pants up and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your
underwear or the crack of your butt."

"If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in
the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and
down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you?
They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. "You have damaged your own race."

Mr. Nutter announced that he was beefing up police patrols in certain
neighborhoods, enlisting volunteers to monitor the streets and moving up the weekend curfew for minors to 9 p.m. Parents will face increased fines for each time their child is caught violating the curfew.

The head of Philadelphia's chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, J. Whyatt Mondesire, said it "took courage"
for Mr. Nutter to deliver the message. "These are majority African-American youths and they need to be called on it," Mr. Mondesire said.

Mary Catherine Roper, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia chapter of the
American Civil Liberties Union, said her group sees the curfew move as legal with its sole caveat being that it not evolve "into an excuse to hassle" any youths on the street.

The state ACLU filed a federal lawsuit last year challenging Philadelphia
police's use of "stop and frisk" searches. A settlement announced in June
allowed the program to continue, along with safeguards to prevent the use of racial profiling.

In the past two years, the City of Brotherly Love has been the scene of
several flash mobs in which youths meet at planned locations by texting one another and then commit assorted mayhem.

In one episode, teens knocked down passers-by on a Center City street and
entered an upscale department store where they assaulted shoppers. On
another occasion, hundreds of teens gathered in a restaurant district and
menaced patrons, forcing some restaurant owners to lock customers inside
temporarily for their own protection or to close early.

In the latest event July 29, about 20 to 30 youths descended on Center City after dark, then punched, beat and robbed bystanders. One man was kicked so savagely that he was hospitalized with a fractured skull. Police arrested four people, including an 11-year-old.

Other cities have grappled with the problem of destructive flash mobs. In
Chicago on Memorial Day weekend, roving teens flashed gang signs, knocked
cyclists off their bikes and harassed picnickers. Police closed a popular
beach as the violence escalated.

In January, dozens of young people stormed a popular Milwaukee mall late in the afternoon and scared customers and store employees.

In the District of Columbia, about 20 teenagers entered the G-Star Raw store on Connecticut Avenue at Dupont Circle in April and stole about $20,000 worth of merchandise before fleeing.

Blaming the Victim is a list of 1960 liberal rationalizations and plea for wealth redistribution as the way to fix the poor and dysfunctional minority populations. Perhaps then it seemed best to liberals then, but what is unfortunate is liberals today still believe this.
The decline of Communism in the world has proved the failure of Socialism. It is clear that veiled liberal attempts to redistribute wealth through various welfare schemes, the sub-prime mortgages that caused this recession, and so on never work. In the end these programs hurt everybody such as the misguided social experiment called the "Fair Housing Act" wrecked the global economy by eroding the tough standards we once had to get credit. I digress.
Blaming the Victim is now a lesson in failed reasoning when political correctness was in its infancy. We can see its message, though well meaning, avoids personal responsibility. Whether one is a Negro, or a black, or an African-American, European-American, or just an American; this is a free market system that rewards hard work, playing by the rules, and speaking and writing English well. Those who have had plenty of chances to pull themselves up over the decades deserve blame; they did not make the effort. They are not victims but immoral leaches on society, today even proud of their own poor choices. I hope no college professors out there in academia today tout this book or try to teach this false message.