Blaming the Victim
By: Terry Barr
Tags: Literally Literary, Exulansis, Nonfiction, Family, Education

Blaming the Victim

Literally Literary and The Writing Cooperative prompt

Photo by Clayton Cardinalli on Unsplash

For three years as an undergraduate, I claimed a Social Work major. I wanted to do good work for the poor and disadvantaged. I was minoring in English and decided to take a course in Southern Literature in which we read several Faulkner short stories and his masterwork, Absalom, Absalom! As I read Faulkner’s prose about the benighted south, I felt kinship. I was an Alabamian, after all. I said goodbye to Social Work then and became an English major.

Yet from my social work days, I will always remember William Ryan’s seminal text, Blaming the Victim, from which he reflected on our nation’s pervasive, negative attitude toward our “have-nots.” An attitude that blames these unfortunate people for the downward course of their lives. That the poverty, neglect, and abuse they suffer is entirely their doing.

That they don’t have a job because they are too lazy to hold one.

Getting a job isn’t easy under any circumstance. I applied for approximately 100 college teaching positions up and down the eastern half of this country. My wife, herself finishing her Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology, was willing to go wherever I could get a job.

Of those 100 applications, I landed two interviews.

The one I got was at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. Clinton, a former mill town, had fallen on hard times. The mill had shut down, and the town’s population, hovering at 10,000, was on the wane.

So upon my hiring, the first question I had for the college was whether or not it could also employ my wife, and if it couldn’t do that, could it help her find a job? I noticed early on that many faculty member’s spouses had staff jobs on campus, in the library and in administration.

However, the college already had a counselor, a member of the psychology faculty. As we all know, one counselor for 1200 students is surely adequate.

To her credit, though, this professional helped my wife find a job in another town to the south of Clinton— a good state job with benefits. The catch was that since we had freely chosen to live in Greenville, forty-five miles to the north of Clinton, our commute would be close to 200 miles per day, given that we had one car. We made this commute for two years until my wife became pregnant, quit that job, and then after our baby was a few months old, went into private practice.

In the end, everything worked out for us, and we’ve been in these same jobs for over thirty years, have raised two daughters, and finally got that second car.

So I shouldn’t complain. I am a full professor, have tenure, love my colleagues, students, and the courses I teach. Sure, there have been conflicts and down times, and the salary isn’t up to competitive standards, at least for those at my rank. Over my tenure, I have taught courses in Southern Literature, Film Studies, Creative Nonfiction, and I inaugurated a course in American Literature and Ethnic Identity, in which I have taught such works as Typical American, by Gish Jen, The Romance Reader, by Pearl Abraham, and Caucasia, by Danzy Senna.

I started this ethnic lit course for three reasons:

Our students are predominately Caucasian. My wife is a native of Iran. I am half-Jewish.

Of these three reasons, the last two formed the problem that I can never forget.

My “Exulansis.”