White Guilt

Writing in the Opinion Journal, Shelby Steele argues that America is hobbled by white guilt.

It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West–like Germany after the Nazi defeat–lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

His theory seeks to explain why America recoils from using the full power of it's military. He also sees this stigma of white guilt in America's inability to grapple with many contentious internal issues.

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.

To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.

So, in order to avoid being smeared with racist accusations, politicians hold back from pushing that which really needs to be done. Steele's theory has likely hit upon at least part of what is crippling America these days. I see it here in my comments section. The meme about "little brown people" shows up routinely. My stand against illegal immigration brings calls from some that I am a racist.

I think there's something even more insidious about this idea of white guilt. That there is an inherent racism in those who claim that white Europeans are morally inferior because of past errors. I, personally, never think about my race, I only think of myself as an American. I think we would all be better off if we did.

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  By Tano, May 2, 2006 @ 10:02 am

  ” I, personally, never think about my race”

  Well, good for you Gaius. Clearly however, Steele does think about it, obsessivly. That is the big meme that he is pushing – in his new book, and in this article. Its all about race, about “whites”, and what we (sorry if I am guessing wrong about you), as a race, feel or don’t feel.

  What I don’t understand is why you seem to buy into much of his argument at the same time that you declare that you don’t think in these terms?

  Personally, I don’t think about my “race” either. I am a liberal and I dont feel any guilt about “whiteness”. I don’t feel the need to take the gloves off and turn our military loose on the rest of the world – but it isnt guilt about past sins that makes me feel that way, it is a positive vision of how America should handle its role as the world’s superpower. It is a vision that is different than the vision that past superpowers had – their visions led them to use that power to be imperialists. I dont feel guilt about that, I just dont want to go down that road. America is the paradigm of the anti-colonialist country – thats what our revolution was about. We fought for our own set of values which were fundamentally different from the values of the colonialists. We need to find a way to express those values as a superpower.

  Steele seems not to understand that – though he denies it, it sounds like his article is focused on shedding the “guilt” and being a force for kickass white pride again. This is pretty nasty stuff.

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  By Gauis Arbo, May 2, 2006 @ 10:16 am

  No, I think you miss the point. The race card as it is being played today is, itself, racism. While America, and every other Western country, has made mistakes, we’ve also achieved something never seen in the world before. You see only the potential evil and the past sins.

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  By Sven, May 2, 2006 @ 12:23 pm

  Pears’ Soap – Matchless for the Complexion

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  By Gauis Arbo, May 2, 2006 @ 12:33 pm

  Pretty funny ad from a long time ago….

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  By Sven, May 2, 2006 @ 1:19 pm

  What’s even funnier is that Kiplingesque urge to take the gloves off in the Phillipines “for the good of the occupied” was widely recognized at the time as racially tinged:

  Consider the easy and self-satisfied way in which we regard the mowing down of the savage and semi-savage in the Philippine Islands, when they stand in the way of the national purpose, of which, after eight years of “benevolent assimilation” we have just had a most startling and heart-rending example in the bombarding to death of 600 men, women, and children, collected in a crater in the Moro Islands.

  There are two things to be said about the jubilant congratulations sent by the Chief Executive to Gen. Wood. The first is in reference to the designation of the performance as a “brilliant feat of arms.” Basing our estimate on the reports rendered by Gen. Wood, it was no more a “brilliant feat of arms” than smoking bees out of a hive or rats out of a nest.

  But a far sadder feature of the Executive communication to Gen. Wood is that it contained not one word of sympathy, one note of tender distress, in view of the discriminate slaughter perpetrated “In honor of the American flag.” We have been taught to believe, and we like to believe, that the President has a great heart. And so I prefer to think of that cable-gram, composed as it was in the presence, practically, of mangled men, torn women, armless and headless children; I prefer to think of it, not as being the expression of the man Roosevelt, but of the President Roosevelt, in whom officially the heartlessness and the greed of unregenerate nationality is functionally represented. I want to find a way out for Roosevelt, for the performance on the Jolo Island has a ghastly look, and the cablegram matched it.

  With the exception of the maintenance in the South of negro slavery, there has been, I should say, nothing sadder in our history, than the national attitude which we today stand as toward the little brown people of the Philippine Islands.

  A hundred years later, “enlightened” pundits like Max Boot whitewash the Phillipine atrocities and use them as an example of what we should be doing in Iraq:

  Upon leaving Cuba as a two-star general, Wood was dispatched to the southern provinces of the Philippines, where Islamic Moro extremists were in perpetual revolt against the central government. Here Wood showed another side of his character as he dealt ruthlessly with all opposition. The primary threat came from juramentados, knife-wielding assassins who thought that they could win a place in paradise if they died fighting Christian infidels. To defeat them, Wood shelled numerous cottas (forts) containing not only enemy fighters but also women and children. His scorched-earth policy sparked controversy but achieved results. Moroland had been temporarily pacified by the time Wood left for Manila to take over as military commander of the entire Philippines in 1905.

