White guilt

White guilt is the individual or collective guilt felt by some white people for harm resulting from racist treatment of ethnic minorities by whites both historically and currently.^[1] White guilt has been described as one of the psychosocial costs of racism for white individuals along with empathy (sadness and anger) for victims of racism and fear of non-whites.^[2]

It can be characterized as a strong, emotional feeling of direct responsibility for the unequal circumstances of ethnic minorities living in historically and culturally European nations, or the Western world largely due to historical exclusion of non-whites from mainstream white society. Discomfort when talking about issues involving race is also a common characteristic of white guilt.

Judith Katz, the author of the 1978 publication White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training, is critical of what she calls self-indulgent white guilt fixations. Her concerns about white guilt led her to move from black-white group encounters to all-white groups in her anti-racism training. She also avoided using non-white people to re-educate whites, she said, because she found that this led whites to focus on getting acceptance and forgiveness rather than changing their own actions or beliefs.^[3]

A report in The Washington Post from 1978 describes the exploitation of white guilt by con artists: "Telephone and mail solicitors, trading on 'white guilt' and on government pressure to advertise in minority-oriented publications, are inducing thousands of businessmen to buy ads in phony publications."^[4]

Shelby Steele, a conservative black political writer, discussed the concept extensively in his 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Steele criticizes "white guilt" saying that it is nothing more than an alternative interpretation of the concept of "black power":

Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed by it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty and so on. [...] The authority they lose transfers to the 'victims' of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why white guilt is quite literally the same thing as Black power.^[5]

George F. Will, a conservative American political columnist, wrote: "[White guilt is] a form of self-congratulation, where whites initiate "compassionate policies" toward people of color, to showcase their innocence to racism.^[6]

Commentator Sunny Hundal, writing for The Guardian, stated that it is "reductionist" to assign political opinions to a collective guilt such as "white guilt" and that few people on the left actually hold the views being ascribed to them by the conservative writers who expound on the concept of "white guilt" and its implications.^[7] Hundal concludes: "Not much annoys me more than the stereotype that to be liberal is to be full of guilt. To be socially liberal, in my view, is to be more mindful of compassion and empathy for others."

One academic paper suggests that in France, white guilt may be a common feature of management of race relations – in contrast to other European countries.^[8]

See also

• White privilege
• Reverse racism
• The White Man's Burden
• Black shame
• Colonial mentality
• Self-hating Jew
• German collective guilt

References

Further reading

• White Guilt: Its Antecedents and Consequences for Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action
• White Guilt and Racial Compensation: The Benefits and Limits of Self-Focus
• Teaching White Students About Racism: The Search for White Allies and the Restoration of Hope
• White Guilt: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Emergent Racisms in the Contemporary United States