Posted on February 22, 2017

What Exactly Causes “White Guilt?”

John Gorman, JNS, February 22, 2017

When Adele was awarded the Record of the Year at the Grammys last week, she felt she had to apologize to Beyonce for having won it over her. After last year’s #Oscarssowhite campaign, blacks, who comprise 13% of the population, were given 30% of the acting nominations for the Academy Awards this year.

Adele must have been so afraid of sparking another Kanye West-Taylor Swift moment that she decided to preempt it by prostrating herself, beforehand, to Queen Bey.

And those Academy members must have been so horror-stricken by the negative publicity of the Oscarssowhite controversy that they made sure not thirteen percent, but thirty percent of this year’s acting nominees were black.

Whites are just absolutely terrified about appearing “racist” against blacks, in any way. It’s a crippling fear, to the point where whites will cower in the face of black demands. Yet there is no equivalent fear regarding the other races.

So why is it that no such fear of being accused of racism exists vis-a-vis yellow people or brown people? It’s not as if Amerindian or Asian features aren’t easily recognizable.

There’s a virtual boycott against Hispanics and Asians at the Oscars, but nobody seems to care. Hispanics and Asians are extremely underrepresented in professional football and basketball, yet nobody expresses concern. (Sport is, of course, the one area of American life where nobody seems to be agitating for proportional participation; Americans seem content to let pro sports remain a meritocracy.)

Nobody ever feels obliged to say, oh, some of my best friends are Hispanic. Or, some of my best friends are Asian. Nobody ever feels the need to prove that he regards Hispanics or Asians as intelligent, civilized human beings. These groups simply don’t provoke the same types of fears that blacks do.

It’s not that there aren’t any scary Hispanic gangs around. The Mexican Mafia is as vicious as any black street gang. And MS-13 may be scarier. But on an individual basis, Hispanics don’t strike fear into the hearts of white people.

And as far as Asians, well, why would whites be afraid of a group who score higher on the SAT’s and are physically smaller and less criminally inclined than they are?

The white fear of being accused of racism against blacks seems to be rooted in the overall white fear of blacks. This leads to the ironic situation where whites are so afraid of blacks that they fear showing how afraid they are of them.

Most whites, even if they don’t fully grasp them, at least sense the many ways in which whites and blacks differ. And so, in their heart of hearts, they realize that they are in fact “racist.” And since they’ve been told time and again by the media how evil this makes them, they end up groveling and acquiescing to black demands in order to show that this is not true.

But it’s a universal law of human nature that the truer something is, the more effort will be spent denying it. It’s the person who constantly says that he’s got honesty and integrity whom you can be sure has neither. It’s the guy who who disparages gays the most vociferously whom you can be pretty sure has pretty strong inclinations in that direction himself. And so on.

Likewise, those who go to the greatest lengths to prove they’re not racist tend to be the ones who in fact feel the most instinctively repelled by blacks. (“Racist” has a lot of vague, overlapping, and usually self-serving definitions, but for purposes of this post, “instinctively repelled” is the sense in which I’m using the word.)

Whites’ feelings of guilt don’t stem from slavery. Only a small percentage of whites in America today had ancestors who owned slaves. And those who did are no more responsible for what their ancestors did than blacks are somehow collectively responsible for the blacks who’ve raped and robbed whites. So whites have no reason to feel individually guilty about what happened long before they were born.

It’s far more in keeping with human nature to feel guilty about one’s own innermost feelings. And if one’s inner thoughts about blacks tend to be negative, and if one is told constantly that harboring such thoughts makes one a bad person, that can lead to feelings of guilt.

Whites aren’t as fearful of appearing prejudiced against Hispanics and Asians simply because they are less prejudiced against them. They may make some negative judgments about those groups, but they tend to feel more comfortable with members of those groups individually, and therefore have less to cover up. When the average white converses with a Hispanic or Asian, he simply doesn’t put his guard up to the same extent.

It’s an almost mathematical relationship: the more uncomfortable a white is with blacks, the more alien he perceives them to be, and the more scared of them he is, the greater the effort he will put forth to make it appear he’s not racist.

A strident, vocal, virtue-signaling stance of anti-racism is itself the best proof off racism there is.