The Rise of Victimhood Culture Quotes

“Many today have difficulty understanding how the Puritans could execute people based on something like spectral evidence. Yet modern moral panics are more like witch hunts than one might suppose.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Much scholarship is nothing more than political activism, and much teaching nothing more than indoctrination.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“A social environment that is conducive to false accusations could lead us to people being falsely accused of falsely accusing others.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Magnifying small offenses, mind reading by identifying subconscious thoughts even the offenders are unaware of, and labeling others as aggressors are all integral to the microaggression program but possibly harmful to mental health.”
― Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Campus victimhood culture is so conducive to accusations on behalf of victim groups that we should not be surprised if many turn out to be false.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“It is only when faced with deep differences, with cultural miscommunication and moral conflict, that we become aware that our way of seeing the world is not universally shared.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The logic of victimhood culture means no speech is clearly protected.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Victimhood culture makes it hard to avoid wrongdoing. If you have any kind of privilege, the social world is full of peril; you always risk giving offense. Engage in small talk and you might be guilty of a microaggression. Cook a new dish or adopt a new hairstyle and you might be guilty of cultural appropiation. Teach about something unpleasant and you might be guilty of triggering someone. Express your religions or political beliefs and you might be guilty of violence. Whatever you do, you must do it in a way that is supportive of victims and reproachful of their oppressors.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Bad social science might result from systematic bias, but to embrace blame analysis as a way of evaluating theory or to transform sociology into advocacy for the oppressed is to do something else entirely.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Sociology and social justice each have potential only when operating within their limits. The promise that a science of social life could aid social justice efforts was reasonable, but when social justice becomes an ideology unmoored from empirical reality, it needs no science.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Competitive victimhood can both encourage and limit the spread of victimhood culture. It may lead the clash between dignity and victimhood to transform into a clash between competing victimization narratives, or it may cause the victimhood revolution to devour its own, eventually burning itself out.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The concept of political correctness is now used in a variety of ways, but must often it refers to the rules about what words and ideas are forbidden for being offensive, particularly if they are offensive to women and minorities.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The prominence of victimhood culture in higher education, especially at elite institutions, indicates that victimhood culture is concentrated among the relatively affluent and successful members of the upper middle class.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“There are different kinds of false accusations. In some cases, the accusers might genuinely believe what they say. People accused of witchcraft are innocent, but those who condemn them might genuinely believe that they are witches. In other cases, the accuser knows the accusation is false. Such cases can happen because the accuser and accused were embroiled in a conflict over something that third parties would not treat as a matter for intervention.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“There are different kinds of false accusations. In some cases, the accusers might genuinely believe what they say. People accused of witchcraft are innocent, but those who condemn them might genuinely believe that they are witches. In other cases, the accuser kwnos the accusation is false. Such cases can happen because the accuser and accused were embroiled in a conflict over something that third parties would not treat as a matter for intervention.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Manufacturing a case of victimhood allows the aggrieved to elicit sympathy or even to mobilize third parties such as legal authorities against their enemies. Since a victimhood culture is one where this status is most valuable, we should expect it to be especially prone to false claims of victimization.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“And just as some conceptualize racism as an inherent property of all white people, there are those who view trauma as a collective and hereditary condition shared by all members of an historically victimized group.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“As the definition of what is harmful grows, there is a corresponding expansion of concepts related to victimization. More and more people are seen as vulnerable and in need of special protection from harms.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Haidt shows that people of different political persuasions draw on different intuitive concepts -or moral foundations- when thinking about right or wrong.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Sensitive to slight, they police even unintentional verbal offenses; concerned with the oppressed, they champion minorities and vilify the privileged; reliant on help, they publicly air lists of grievances. The university is the epicenter of victimhood culture. As such it is the epicenter of microaggression complaints, as well as trigger warnings, safe spaces, and hate crime hoaxes.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“The same progressive activists who campaign against microaggressions might also call for the banning of conservative speakers, for the forbidding of displays of support for certain political candidates, and for the creation of safe spaces where progressive ideas can go unchallenged by opposing views.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Microaggression complaints arise from a culture of victimhood in which individuals and groups display a high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to authorities and other third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Magnifying small offenses, mind reading by identifying subconscious thoughts even the offender are unaware of, and labeling others as aggressors are all integral to the microaggression program but possibly harmful to mental health.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“2011. Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars