Having been the target of a rapist, nothing angers me faster than someone calling me a “victim”.

I was a target – not a victim.

Just as the difference between a victim and a target are completely different, a victim mentality and the mentality of a target are completely different. While targets are trying to avoid people who are targeting them, victims are trying to avoid accidents and dangerous activities.

The dictionary makes these differences crystal clear.

Target: a person, object, or place selected as the aim of an attack.

Victim: a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.

Black people were the targets of slaveholders (not their victims). Likewise, black people were, and still are, the targets of deliberate and calculated actions which include Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, lynchings, redlining, profiling, ghettoization, segregation, mass incarceration, etc.

Of course, those are just my thoughts.