White Guilt

“Oh my G*d, Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white.”

Mean Girls (2003)

 

The fruit is a metaphor for guilt, because, you know, Tree of Knowledge and all that. (Look, I know it’s not brilliant, but I’m tired and it was the best I could come up with...)

Around this time four years ago, I was busily embroiled in revision for my A2-level summer exams. I had three: a module 4 Chemistry paper; a two-and-a-half-hour French assessment including listening, reading, and writing components; and an essay exam for History concerning the progress of civil rights in the USA from 1865 to 1992.¹

Why my secondary school settled on US civil rights as the exam-assessed History topic for the Upper Sixth is entirely a mystery to me; I personally found the whole affair rather dull, especially trade union rights, and especially compared to our parallel coursework topic of the 1917 revolutions in Russia. Aside from my lack of enthusiasm for the course’s subject-matter, however, what was perhaps even less fun was the way I would find, in almost every lesson, what seemed to me a compelling reason to feel guilty for being white.

The bulk of what I learned about American civil rights history, I reckoned, could happily have been summed up as ‘White People Oppress Everyone Else’. Black Americans and Native Americans were the two minority groups we focussed on most heavily, and in each case the story was a grimly depressing one. Legalised segregation. Forced resettlement. Lynchings. Disenfranchisement. And when other racial and ethnic minorities got a peep into the curriculum,² things were just as bad: internment camps for Japanese Americans during the Second World War, for instance.

And my history class, a small group populated entirely by white kids, just sat there feeling horribly guilty about all of it.

It’s strange, isn’t it? All that stuff wasn’t, after all, us. It wasn’t even our ancestors, unless there was more hopping across the Pond in my classmates’ family trees than I formerly realised – not that that’s necessarily relevant either. These were atrocities committed decades ago by people we never knew nor had any connection with: to feel sad and angry would have been reasonable enough, commendable even, but guilty? Where did that come from?

Well, perhaps four years should have been long enough for me to come up with a decent answer to that question, but I’m still not sure I’ve got one, and I don’t doubt that people who actually study such things could do an immeasurably superior job of coming up with one than little old me. Still, I do have some small yield of the past few years’ ponderings to contribute towards the construction of an answer, as you’ve probably already gathered from the fact that this post has a few paragraphs left of it yet. Here’s what I think.

See, we know we’re not able to be plausibly implicated in those specific crimes against people of minority racial and ethnic backgrounds that I learned about in A-level History. Those are things we can look at from a safe distance shaking our heads, lamenting them and condemning them and generally making it clear we find them entirely regrettable and altogether repulsive. To express guilt over something makes it clear we deem said something unacceptable – and to express guilt over atrocities in which we played no part makes it abundantly clear that we’d never dream of actually playing a part in anything resembling such atrocities. In other words, by feeling guilty about other people’s crimes, we automatically avoid the question as to whether we’re guilty of any similar crimes ourselves.

Fellow white people, I’m certainly not suggesting that any of you ever helped lynch anybody or anything like that, but if you accept that discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities is still a problem in this day and age, then, well, the fact is that somebody’s got to be responsible for it. And much as it shames me to say it, I’m pretty blooming sure that I at least am part of the problem. I do take for granted that my own census category of White British is the norm in my society. I do prefer to avoid discourse in which the matter of racial and ethnic background features heavily. I do make snap judgements about people based on physical appearance. It’s not overt or explicit, and it certainly doesn’t prevent me from having the utmost love and respect for people from a whole variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds; it’s more subtle than that, more silent, more situation-specific – but I catch myself often enough to be sure that it’s there.

I read an article some time ago in which the author argued that white people are often happy to talk about the problem of racism in general terms, but never prepared to acknowledge the problem of ‘I, racist’.³ We blame the nameless, faceless System, or we blame those Other white people – and, I suggest, we feel vaguely guilty about our ‘privilege’ even as we are blind to the ways in which we personally abuse it. We can’t be blamed for having been born white any more than we can be blamed for the segregation and disenfranchisement and so on that was rampant in the US in previous decades – but if we feel guilty about something for which we’re not responsible, that gives us space to look the other way when it comes to something for which we are. If we determine to feel guilty about something for which we know we can’t reasonably be blamed, we assure ourselves that deep down, we are really innocent after all. Such guilt is, in a way, overdoing it; it’s a kind of ostentatious socio-cultural piety, if you will, a way of demonstrating what nice people we actually are. Vague, collective White Guilt both shifts the focus from our own sins as individuals and asserts that we are Not The Kind Of People who would commit such sins.

But if I know anything about sin, I know that assuring oneself of one’s innocence is a very dangerous place to be: if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.⁴ Admitting to being ‘I, racist’ is such a massive taboo in our society that it’s really no surprise that I should prefer to veil myself in the comfortable detachedness of White Guilt. But none of my wrongdoing and corruption can be veiled from the eyes of God who made all humankind in his image, and calls individuals from all peoples and nations to belong to the great assembly of those forgiven and made righteous by the blood of Jesus shed for them. And indeed, if I confess even the kinds of sins my culture (or subculture) deems most shameful (and not without reason), that reveals the depths of God’s mercy on me even more dramatically as he proves himself faithful and just to forgive me. Forgiveness, and the help of the Holy Spirit to fight against such sins as racism and grow into the righteousness I have already been freely gifted – that’s got to be better than manufacturing an illusory righteousness of my own by wallowing around in White Guilt, right?

Footnotes

¹ Would you like a Horrible Histories song about the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Of course you would: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHttUInZHTY. Audio and lyrics only, I’m afraid, but it’s still worth three minutes of your day.

² I wasn’t totally sure about the precise difference between race and ethnicity, so I asked the Internet for help – but I’m not convinced that what differencebetween.net says on the matter corresponds exactly to the way we use the terms in modern Britain, http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-ethnicity-and-race/, so I’ve plumped for covering all bases by using both terms together on every occasion.

³ I even managed to find said article in my browser history: http://www.differencebetween.net/science/nature/difference-between-ethnicity-and-race/. (This is why you should never delete that jazz.) The argument’s got much more to it than the one point I remembered, and it’s far better informed than my argument here, so maybe just go and read that instead.

⁴ That’s from the first letter of John, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John+1&version=ESVUK, and seems to have become a bit of a favourite of mine.