Shades of Gray-White Guilt, Black Shame

Anti-Americanism on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. . . Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. . . This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at a very slight echo of the imperialist past. . .

White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it.

Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem-- win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy. . .

Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites—and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true.

There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.

This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems.

....Guilt is the natural--and correct--emotion to feel when as an American--one is confronted by America's slavery past. This doesn't mean I ought to go flogging myself all the time (shame). It does mean that I ought to be aware of the past and work to change the system where it is broken… IF it is broken. When I call myself an American, I don't get to cherry-pick which parts of America's identity I bring along. For slavery is as much a part of America as The Emancipation Proclamation; Japanese Internment as much as the Bill of Rights; Guantanamo Bay as much as The Berlin Airlifts. So, by calling myself American, I give myself to a country that both enables some of the best opportunities for social change and justice in the world and has facets that require deep change.

For every white racist, I've met a black one.

Black people during the civil rights movement, took charge, fought out a peaceful revolution… and WON against a society in which they were outnumbered ten to one. They won a personal victory, then turned right around and put their future in the hands of the larger society.

To understand that, just consider another theoretical option.

What if, in 1965, every black person had left America and started a new nation? They would have put all of their energy into education and development--because they'd have had to become competitive with the world. They would have focused on hard work and conservative values. There's no doubt that our new nation would have had conservative politics.

Instead, the Black society, mis-led by militant Black leaders chose a different path. They were smack in the middle of a society that knew what it had done to them before. There was a profound amount of guilt.

Blacks knew that guilt was there, and we had a U.S. President who was reeling backwards, putting the responsibility on whites to make things up to them, promising to end poverty. Blacks bought into that, and it made them weak. They bought into precisely the opposite of what they should have done.

The real problem was a lack of development. Most Blacks weren't educated. They weren't competitive. And so rather than really tackle those problems within Black society, "Black leaders" just kept saying, "Well, you guys haven't given us a good enough school yet. You haven't given us good enough this, or good enough that." Blacks had this wonderful excuse.

All of these government programs were bound to fail from the start, because the people they were meant to serve had not taken responsibility for using them. By accepting the idea that government is somehow going to take over the responsibility that only individuals can take, Blacks relinquished authority over themselves. They became child-like, and their families began to fall to pieces. Welfare--which promised a subsistence living for the rest of your days for doing absolutely nothing--provided a perfect incentive to not get married, yet still have babies. Then the babies will be state wards, and their babies, and so forth.

The incentive is just to stay in that rut. And so the goodwill of America finally did do to Blacks what slavery and segregation failed to do. It destroyed the Black family, destroyed the Black character, and now black America is in a struggle. The struggle to stand up like men and women and take charge of

their own lives, and become competitive with other people in the modern world.

If American Blacks don't do this, they'll always be behind. But if they do take charge of our own lives, they'll be men and women among equals.

A central answer is education. This isn't complicated. If you can't compete with whites and Asians, you're going to be an inferior class of people. But Blacks don't have any of leaders telling them that. All they keep doing is making excuses for failure, for weakness, for irresponsibility. White leaders in America don't have the courage to tell the truth either. If they did they would say: "Look, I'm talking to you black people. If you want to make it, if you want to stop being behind everybody, you've got to become serious about education, without making excuses about bad school districts and how you don't get the funding."

I don't expect anything to change until the current "civil rights leadership" just dies off. They're really past their usefulness at this point, and they've become part of the problem. They're concerned with nothing except keeping their people in the Democratic Party.

Politically, black America is almost socialistic. There's a belief that the government is the vehicle that's going to lift them to equality, and without the government, they'll never make it. Black America has suffered from this delusion since the 1960s. It's gotten to the point where they've now made affiliation with the Democratic Party an aspect of the black American identity. No matter who the Democratic nominee is, they get 90 percent of the black vote in every single election. If you are black and not a Democrat, it's said you're not authentically black--the "civil rights leadership" vigorously enforces that. So you have this disjuncture in black life: they're culturally conservative, but politically, blacks are far, far left.

Affirmative action smears every single black person. There are no blacks who are free from that stigma, and that's a terrible thing to do to people who are trying to succeed on their own. I think affirmative action is the worst cruelty blacks have endured since slavery.

Following the Civil Rights Act of 1965, blacks made the worst mistake in their history: putting their faith in the hands of outside saviors. The idea that somebody else can lift you up, can teach you skills, and make you competitive is just ridiculous. That sort of abject dependence has never worked, and it never will.

