Marie Kawthar Daouda is a Lecturer in French at Oriel College, Oxford University. Born and raised in Morocco in a bilingual French and Moroccan Arabic family she enrolled in the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris at 17 and completed her doctorate in French and Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne. Her just published book, NOT YOUR VICTIM: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, deserves to be read by all of us concerned about current events and education. Her thesis is that “the narrative according to which all the evil in the world is the result of the involvement of the white Western man is infantilizing, historically erroneous, and nurtures the very prejudices it claims to fight. It is culturally divisive, and valorizes victimhood above individual and collective agency. Moreover, it entertains the idea that members of ethnic minorities can only succeed and thrive if and when white people express their regret for the colonial past.”

The call to ‘decolonize’ history by attributing evils of the past on former white supremacists and seeking reparations and blame to create guilt on Europeans and North Americans reveals ignorance and a condescending attitude towards the Global South. Bemoaning the alleged victimhood of the colored races and putting them in the category of the oppressed only serves to assert the moral superiority of the left-leaning Western liberal elite. Rousseau’s view of the Noble Savage obscures the realities of slave-owning African and Asian cultures. The Global South has never been a utopia. The transatlantic trade appears as the original sin of the West, with no regard to the log history of the slave trade in Africa by Africans, or to the enslavement of white people throughout history. The toppling of statues in the USA and the UK was not about history but about present political and social issues. The wish to destroy symbols of the past is rooted in the need to scapegoat something in order to legitimize the passage into a new era. How can we say we are good? How can we signal that we are not racist? Throw our sins on a statue, of course, then have that statue thrown into a river. The architectural history of the West is full of echoes of the past that cannot, and will not, be made comfortable to everyone. No era in history is perfect. The past is a violent place, an ‘uncomfortable’ realization for some. Some people feel threatened by visual traces of our history. What will our heirs feel about our generation? Will they judge us and cancel us too?

Proponents of critical race theory encourage self-depreciation in order to gain popularity. Robin Di Angelo writes in White Fragility, “White identity is inherently racist. To be less white is to be less racially oppressive. To be less white is to be open to, interested in, and compassionate toward the racial realities of people of color.” The sacrifice of Western culture on the altar of guilt about our racial and imperial past ends up being just as racist as any historical crime it seek to expiate.

The progressive culture wishes to see everything in terms of tensions between the oppressor and the oppressed. Nowadays victimhood is the spirit of the age that seems to grasp young adults and throw them into fits of rage on TikTok, around statues, or facing protests of trans-exclusionary radical feminists. The feeling of victimhood is contagious, and just like hysteria, it is likely to be mainly in your head, and to get better once you accept that you are unhappy, not sick. Race occupies a special category among the victimhood labels. It is immutable.

Cultural levels in education have been lowered in the name of inclusion. The progressive left, wishes to fabricate equality by engineering and artificial equality of outcome. We must all be the same. We are now expected to be as mediocre as everyone else. Imagine growing up surrounded by the lullabies of white guilt, telling you that everything you do as a white person, is inherently evil, conditioned by centuries of evil, and bound to perpetuate evil; and that all you can do is apologize and turn your life into a long string of reparations for the sins of your forefathers.

Secular thought is unable to address the problem of evil without reverting to pre-Christian mechanisms of scapegoating. To a Christian, and to a Christian society, the horrors of life were made to make sense by the belief that God himself went through each and every one of them to set us free from the fear of death, the desire for revenge, and the tyranny of envy. All the ethical norms that govern modern liberal democracies, even the very idea of human rights and human dignity, bear deep within them that trace of a loving intelligence that found no other way to tell its creatures about its love for them than to take human flesh and die.

The best way to put an end to the endless grievances of victimhood culture is to remind ourselves that life is good. What is the point in living in an ethnically diverse country if everyone is expected to have the same view that everything is a power struggle, and that nothing means anything at all. People in the West are starved for meaning. The victimhood narrative makes an attempt at filling a religious void. The sense of meaning is essential to happiness. For Pascal, that wish for happiness, which he saw as a wish for the knowledge of God, is impossible to forego. Our Western culture traces a quest for the only thing that could every satisfy a human heart: the truth of divine, sacrificial love, for each and every one of us. Christianity alone teaches us that no one is blameless, yet everyone is priceless in the eyes of a God who died for love. The peace so many of us yearn for can only be found through an individual encounter with the only spotless victim.

I have not done justice to Marie’s narrative and commend you read the 162 pages. It is a rich response to many of our current political and social conflicts.