Do You Think White Guilt Is a Good Thing?

When I first approached this story, it was going to be about privilege and my experiences being on both sides of it. When I talked to another journalist about this topic and she asked me, “Do you think white guilt is a good thing?” I wasn’t sure what to say. The question is dense with philosophical, ideological, and political ideas along with assumptions and motives. I’m going to unpack it and then explain what I think.

To talk about white guilt, we have to talk about privilege. Privilege is a model of society that posits that every person is made up of a matrix of categories and that some groups in a category have an advantage over other groups. This advantage is almost always cultivated over generations of oppression and discrimination against the disadvantaged group. For instance, I’m a white trans woman. This means that I benefit from being white, but I am disadvantaged by being trans and a woman. Being part of the privileged group means that you have the ability to ignore the problems of those who are not privileged, furthering their oppression.

Privilege, like most ideas, has its share of criticism. I think it lacks the nuance of intersectionality, the idea that labels interact and influence one another in inseparable ways, and it ignores the negative aspects of categorization that affect those with privilege. Men are just as trapped by the gender binary as women are. However, it’s a long-standing model of society that has its benefits when talking about certain aspects of the human condition, and we’ll be using it in this discussion.

White guilt, then, is a specific reaction a person has once they’ve become aware of their white privilege. This reaction is manifested mostly by that person’s desire to be forgiven or accepted by people of color, instead of changing their behavior. George F. Will, a Pulitzer Prize winning conservative political commentator, said that white guilt is “a form of self-congratulation, where whites initiate ‘compassionate policies’ toward people of color, to showcase their innocence to racism.” The idea is that white people cannot be innocent to racism; since they benefit from their white privilege constantly, they cannot simply play nice with people of color to dismantle the systems that oppresses them.

This explains what white guilt is, but to explain why white guilt happens I’ll have to talk about morality. While morality is subjective, people tend to think of it as a statistic where every action has a positive or negative moral value that people can use to judge you.

There’s some science to back this claim up. The human brain tends to balance actions it perceives as good with those it sees as bad: You did all that homework today, so you can totally splurge on those nice pants you saw! It’s OK to not recycle this one thing because you picked up a bunch of garbage yesterday. As long as, in the end, we do more good than bad, we can keep thinking of ourselves as good people.

And that’s the key to all of this. White guilt is a manifestation of the internal conflict between knowing that you’ve profited from and continued a system that hurts others, and your eternal desire to justify to yourself that you’re a good person. Everybody wants to see themselves as a good person. I bet that, while reading about the way that we balance good and bad actions with one another, you felt a kernel of self-doubt in the pit of your stomach. You don’t want to be that kind of person, the kind of person who compromises on ethics because the bad things feel good, or because it’s too much effort, or because you’re emotionally drained. It makes you doubt your moral value. I know this because it does the same thing to me.

Let me tell you something about myself that most of you are going to find reprehensible. The first time I talk to a person of color, I have this little nagging voice in the back of my head that makes me tense up. I fear that I’m going to say something wrong, that I’m going to mess up in some catastrophic way and that that person is going to think I’m racist. That’s why I froze up when I was asked about white guilt. I feel like I have to tread carefully, not because the person is sensitive, but because I’m sensitive. I know how awful it feels to be treated with bigotry, sure, but also because I need to feel like I’m good. I feel awful revealing this about myself here, for everyone to read, because it’s showing you one of my deepest fears: that I’m not a good person.

So, am I? Is white guilt a bad thing?

White guilt is a feeling, a motivation, and if you were to ask me, I don’t think it should matter why you do something. If someone says something racist because they believe it, and another person says the same racist thing because they want the attention, both of them are identical in the eyes of the person that’s receiving the abuse.

It doesn’t matter how you feel or why you do the things you do. What matters is what you do. And I’m not going to say that white guilt can’t have negative consequences; it absolutely can, and often does. There are people out there who, when confronted with their bigoted behavior, will get defensive and tell the confronter anything to try to justify their actions. Instead of looking inward and coming to terms with their own faults, they push out the same bile they pretend to be separate from.

The problem with these people is that they’re trying to run from their guilt, trying to stay put instead of evolving. The conflict between their empathy and their complicity makes them feel bad, so they ignore it. What we need to do instead is change our perspective on guilt.

I feel horrible about some of the things that pop into my head, but I use that feeling to motivate myself. It forces me to be more inclusive, more understanding, and more aware of my faults and biases. I’m not perfect, and this could be a long-winded excuse for me to compromise my guilt and my insecurities with each other. But having privilege is just as inescapable as lacking it; the only thing we can do is be the best people we can be, and learning to accept and grow from our guilt is a step in that direction.

If we reframe our guilt as the necessary evil of being mature, empathetic, and in- trospective, we can use it to push ourselves into becoming better people.