White Liberal Guilt

I see Reihan has picked up on Ron Rosenbaum’s Slate piece on white liberal guilt. I appreciate what Reihan is saying when he writes “I mean, would you rather be incredibly stoked about the massacre of American Indians, or America’s history of enslavement and official racism?” but he’s offering a false dichotomy. The choice we are offered in the present isn’t between being “incredibly stoked” and “outraged to the point of self-loathing.” Rather, conservatives are able to recognize that bad things happened in the past and that people in the present can’t beat themselves up over what their ancestors might or might not have done.

This is why conservatives like myself have a problem with white liberal guilt: We don’t understand what we, as individuals, have to feel guilty about. How can you transfer the sins of the past onto the denizens of the present? When does the past stay in the past? Furthermore, can’t you feel something is wrong without feeling guilt for it? For example: Murder is wrong. I live in a house with five other people–if one of them were to commit a murder in my house, I would condemn it as wrong. But I would not feel guilty about it. What would I have done to feel guilt for?

Torturing this metaphor a little more, I was born into the house of America. The couple that lived here eight generations ago committed a series of brutal, ritualistic murders in the basement, and the couple that lived here three generations ago hated my black neighbors, the Washingtons. But I get along pretty well with the Washingtons. And my forebears on my Mom’s side weren’t even in the country when those ritualistic murders happened. Why should I feel bad about what went on in my house before I was born into it?