
In the last decades, Western societies have witnessed a growing tendency of minority groups to profile themselves as victims in order to obtain more societal recognition (Moscovici & Pérez, 2009). Members of these minorities have publicly expressed negative attitudes towards other minorities, although the latter were not responsible for their past victimization. For example, Khalid Muhammad, from the Nation of Islam, stated that “The black Holocaust was 100 times worse than the so-called Jew Holocaust” (Muhammad, 1994, cited by Benn Michaels, 2006, p. 290), and “I say you call yourself Goldstein, Silverstein, and Rubinstein because you’re stealing all the gold and silver and rubies all over the earth” (Baltimore, 1994, cited by Anti-Defamation League, 2013). Dieudonné, a French humorist of African descent, declared that the recognition devoted to Jews for the Holocaust prevented him from denouncing the victimization of Blacks during slavery and colonialism (2005, February 17). He was recently convicted for anti-Semitism in Belgium (Wauters, 2015). This phenomenon was described and analyzed by sociologists (e.g., Chaumont, 1997), philosophers (Ricoeur, 2007), and philologists (Rothberg, 2009; Todorov, 1996, 1998), who framed it in terms of competition over symbolic recognition. So far, this phenomenon has not been systematically researched by social psychologists.
