How White Guilt Enables Racial Inequality (Part 1)
In his book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (2006), black conservative author Shelby Steel describes how white guilt stokes a patronizing attitude toward minorities. Worse yet, that guilt presupposes that minorities cannot rise above inequalities unless white liberals help them by remaking society.
That approach, which is a form of Neo-Marxism, is the process by which white liberals symbolically, if not literally, taking upon themselves all the moral ills of Western society. Many of them believe themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to other whites and, by extension, to the very minorities whom they seek to offer paternalistic protection. It can be argued, that this patronizing approach is the most powerful form of modern racism if not the most dangerous.
It is impossible to avoid the fact that minorities suffer squalid conditions and terrible crime in inner cities that are ruled by the white liberal elites. Sadly and cynically, to preserve their own power, those same elites prevent minorities from overcoming those conditions. Fortunately, minorities in America are beginning to break free of those modern-day “shackles,” while many white liberals, including many in the the power structure Democrat Party, are doing whatever they can to sabotage the effort.
The Racism of the American Left
In his book, Mr. Steel wrote that because white liberals internalize the problem of racism, they become blind to very real plight of racial minorities. They are thus unable to fathom the daily concerns of African-Americans. “White blindness” to the human suffering of African-Americans is one of the greatest impediments to a real reduction in racial inequality. According to Mr. Steel:
“White blindness is an unconscious self-absorption by which whites see racial issues and even inter-racial encounters as an opportunity to dissociate from historic racism. People who are in the grip of white blindness, and are thus unaware of their true motivations, always miss the human being inside the black skin. Your color represents you in the mind of such people. They will have built a large part of their moral identity and possibly their politics around how they respond to your color.”
Mr. Steel continues:
“Thus a part of them, the moral part, is invested not in you but in some idea of what your color means, and when they see you the individual they instantly call to mind this investment and determine once again to honor it. They are very likely proud of the way they have learned to relate to your color—proud of the moral magnanimity it gives them the opportunity to express. So in meeting you they actually meet only the well-rehearsed and better part of themselves. In the age of white guilt, white blindness has been driven not by racism, but by the white need to dissociate from racism. Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today not out of bigotry, but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority. When they find a way to dissociate from racism (diversity, politically correct language, political liberalism itself) there is little incentive to understand blacks as human beings.”
For those who have had the opportunity to study the Marxist Religion thoroughly, it is clear that Marxism plays a major role in white guilt and in the recent wave of violence in America’s inner cities. Marxism has never been popular in the United States under that name, which is why it has been couched in other names like “Post-Modern,” “Progressive,” and “Social Justice.” Nevertheless, these movements are little more than a modern and destructive branch off of the old Marxist tree.
Marxism, in its early stages, is anarchism. Marxists seek to destroy all the institutions of a given society (government, religion, family, history, and tradition) and create as much chaos and suffering as possible, leading to the next stage: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marxist elites then commit mass murder, theft, and plundering (looting and rioting?) supposedly to correct the ills of society but in truth this is to seek their own enrichment and empowerment. In Marxist theory, what follows is supposed to be a socialist utopia, a perfect society wherein everyone can do what they want because “the people” control the means of production. In practice, the tyranny and oppression continues until it is violently overthrown. The proof of the underlying Marxism among today’s white liberals, is in their assertions that America is structurally racist and must be remade; when they seek to “defund the police” and unmake all American social institutions.
It is not at all clear how such approaches would actually help minorities nor has any potential solution to the very real racial inequalities in our society been advanced. The purpose of the riots, violence, and destruction of statues is not to help minorities but to empower white liberals, to the detriment of our society at large. They show no concern for how said restructuring might harm blacks and minorities. Defunding the police, for example, will hand inner-city minority communities over to thugs, gangsters, and criminals.
Civil Rights leaders, meanwhile, have been calling for many years to reduce crime in inner cities through an increased police presence. During the Bill Clinton presidency a major wave of crime bills and reforms passed to hire more police officers. The resulting reduction in crime led to economic growth and investment in black communities.
In a recent article in the New York Post, Charles Love notes that “woke” white liberals portray blacks as helpless, oppressed people who have nightly run-ins with police officers:
“Blacks do lag whites in many socioeconomic indicators — but most blacks don’t live in poverty, don’t have constant run-ins with law enforcement and aren’t uneducated. It’s important to look at racial disparities in context.”
Mr. Love continues:
“Since they don’t have many blacks in their social circles, and having conversations with blacks is awkward and can take time, woke whites opt for easy, feel-good actions, most of which will have no effect on police brutality, on the quality of black schools or neighborhoods or on black lives generally. Most woke whites have good intentions, but their symbolic gestures will, at best, have little effect and, at worst, do real harm. The campaign against police is a good example. Broad anti-police sentiment has already caused cops to become less proactive in high-crime neighborhoods, with the predictable result that shootings have spiked around the country.”
By contrast, hard on crime policies have brought positive results to black communities. Rudy Giuliani’s reforms in New York City, for example, made Harlem a much more prosperous place, reflected in economic statistics in the mid to late 1990’s. Obviously, improvements in community relations for law enforcement officers are needed to improve how they interact with the communities they serve. Increased training and policy reform have vastly improved this situation over the past several years with police killings of unarmed black men declining from 38 in 2015 to 9 in 2019 (still too high). But these reforms are not good enough for white liberals.
For the next article in this series see Part 2 White Guilt vs Black Excellence.