Blacks do well in sports, music, entertainment, and literature—because there's absolutely no white intervention, paternalism, affirmative action, or anything else. They compete without any assistance, and sure enough, they compete. They succeed. In these areas, whites never intervene, so Blacks ask the best and Blacks get the best.

But in colleges and other places, there are a billion excuses. Whites intervene and convince themselves not to ask much. It's the same old vicious cycle.

Affirmative action and all of its sundry manifestations should be completely eliminated. It stigmatizes all blacks, and it's not voluntary. One of the real cruelties of affirmative action is that whether Blacks want it or not, it is imposed on them, simply because of the color of their skin. You don't get to opt out.

You shouldn't be able to go onto a campus and have a separate black graduation ceremony, a separate black student union, a black studies department. Why do Blacks get all these racial things, but Whites can't have them? Why?

White paternalism and guilt is behind it, because it allows whites to effectively take credit for Black advancement. Just like slavery, affirmative action allows blacks to be used, and bestows on them a stigma of being inferior. It's a stunning cruelty. Black "leaders" ought to have a "Million Man March" on Washington to end paternalism and affirmative action; not marching to keep it.

Political correctness is an outgrowth of white guilt. It's a way for guilty-feeling whites to constantly indicate that they're not racist, not colonialists, not imperialists, not warmongers, and so on. It's a kind of ritualization of life by which some whites free themselves of the stigma that history has left them. History has left whites stigmatized as racists, just like blacks were stigmatized as inferior. Both of those are irrational conclusions, but that's how stigma works. And political correctness is a way to address that.

White guilt defines liberalism. It is a response to the stigma that white Americans bear for practicing racism for four centuries. Whites live with this constant pressure of having to demonstrate to the world that they're not bigots, and this manifests itself in many facets of American life. You see it in our politics, you see it in war, you see it in our immigration debates--the real topic at hand is always secondary, because we're first trying to prove we're not racist.

Blacks have done worse since the Civil Rights Act of 1965 than they did in segregation. It's abominable that Blacks made more advances between 1945 and 1965 than they have since, but it's the truth.

Something people overlook is the shock of becoming free. When an oppressor finally takes his foot off your neck--whether it's the European powers withdrawing from their colonies, or whites in America passing civil rights legislation and starting a Great Society--the group that has created an entire culture to cope with oppression is suddenly disoriented.

Becoming free can give a profound shock. Blacks don't have the values in place for dealing with it. They don't have the ideas. They have the mechanisms for wearing masks, for manipulating an oppressor, for surviving under harsh circumstances; they've become geniuses at that. But they don't know what to do with freedom.

So when Blacks come to freedom, they experience it as a humiliation, as an embarrassment, as a shame. Now, for the first time, Blacks see how far behind they actually are. they see how long it'll take to catch up with the people they suddenly have to compete with. And in some cases, they lock up in terror. Freedom has just terrorized Black Americans. They are scared to death of it. And rather than admit that, Blacks say we're still living in a racist society, or that the government isn't doing its job. Blacks and especially "Black leaders" make excuse after excuse after excuse. But the bottom line is that Blacks have failed to stand up to the challenges of freedom. And that's terrifying because it shows just how much work lies ahead.

The great promise of the United States of America lies in the wonderful interplay between individual freedom and individual responsibility. That's the secret of our greatness; it always has been, and it always will be. Identity politics, "Black politics", requires being evaluated on the color of your skin, or the group you're supposed to belong to. If America continues to go in that direction, then we're in trouble.

In today's black community, a leader is only a real black if he's angry at white America. But if I'm an angry black man who's independent--and thinks we have to help ourselves in order to become self-sufficient--then I'm an Uncle Tom.

I'm old enough to remember segregation. Where I grew up, whites had no shame about being racist. My grandparents used to explain that racism and segregation were God's will. And they were perfectly comfortable with it.

Today, there's no white person that could do that. Among whites, things have changed. No one wants white supremacists around. Sure, there are some, but America's transformation is just amazing.

Now it's time for blacks to make a similar transformation, to grow up, and take responsibility for their own future. If they don't do it, they're not going to have prospects that amount to very much. If they do it, they'll be able to succeed. We've come to a place in our history where the real onus for change is on black Americans.

It must be so hard for liberals to be white, guilty and stupid. White guilt is the single most destructive trend of the last fifty years. How many black lives have been destroyed by white guilt? How many families? A white person starts feeling guilty. “My ancestors may have caused the suffering of this other (almost always black) person,” they think. They draw the conclusion that the non-white person is a victim!

The next step: being a victim means being a loser or a saint. This has nothing to do with race, it’s actually a much deeper cultural tendency and runs deep through various religions.

