The Wrong Victims

Abstract

In mainstream journalism, public discourse, and some of the most impassioned interdisciplinary discussions about violence in the humanities, there is a constant and insidious misidentification of the primary victims of violence. This misidentification operates under the aegis of two disparate but surprisingly symbiotic terms: trauma and terrorism. These terms provide emotionally compelling but politically distressing justifications for preferring the victims of symbolic violence to those who suffer from direct physical harm and routine privation. While we should resist what historian Peter Novick has called the “sordid game” of trying to claim superior victimization for one group or another on the basis of specific historical horrors, we should—indeed we must—make a distinction between symbolic violence and physical violence, particularly when these differences are indices of the very structures of inequity that violence maintains (Novick 1999, 9–10). As Edward Said suggests at the close of his classic essay, “The Essential Terrorist,” which applies to our investment in trauma as well, our preoccupation with terrorism “is dangerous because it consolidates the immense, unrestrained, pseudopatriotic narcissism we are nourishing” (Said 1988, 158). Our involvement in the drama of our terror and trauma, so often established through forms of proxy and identification, blinds us to violence suffered across the globe.