With recent events taking place in the United States, a specific term is being used: “white guilt.” Similar to collective guilt, white guilt is this notion of feeling guilty for the mistreatment of minorities by white people. White guilt in America, however, differs from the collective guilt of the Germans in the sense that when white Americans express their white guilt, they do it for the purpose of trying to distance themselves from the injustices done to minorities and to try to prove their innocence in regard to racism. In The Storrs Lectures, Fletcher brings up one of Jasper’s arguments on collective guilt. He mentions that ascribing “irreducible, associative national guilt to the Germans is to repeat the intellectual indecency of anti-Semitism”
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In the case of immigration, when white Americans who are “trying to help” say phrases like “we were all once immigrants here,” they fail to mention that most white “immigrants” were in actuality white colonizers and that even if they were immigrants here, they didn’t face the same racial profiling immigrants of color faced. When people of color point that out, it’s these very white “allies” that retort with comments like “stop trying to instigate conflict” and “we’re just trying to help” when the actual case is that they are drowning out the voices of people who really do face racism and other struggles. This need to defend themselves from any accusation of racism has the opposite effect in which white Americans then get angry because they’re not being rewarded for trying to help people of color. This creates subconscious racist behaviors like shutting down the voices of women of color at the Women’s March who pointed out the true statement that over 50% of white women voted for Trump. Another thing that makes this concept of white guilt dangerous is that it takes away from the struggles and successes of people of color. For example, when Moonlight won this year’s Oscar for Best Picture, the win was immediately taken into question on whether it won based on merit or because of white guilt that came from last year’s boycott called “#OscarsSoWhite”. This type of mindset mitigates the struggles, perseverance, and successes of people of
In the case of immigration, when white Americans who are “trying to help” say phrases like “we were all once immigrants here,” they fail to mention that most white “immigrants” were in actuality white colonizers and that even if they were immigrants here, they didn’t face the same racial profiling immigrants of color faced. When people of color point that out, it’s these very white “allies” that retort with comments like “stop trying to instigate conflict” and “we’re just trying to help” when the actual case is that they are drowning out the voices of people who really do face racism and other struggles. This need to defend themselves from any accusation of racism has the opposite effect in which white Americans then get angry because they’re not being rewarded for trying to help people of color. This creates subconscious racist behaviors like shutting down the voices of women of color at the Women’s March who pointed out the true statement that over 50% of white women voted for Trump. Another thing that makes this concept of white guilt dangerous is that it takes away from the struggles and successes of people of color. For example, when Moonlight won this year’s Oscar for Best Picture, the win was immediately taken into question on whether it won based on merit or because of white guilt that came from last year’s boycott called “#OscarsSoWhite”. This type of mindset mitigates the struggles, perseverance, and successes of people of