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in the rule of Fortune. Many thought that those who were lowest on Fortune’s wheel, such as slaves or the chronically unlucky, should be socially avoided. Their suffering was contagious and could drag down those higher on the wheel. But Christianity stresses the redemptive value of suffering: the meek shall inherit the earth.

The guilty white person believes that suffering has ennobled the black person to a near mystical degree. This is the origin of all those silly Magic Negro fictional characters.

But suffering doesn’t really make people any more noble in their real-life actions. In fact, it often makes them stressed, depressed, apathetic and mean. Overcoming suffering builds character, but suffering on its own tends to limit people horribly.

Black Africans don’t feel any guilt. Not once have Black Africans ever apologized to Black Americans of African descent for selling their ancestors (Black Americans) for rum and beads.

The healthy and pragmatic approaches are to not feel guilty in the first place, or else work through and move past the guilt/resentment dynamic.

Black rage was not created by racism but by the white guilt that accompanied the end of the era of racism. Black rage would have been useless under a harsh racist regime. Wounds and injustices only create the potential for anger, but weakness in the oppressor calls out for anger, even when there is no injustice. In both the best and worst sense of the word, black rage is always a kind of opportunism. In other words, rage became politically and economically useful -- for some -- only when there was white guilt to exploit. Black rage had to lead to black power to be advantageous.

For those who wonder how we got from fighting specific racist laws and barriers to the notion of vague institutional racism and collective guilt, a rising Marxist tendency among black intellectuals came just as white guilt became the federal government's official position. This gave the new breed of so-called civil rights leaders the chance to benefit from keeping the fight going. The Marxian emphasis on structures gave the new militant leaders of the time an infinitely larger racism to work with. Systematic racism would have to be answered with systematic redress.

Black liberals encourage the guilt/privilege game. They want to be among the few winners of the bigger game. The mainstream of the black leadership eschewed cultural reform in favor of racial preferences and race-based programs. The usually stated reason for this is an ideological commitment to equality of results, but in too many cases, the reason is that civil rights activists found that color-conscious approach far more profitable for themselves. Many of them, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Marion Barry, became black professionals . . . by becoming professional blacks.

But white guilt is not just a racket for those who declared themselves heirs of the legitimate civil rights movement. White liberals make careers of it, too. From college professors to heads of charitable foundations, to "religious leaders, dissociating themselves and their institutions from America's racist authoritarian past is an imperative that trumps all others. Affirmative action is the ultimate in dissociation, as a program that helps whites feel better more than it helps blacks to achieve progress in their lives. In fact, it stigmatizes black accomplishments at the same time it discourages them.

Affirmative action effectively turns blacks into clones of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" -- if society sees them at all, it registers only the color of their skin, not who they are.

White liberals play the guilt/privilege game because it lets them stay white liberals. They realize that their lives are based on a bigger game that has few winners and many losers, and its current rules make it easier for some whites to win. They think that if they tweak the rules to eliminate the effect of racialization, the bigger game will become fair, even though it will still have few winners and many losers.

From a religious point of view, “white guilt” is wrong: you don’t inherit the sins of your parents. What you inherit is the world. And in that world, there are many reasons why many people are poor.

Affirmative action was a seemingly humane social gesture that was actually quite diabolical in its consequences, not only causing racial conflict because of its inequities, but also validating blacks’ fears of inferiority and reinforcing racial stereotypes.

Diversity’ was one of those concepts that sounded so good, a notion that called up images of different people standing joyously on a mountaintop singing ‘We Are the World.’ How could you oppose it? Of course, later on I understood that the people who use this word define it in a very narrow way.

For them, diversity means people who have dark skin or wear a pants suit and unquestioningly support their ‘progressive’ political line. ‘Diversity’ is really about forming group caucuses and has nothing to do with the individual’s heart and soul, which is where true diversity exists.

Affirmative action has hardened into an ideology in search of a justification. “Diversity is simply the old racism in a new guise, spiced up with a touch of sexism.”

Shades of Gray – Affirmative Discrimination

“Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties and nations it is the rule”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Affirmative action has a tangled history that illustrates the legal and moral dilemmas of race.  It has proud roots-the struggle during the 1950s and 1960s that abolished legal discrimination-but it has borne bitter fruit.  It has become the practice of discrimination in the name of equality the practice of injustice in the name of justice.  Perhaps nowhere else in our society of good intentions gone so sadly wrong, and good sense been driven so completely from the field.

