Focusing on personal responsibility can dilute a group’s adversarial diagnosis and suppress rebellion

Evidence

Gupta’s (1998) analysis of the predicament of the African American community supports the proposed role of adversarial attributions. He argued that despite widespread grievances among African Americans, the notion of a “common enemy” has been diluted in the post-civil rights era, which in turn undermined collective rebellion. He noted that even the Million Men March of 1995 contributed to this dilution because its main message was not the struggle against the dominant White group as the enemy. Instead, it focused on African Americans’ personal responsibilities and thus fostered internal attributions. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4430

Categorization

• SEED: Interesting essay angle: how internal-attribution messaging (self-help, responsibility, respectability politics) can undermine collective grievance movements — a critique applicable to Booker T. Washington vs. Du Bois, and modern movements.
• SHARE: Would send to someone studying social movements or Black political thought — the claim that the Million Man March’s personal-responsibility framing diluted the common-enemy narrative is a sharp, counterintuitive observation.
• XREF: connects to: Group immersion and ideological training erode individual moral decision making in perpetrators. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 136