I am a victim. As a white male raised as a Protestant with a good deal of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, I might have thought I was in a privileged position. But no. According to Trump and Hegseth and those around them, DEI and wokeness have victimized me. This, however, is not the first time America has been turned upside down in order to proclaim white victimization. In Joy S. Kasson’s cultural and historical examination of William Cody and his Wild West Show that supposedly depicted the frontier, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000), she concludes that his performances inverted reality and made whites the victims in encounters with Indians. This view persisted in novels and later in some movies and radio and TV shows. Kasson says that, like some Civil War histories, the show honored individuals—it was Buffalo Bill to the rescue—and made (white) self-defense its theme.
A lawsuit that I have not followed closely maintains that social media harms and knowingly addicts children and must be changed or stopped. This may seem like a modern topic, but it is not. When I was a kid, something similar was said about comic books. Dr. Fredric Wertham led the charge denigrating comics. A well-regarded German-American psychiatrist who treated poor Black clients in Harlem and whose work was cited in Brown v. Board of Education, he became famous for his 1954 best seller, The Seduction of the Innocent. His book contended that comic books had deleterious effects on childhood development. He attacked comics with the pseudo-scientific gobbledygook of the Freudian: “You cannot understand present day juvenile delinquency if you do not take into account the pathogenic and pathoplastic influence of comic books, that is, the way in which they cause trouble or the form trouble takes.” Attention-seeking politicians held congressional hearings. Schools burned comic books. New York passed anti-comics legislation, which was vetoed by Governor Thomas Dewey on constitutional grounds. The anti-comics crusaders were early to the anti-DEI movement. Jeremy Dauber in American Comics: A History (2022)tells us: “To Wertham, Wonder Woman wasn’t a symbol of female empowerment, but precisely the opposite. Not because she was tied up so much, an argument with potential merit, but simply because she was strong, and thus ‘an undesirable ideal for girls: To be strong is to be unwomanly, and to have strong close associates who are female is automatically lesbian and horrific.’”
Similar attacks on the deleterious effect of modern culture on the youth of America preceded and succeeded the anti-comics crusade. Of course, it is the amusing, nostalgic premise of the Music Man. In “You Got Trouble,” it is not pool alone that is corrupting, but also the shameless music of ragtime and other media. Harold Hill asks the River Citians, “Is a crime novel hidden in the corn crib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Cap’n Billy’s Whiz Bang?”
At almost the same time as the attack on comic books, similar things were said about how early TV was corrupting our youth and then a few years later, rock ‘n’ roll was vehemently condemned. As a comic book reader, an early TV watcher, and a listener to early rock, I am surprised I did not spend my life in jail, but it is still possible that I am going to hell.
(Tipper Gore’s Parents’ Music Resource Center did not seek to smash vinyl as did the earlier movement against rock. It sought to place labels on albums to indicate to parents that the records contained explicit lyrics. According to them, the goal was not to censor or ban, but to inform.)