The original desire to create affirmative action was understandable.  If racist barriers had kept large numbers of talented blacks from getting good jobs or going to good schools, such people should surely be found with little effort.  Once found and given equal opportunity, they would succeed at the same rate as whites.  If there was to be preferential treatment, it would be nothing more than the small effort it might take to find qualified blacks.

As with most things regarding race, this was not that simple.  Even before the civil rights laws, gifted blacks found routes to success.  Even after passing the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and subsequent other draconian measures, the reservoir of competent but excluded blacks at universities and employers hoped to find was really much smaller than expected.  The unfortunate truth has become that if blacks are to be represented at University on work and in workforces of anything even approaching their percentages in the population, standards have to be lowered for them.

This upside down inequality was often justified by past racism.  If a job applicant did not meet professional standards, it did not mean he was unable to do the job.  He might have been kept out of a good university because he was black, and with a little on-the-job training, he would soon be a capable worker. 

The same cockeyed reasoning was held true for college admissions.  Black applicants have presumably been forced to go to inferior high schools, so with a little catch-up work they would become solid students. 

This thinking was then expanded to junior high school, grade school, preschool, even whole life.  Past racism made it impossible for blacks to benefit from strictly equal opportunity, so was only fair to weigh the scales a little in their favor.  For example, the original idea behind Headstart was that poor blacks were at a disadvantage from the beginning.  A boost during the early years would enable them to take advantage of equal opportunities and compete successfully with whites.

In some cases, blacks quickly caught up with the mainstream, but all too often they did not.  What was originally intended as a temporary relaxation of standards hardened into permanent racial preferences.  The gap in black/white achievement refused to go away, and what became institutionalized reverse racial discrimination was justified by claiming that the persistent racial gap in achievement could be due only to persistent white racism.

Affirmative action preferences for blacks are now over 40 years old and show no signs of fading away.  Indeed, if anything, they are more entrenched than ever, and the hypocrisy and bitterness they give rise to our fatal to any hope for amicable race relations.

 The legal basis for affirmative action is the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The act followed a well-established trend in our thinking about race.  By then, a clear majority of Americans had come to realize that racial discrimination was wrong and demeaning to everyone.

Though popular mythology and revisionist history dates all programs for the improvement of black life from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, upper trends in black employment, income, and educational opportunities were already well established by then.  The first antidiscrimination laws actually date from 30 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and were passed during the new deal.  The public Works administration required contractors to set black hiring quotas.  The first black federal judge had been appointed by Franklin Bell and all Roosevelt in 1937, and the black congressman became the head of the Government operations committee in 1949.  During the Second World War, for merchant marine ships have black captains who commanded White Cruz, and several ships were named after black seamen who died heroically in the service.  In 1945, a black officer was put in command of a US military base.  In 1948 President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, requiring equal treatment of the races in the military, and set up the fair employment practices committee to oversee civilian employment.  When Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it hardly change the mood of America; it bowed to it.

Congress is very clear intent was to remove racist consideration in the lives of Americans, its famous title VII was written to end discrimination in employment.  Section 70 3(8) forbade any employer to "limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."  The wording of the law was verbose but clear.  However, some lawmakers worried that the act would be used to justify reverse discrimination, or racial quotas in hiring.  Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was one of the bill's most powerful backers, stoutly denied the act could ever be interpreted in that way.  He promised on the floor of the Senate that he would physically eat the paper the bill was written on if it were ever used to require corrective hiring preferences.  As a further safeguard, Congress put in section 703 (j) of title VII which states: "nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer…. to grant preferential treatment to any individual or any group because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance…” America had legally and officially dismantled the color barrier.

The first government mandate for racial preferences was what became known as the "Philadelphia plan", instituted by the Department of Labor in 1969.  Government contractors in Philadelphia were told that if they did not come up with minority hiring goals their bids would not be considered.  For the first time, private employers were on notice that in the absence of discrimination was not enough; they had to employ a certain number of non-whites through race-conscious hiring schemes.  Since race-consciousness in hiring was the very thing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had prohibited, the Nixon administration had unilaterally repealed an act of Congress.

It is also interesting to note how very quickly the people who had argued that race was a relevant change their minds.  In the famous 1954 legal brief filed in the school does segregation case of Brown versus Board of Education, the NAACP had professed its "dedicated belief... that the Constitution is colorblind" and that "the 14th amendment compels the states to be colorblind and exercising their power and authority."  As soon as there was a chance the blacks might benefit from reverse discrimination, the NAACP forgot all about the colorblind Constitution.  The revisionists pursue a civil rights agenda in name only.  Their shift in focus was deceptively subtle, relying upon familiar terms with broad support such as "freedom" and "equality".  In reality however, the revisionists embarked upon an ambitious new program of social engineering and wealth redistribution that is profoundly antithetical to the traditional civil rights vision.