  Here’s a photo of the “results.”

  …When Gen. Wood heard that the photograph had been taken at the scene of the slaughter he made a call upon the photographer to ask to see the plate, casually letting it fall upon the ground so that it broke, and then gave the photographer eight or 10 pesos for compensation for the “accident.”

  Damned liberal media.

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  By Gauis Arbo, May 2, 2006 @ 1:52 pm

  First, Sven, I am not – nor are you – guilty of crimes done years ago in a different time and place. Nor are present day actions dictated by excesses in the past. False assumption.

  The US also freed the Philippines from Japanese occupation and gave them independence in 1946.

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  By Sven, May 2, 2006 @ 2:43 pm

  Quite true. It’s folly to dwell exclusively on the past. But it’s also folly to forget it altogether – or in Mr. Boot’s case, to mangle it beyond recognition. Speaking of which:

  In that speech, Bush credited the United States for transforming the Philippines into a democracy. America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people, said Bush. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule. He drew an analogy between the United States’ attempt to create democracy in the Philippines and its effort to create a democratic Middle East through the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Democracy always has skeptics, the president said. Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia.

  As many Philippine commentators remarked afterward, Bush’s rendition of Philippine-American history bore little relation to fact. True, the U.S. Navy ousted Spain from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But instead of creating a Philippine democracy, the McKinley administration, its confidence inflated by victory in that splendid little war, annexed the country and installed a colonial administrator. The United States then waged a brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it encouraged to fight against Spain. The war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about 120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. Resentment lingered a century later during Bush’s visit.

  I’m not one who holds that America’s motives are inherently evil. In fact, I think we have the opposite problem – we’re so eager to do good, we’re apt to delude ourselves into thinking that because our ends are just, the means we use are by definition justified as well. So no, we’re not responsible for crimes of the past, but we are responsible for remembering – and not repeating – them.

  Politicians often rewrite history to their own purposes, but, as Bush’s remarks suggested, there was more than passing significance to his revisionist account of the Spanish-American War. It reflected not just a distorted view of a critical episode in U.S. foreign policy but the rejection of important, negative lessons that Americans later drew from their brief experiment in creating an overseas empire.

  The United States’ decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (the administration’s leading neoconservative) had remembered the brutal war the United States fought in the Philippines or similar misadventures in Mexico, or the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Middle East, they still might have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second, third, or even fourth thoughts about what Bush, unconsciously echoing the imperialists of a century ago, called a historic opportunity to change the world.

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  By Gauis Arbo, May 2, 2006 @ 3:03 pm

  You can’t draw the conclusion that because Bush did not know the full history of the Philippines that he screwed up in Iraq. In fact he did keep the troop levels down, apparently believing a smaller footprint would look less like an occupation.

  America figured out pretty quickly that it did not have a taste for overseas empires, don’t you think? It was a very brief experiment.

  Also keep in mind that it is not a good idea to ascribe all the wrong that was done in the past just to one side in a conflict.

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  By Tano, May 2, 2006 @ 3:05 pm

  “the McKinley administration, its confidence inflated by victory in that splendid little war…”

  Just as an aside, fwiw, do y’all know who Karl Rove’s favorite past president is?
  Hey, he is the one that has made a point of talking about it a lot….

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  By Tano, May 2, 2006 @ 3:20 pm

  Gaius,

  Racism is the notion that one race is superior to others, and thereby should, by rights, hold a dominant position over the lesser ones. Race-consciousness by those who have had racism imposed upon them is not racism itself. Black and brown people who “play the race card” may be guilty of some opportunism, but they are not proclaiming themselves superior to whites, and thereby entitled to rule over whites.

  Once again, you seem so eager to pick up these reactionary memes by which the modern right tries to dismiss the claims of people who are just after a fair shake. You might argue that their claim is illegitimate, that they are getting a fair shake as it is, but that is a different argument. I am sure that you could find folks to argue it with you – and in the end the argument could be settled by looking at empirical evidence. But calling them racists too, is not serious and not true.

  I don’t just see the bad side of things that we do. But obviously the bad side needs to be talked about if those problems are to be resolved. I don’t know what you do for a living, but I think it normal in the workplace that lots of the conversation revolves around what is going wrong, how to improve. The good things are left to happen. We are a great country because we are problem-solvers, we dont sit around patting ourselves on the back. Maybe that seems sometimes like we don’t give ourselves enough credit, but I say lets not bother about that, and just worry about doing our part to move the ball forward.

  You gotta ask, what is the motivation of people who try to shout down discussions of problems? Its not like what appears on the front page of the New York Times is supposed to be some objective recounting of the state of American society. It is rather the ongoing journal of a great nation as it deals with and solves problems.

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  By Gauis Arbo, May 2, 2006 @ 3:31 pm

  Tano, you’ve got it wrong. Racism is also a belief in inferiority – and automatically ascribing every single thing to the moral inferiority of whites because of past practices is racism.

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