WILLIAM RYAN. Blaming the Victim, Revised, Updated Edition.
New York: Vintage Books, 1976. 288 pages. $3.15.
Though speaking to broadly held misconceptions, Blaming the Victim was also a direct response to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan’s 1965 report: The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (often referred to simply as the Moynihan report). In this attack on the left from the left, William Ryan defines blaming the victim as a concept of characterizing a universal problem as more unique than it actually is. In this way, Ryan explains, countless efforts from well-meaning academics, social workers and legislators have been misguided to treat the individual as the problem rather than the larger social system. The author’s overtly stated goal is to motivate these well-meaning people to “turn [their] attention away from fruitless tinkering with the victim and fix [their] sights on the real targets – redistribution of money and power.” (pp. 288)
With those ends in mind, Blaming the Victim systematically reviews and dissects the evidence for and against widely held misconceptions. It begins with a broad discussion of how otherwise thoughtful and well-educated people learn to blame the victim. Some choice examples are the concepts of cultural deprivation and compensatory education, which gives the example of a poor black child whose home environment presumably doesn’t prepare the child for success in school and therefore that child should be the target of supplemental educational programs. Ryan points out deeply rooted assumptions, and argues that the solution lies in better overall schools (facilities, teachers, policies, etc.) rather than in targeting individuals. The next two chapters discuss these ideas further: Savage Discovery in the Schools: The Folklore of Cultural Deprivation; and Mammy Observed: Fixing the Negro Family.
Next, Ryan tackles the assumption that poor minority populations have higher rates of illegitimate births. Within this assumption is that the poor lead overly active sex lives, that they aren’t concerned about the consequences beyond immediate pleasure, that they therefore have more illegitimate babies, that doing so is acceptable, and that they happily accept welfare to support their growing families. He counters this ideology with logic and data to suggest that rather than having a higher rate of illegitimate births, poor black women are more likely to report them. Furthermore, he suggests that when pregnant minority women arrive at hospitals unaccompanied, some hospitals may tend to automatically record births as illegitimate without confirmation.
By the end of the book, Ryan has sent his message home from multiple directions. Other topics he addresses include: the poor’s inability to delay gratification (depicted by the now famous “Do you want your prize to be one Hershey bar today, or two Hershey bars next Wednesday?” social experiment); that poor people have poor health because they aren’t interested in maintaining it (rather than examining the limitations of health care in the United States); that people living in slums are in themselves the cause of slum conditions; the unfavorable bias towards the poor and the black when it comes to arrests and imprisonment; urban violence; and finally, a concluding chapter that acts as a call to action to create social change through the redistribution of wealth and power.
In keeping with the society-level examination of the book, Ryan’s solutions deal in broad concepts. It is hard to imagine any reader in his target audience (presumably the mostly white, middle-class humanitarian types he so often references) arguing against the ideas themselves. However, they are, as concepts usually are, unrealistically bold and certainly not viable solutions in themselves.
On the other hand, Blaming the Victim does prevail in eliciting self-reflection in the thoughtful reader; so that perhaps the author can feel successful in reaching his goals (he is even influencing thought a good 35 years after initial publication). Despite his sometimes off-putting, caustically angry tone, Ryan does provide compelling arguments as he challenges conventional wisdom. Though perhaps not as revolutionary as the book likely was when first published, many of its messages still ring true. Even while it seems as if there is a greater awareness for the necessity of systemic social change in the general consciousness today, many universal solutions still elude us.
The reader should consider this work as not only a product of its time, but as one text within a body of literature on psychosocial urban studies. The reader will benefit most from culling the concepts from this book as many of Ryan’s examples, as well as his data, are out-dated. A healthy dose of skepticism, of which it seems Ryan should approve, will also allow the reader to maintain a certain degree of faith in academic research.
William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim first appeared in 1971, with this revised edition popping up just five years later in 1976. Over thirty years later, Ryan has made no new revisions. It would be telling, though perhaps dispiriting, to hear the author’s perspective on the current crop of Democratic senators, and the lack of transformational change.
Teachers College, Columbia University MAGGIE MOON
