White guilt is the individual or collective guilt felt by some white people for harm resulting from racist treatment of ethnic minorities such as African Americans and indigenous peoples by other white people, most specifically in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, genocide of indigenous peoples, The Holocaust and the legacy of these eras.
In certain regions of the Western world, it can be called white settler guilt, white colonial guilt, and other variations, which refer to the guilt more pointedly in relation to European settlement and colonization, such as in Australia and New Zealand. The concept of white guilt has examples both historically and currently in the United States and to a lesser extent in Canada, South Africa, France and the United Kingdom. White guilt has been described by psychologists such as Lisa B. Spanierman and Mary J. Heppner 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-white people.
History
Early use
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 white people, she said, because she found this led white people to focus on getting acceptance and forgiveness rather than changing their own actions or beliefs.
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."
Academic research
In 1999, academic research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania examined the extent of societal feeling of white guilt, possible guilt-based antecedents, and white guilt's relationship to attitudes towards affirmative action. The four studies revealed that "Even though mean White guilt tended to be low, with the mean being just below the midpoint of the scale, the range and variability confirms the existence of feelings of White guilt for some". The findings also showed that white guilt was directly linked to "more negative personal evaluations" of white people generally, and the extent of an individual's feelings of white guilt independently predicted attitudes towards white privilege, racial discrimination and affirmative action.
2003 research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in its first study, replicated the link between white guilt and strength of belief in white privilege. The second study revealed that white guilt "resulted from seeing European Americans as perpetrators of racial discrimination", and was also predictive of support for compensatory efforts for African Americans.
One academic paper suggests in France, white guilt may be a common feature of management of race relations – in contrast to other European countries.
Rumy Hasan, in his book Multiculturalism: some inconvenient truths (2010), examines "the liberal postcolonial sense of guilt".
Regions
In the United States
American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote that reparations for slavery would be an exploitation of white guilt and damage the "integrity of blacks". In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope that "rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America". His view on the subject was based on an interaction in the US Senate, where he witnessed a white legislator complain about being made to "feel more white" when a black colleague discussed systemic racism with them.
Shelby Steele, a conservative black political writer, discussed the concept 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.
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."
In 2015, when it came to light American civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal had been posing as African American, Washington Post journalist Krissah Thompson described her as "an archetype of white guilt played to its end". Thompson discussed the issue with psychologist Derald Wing Sue, an expert on racial identity, who suggested that Dolezal had become so fascinated by racism and racial justice issues she "over-identified" with black people. In 2016, the school district of Henrico County, Virginia ceased future use of an educational video, Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race, which visualized white privilege and structural racism. Parents complained, calling it a white guilt video, which led to a ban by the county's superintendent.
Since 2016, white liberals rate non-white groups more positively than they do whites. Every other racial group feels more positive about their own race than they do about other races.
In October 2018, The Economist proposed that an increase in Americans claiming Native American ancestry, often incorrectly, may be explained by attempts to "absolve them of collective European guilt for the genocide of indigenous people". In 2019, it was reported how liberal white Americans were being influenced by white guilt, changing patterns of political and social behaviour to be more racially inclusive since the election of Donald Trump. This included the methods by which Democratic nominees were being considered for the 2020 presidential election.
In October 2019, students at middle school in Massachusetts raised money for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, after learning that the tribe had dealt with the first colonists from The Mayflower. The school director said it had "left all our students with this sense of European guilt", and one student remarked "If we don’t try to repair what our ancestors did, the tribes will die off".
In Australia
Author Sally Morgan 1987's book My Place, which explores Aboriginal identity, has come under critique for providing European Australians with a narrative of colonization in Australia which, critics argue, too generously assuages white settler guilt. Marcia Langton has described the book as a kind of an unearned catharsis for European guilt: "The book is a catharsis. It gives release and relief, not so much to Aboriginal people oppressed by psychotic racism, as to the whites who wittingly and unwittingly participated in it".
In New Zealand
In New Zealand, the legacy of Pākehā settlers has created a localized sense of white guilt in relation to the resulting damage to pre-existing Māori culture and mistreatment of indigenous people. Then opposition leader, Bill English, in 2002, gave a speech rejecting the "cringing guilt" said to be a result of the European colonialism to Aotearoa, and the Pakeha settlers who enacted it. This was in response to the government Race Relations Commissioner, comparing the impact of British settlement in New Zealand to the Taliban's vandalism of the Buddhas of Bamyan.
Academic Elizabeth Rata has proposed that "without the mirror image of unexpiated guilt, a necessary process in the recognition and validation of a shared reality, Pākehā guilt moved, not onto the next stage of externalised shame, but into an internal and enclosed narcissism". In her analysis, she suggests that the Waitangi Tribunal has been a missed opportunity to reconcile white guilt in New Zealand.
Critical opinions
Commentator Sunny Hundal, writing for The Guardian, stated it is "reductionist" to assign political opinions to a collective guilt such as "white guilt" and 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. 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…to label that simply as guilt is just...insulting."
In 2015, Gary Younge explored white guilt's impotence in society, writing: "It won't close the pay gap, the unemployment gap, the wealth gap or the discrepancy between black and white incarceration. It won't bring back Walter Scott, Trayvon Martin or Brandon Moore." Coleman Hughes has suggested that white guilt causes the misdirection of anti-racist efforts, writing that "where white guilt is endemic, demands to redress racism will be strongest, regardless of how much racism actually exists".
Works about white guilt
- The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, a 1983 book by the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner
- The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, a 2006 book by Pascal Bruckner
- White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, a 2006 book by American author Shelby Steele
- Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, a 2016 book by the French-Algerian political activist Houria Bouteldja [fr]