This change in direction when largely unchallenged.  The goal of the "civil rights" movement changed from equality for all to preferences for some. 

When it became clear that merely ending legal discrimination would not lead to quick parity, a new set of arguments arose to justify a new form of racial preferences: slavery was a terrible thing that whites did to blacks.  Slavery and racism have ever since been the reason why blacks do not get ahead.  All whites must take responsibility for these crimes, whether or not their ancestors owned slaves or discriminated against blacks.  Therefore, society will now compensate blacks for these crimes even if it means penalizing whites.  This philosophy of white guilt, this theory of Justice, is hypocrisy and the line.  Whites are guilty simply because they are white.  A black gets preference over a better qualified white because some whites, at some point in the past, discriminated against some blacks.  It makes no difference if neither the black nor the White was ever within 100 miles an act of discrimination.  While normally a man is innocent until proven guilty, under affirmative action he is guilty without trial or appeal.  Even if a white job seeker would approve himself completely innocent of discrimination, he is guilty simply because he is white.  A white man can therefore be guilty-and punished-even if proven innocent.  A white immigrant to this country can be penalized because white people he is not even related to one's own slaves.  This is dangerous nonsense of precisely the kind that Hubert Humphrey assured us was unthinkable.  Yet now it is institutionalized.

Supporters of affirmative action argue that this is not what really happened.  They insist the preferences for women and minorities do not mean discrimination against white man.  It is hard to understand, even in theory, how preference for one group is possible without prejudice against another.  Preferences for whites have always been called discrimination against blacks.  If a certain number of slots are held aside for blacks, they are not available to whites.  Nevertheless many people use the terms "affirmative action" and "equal opportunity" which are exact opposites, as if they had identical meanings "civil rights leaders" argue that affirmative action is simply any action taken to ensure, or affirm, equal opportunity for all pressed or previously disadvantaged groups.

What is astonishing is that white society goes along with this.  America has done something that few nations ever do: put an official, legal end to discrimination against minorities.  Now blacks demand that America do something no nation on earth had ever done: officially discriminate in favor of minorities. 

Why on earth do whites except us?  The following theory tends to explain it: it is one thing-and difficult enough-to convince a majority to support equal rights; it is yet another to convince it to voluntarily subordinate its own rights in favor of the minority.  The rationale advanced for such subordination was guilt-White Guilt- white Americans were judged guilty of imposing the conditions of slavery, and were held responsible for its manifestations, which reviewed to encompass every conceivable malady affecting blacks.  Therefore, in order to redeem itself, the white majority was called upon not only to ensure freedom and opportunity for blacks but to furnish "reparations" as well.  While these reparations have not yet taken the form of monetary payments, although there is an ongoing congressional effort to implement exactly that, they have taken the form of officially sanctioned discrimination against the white majority in employment, education, business and housing.

Is this really the kind of society we want to build?  In this climate, it is no wonder that more than a few whites are scouring their family trees for the odd black or Hispanic ancestry.  Many municipal police and fire departments have launched investigations of the bona fides of its majority employees after anonymous textures accused whites of making fraudulent racial claims there have been many challenges encountered challenges and numerous accusations of "ethnic fraud".

Attempts to cash in on affirmative action have highlighted not only how arbitrary the practice is, but even how arbitrarily the protected populations are defined.  Essentially any nonwhites can get preference, including recent immigrants.  However, since Hispanics are often defined as "Spanish-surnamed", like Spaniards are defined as a federally protected group, even though Portuguese, for example, are not.  This means that South Americans, even those descended from European immigrants, get preferences-except for those Brazilians who do not have to be black.  They have Portuguese surnames, so they are treated like native-born whites.  Presumably this makes some sense to some bureaucrat.

Those who defend affirmative action have to pretend there is no injustice in.  It is interesting to see the tortured reasoning that even our highest court is used to turn the Civil Rights Act inside out.  Justice Blackmun, for example, has argued: "in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race... and in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently".  (???) 

Justice William O. Douglas once explained his opposition to affirmative action to Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black to be appointed to the Supreme Court.  Douglas said he thought discrimination against whites was just as unconstitutional as discrimination against blacks.  In a flurry shoot high legal reasoning, Justice Marshall replied: "you guys have been practicing discrimination for years.  Now it's our turn."  If nothing else Justice Marshall's honesty was refreshing.

We should boycott the gas on the 21ft of June, since the prez can't do nothing about it.

Thus, I thought that they were for the people.