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Comments from an AP history
and government teacher in Raleigh, NC.
e-mail betsynewmark AT gmail.com
Commissions earned from selling items through Amazon will go towards buying materials for my classes. Thank you.
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Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Are We Paralyzed by White Guilt?
Shelby Steele has a very thought-provoking and, I hope, discussion-inducing, essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing that America is hamstrung by feelings of collective white guilt for racism and imperialism. Thus, we start off at a disadvantage in world conflicts because we feel we must overcome that reputation. And, we've absorbed all the guilt for the Age of Imperialism that the Europeans have seemingly sloughed off onto our shoulders.Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly desperate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.Steele argues, and he convinces me, that part of the problem we have in confronting the problems we face in the world today is that we are always confronting our racist past and then minimalizing our reactions to situations today so that we don't regard ourselves as exercising a new racism.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.I see this in how American history is presented often - it is hard to discuss anything positive because there is that underlying predicate that the people involved were racist. For example, first remember that 19th century Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, were racists by our 21st century benchmarks, and then downgrade any achievements in emancipation.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.
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Shelby Steele has a very thought-provoking and, I hope, discussion-inducing, essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing that America is hamstrung by feelings of collective white guilt for racism and imperialism. Thus, we start off at a disadvantage in world conflicts because we feel we must overcome that reputation. And, we've absorbed all the guilt for the Age of Imperialism that the Europeans have seemingly sloughed off onto our shoulders.
0 comments
Shelby Steele has a very thought-provoking and, I hope, discussion-inducing, essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing that America is hamstrung by feelings of collective white guilt for racism and imperialism. Thus, we start off at a disadvantage in world conflicts because we feel we must overcome that reputation. And, we've absorbed all the guilt for the Age of Imperialism that the Europeans have seemingly sloughed off onto our shoulders.
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly desperate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today's international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.Steele argues, and he convinces me, that part of the problem we have in confronting the problems we face in the world today is that we are always confronting our racist past and then minimalizing our reactions to situations today so that we don't regard ourselves as exercising a new racism.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war, fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.I see this in how American history is presented often - it is hard to discuss anything positive because there is that underlying predicate that the people involved were racist. For example, first remember that 19th century Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, were racists by our 21st century benchmarks, and then downgrade any achievements in emancipation.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.
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