I was conversing with a black commenter, who also happened to be gay, which the conversation was mainly about; and he calls me a racist. I looked back at that post and could not see what was racist about it. I did make a comment about some people in the black community but I couldn’t see how that could be construed as being racist. Then I thought he probably used that word, maybe subconsciously, to shut off the conversation or to put me in my place, so to speak. At that point Shelby Steele and his book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. came to mind. I found this long essay, brilliantly written. More than half way through are these paragraphs which is his explanation of White Guilt.
What is white guilt? It is not a personal sense of remorse over past wrongs. White guilt is literally a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality, and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America’s historical racism. It is the stigmatization of whites and, more importantly, American institutions with the sin of racism. Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative–that they are not racist–to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity. If they fail to prove the negative, they will be seen as racists. Political correctness, diversity policies, and multiculturalism are forms of deference that give whites and institutions a way to prove the negative and win reprieve from the racist stigma.
Institutions especially must be proactive in all this. They must engineer a demonstrable racial innocence to garner enough authority for simple legitimacy in the American democracy. No university today, private or public, could admit students by academic merit alone if that meant no black or brown faces on campus. Such a university would be seen as racist and shunned accordingly. White guilt has made social engineering for black and brown representation a condition of legitimacy.
People often deny white guilt by pointing to its irrationality–“I never owned a slave,” “My family got here eighty years after slavery was over.” But of course almost nothing having to do with race is rational. That whites are now stigmatized by their race is not poetic justice; it is simply another echo of racism’s power to contaminate by mere association. >>entire essay here
It is a long essay but well worth the time. It also might explain one of the reasons why Obama is president today.
Out of the Cave 