White Guilt
I may not understand the term the same way others do, but I think white guilt is a good thing.
Guilt has gotten a bad rap for some reason. Perhaps because it’s no fun. Perhaps more because we don’t know what to do with it. Guilt exists for a reason. Like anger, it is there to tell us that something is wrong and needs to be changed. In her essay “Killing Rage,” bell hooks talks about the rage that black Americans feel in response to racism. She says that this rage is a healthy response which should be directed into militancy, self-determination, and action for change. I think white guilt is a similar response to the same phenomenon from a different vantage point. When you’ve been hurt, you get angry. When you’ve hurt someone you feel guilty. The healthy response to both emotions is to do something to change the situation—to redress the wrong and/or heal the hurt.
The problem with white guilt is not that it’s bad, but that it’s not enough. Guilt is a largely selfish emotion by itself. When I feel guilty I’m focused on the fact that I did something wrong and how bad I feel about it. What I should then do is start to think about the person I’ve hurt, how they’ve been hurt, what they might be feeling and wanting. Basically, guilt should lead to compassion. Then I should think about what I can do to make things better for them. And I should, of course, consult them in this process.
So white guilt sucks when we get stuck in it—when it becomes a way of beating ourselves up, of closing ourselves down, of isolating ourselves further from ourselves and others. But it doesn’t have to be this. It can be a doorway to opening ourselves up to deeper connection with ourselves, people around us, and our world.
December 31st, 2009 at 12:13 am
I really appreciate this perspective. I confess, I’ve never quite thought of “white guilt” this way. But i have applied this kind of thinking to other areas of my life – i.e. remorse about personal choices, actions, in-actions, etc.. . . and concluded that feeling remorse is actually a healthy thing. Not to get stuck in it, but to feel it deeply, learn, change, forgive myself if need be, and hopefully, move on. When I say move on, I don’t mean to put it all behind me and forget, but rather to create something better than before, because I REMEMBER how fucked up what I created before was. Allowing myself to experience my remorse fully is a form of self honesty. And to really transform – myself, my community, the world – I need to first be honest about what needs to change. So here’s to feeling a little more of that white guilt! It is not a sum total of the parts, but it is a part of the sum total.
Keep on writing. Keep widening the gyre.
I love you!