Don’t Be Guilty. Be Better.
Deconstructing the Myth of White Guilt
I’ve been seeing this meme lately, variations on a pretty basic theme:
0 white guilt.
And the folks sharing it are usually so aggressive and adamant and defensive about it that all I can say is, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
I’m Tao Joannes, coming to you from the Dog Shack deep in the heart of Texas.
And look, I get it. I’m white by all measures and categorization, regardless of who my ancestors were or what they might have done.
But I don’t feel guilty.
I feel compelled to do the best I can in the present day with the information and opportunity that I have.
We just need to be clear about three things.
1. If Encountering Historical Facts Raises Unpleasant Feelings, Congratulations
You’re learning real history, not propaganda.
Piercing the national myth of white superiority can feel threatening to our sense of identity. And the easiest response is to deny, deflect, and attempt to injure the source of the information in response.
Try this:
Absorb the information.
Take testimony about experiences you haven’t had seriously.
And take scholarship seriously where you lack expertise.
Don’t just pull a thought-terminating cliché out of the bag and move on. Take a second or two and learn.
Seek out work you disagree with. Howard Zinn, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Raul Perez, just to name a few.
Reckon with the history.
Don’t avoid it.
It might not make you feel better, but it can definitely help you to not do worse.
2. Guilt Is Not the Point
We don’t share historical information to make you feel bad about yourself.
The point is to learn about our nation’s history to make sure we wind up on the right side of the history being written today.
None of us wants to be the people in the background of the picture harassing Ruby Bridges on her way to school, or dumping acid in the pool, or dumping food on people at the lunch counter.
The legacy and brutality of racism did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation or the Civil Rights Act.
The same racist tropes and stereotypes advanced to undermine Black progress during Reconstruction and justify the injustice of Jim Crow apartheid are still making the rounds.
And too many white folks keep falling into the same rhetorical trap and spreading them.
Look, I’m Southern. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love fried chicken and watermelon.
Why are we still using these symbols to denigrate Black folks?
The negative association with watermelon was just a way to undermine the success of freed slaves making an honest living with an accessible cash crop.
There’s a white guy that sells them out of the back of his pickup truck at my local gas station even today.
Okay, the fried chicken trope can be seen as early as 1915 in the propaganda film Birth of a Nation, which showed white actors in blackface playing congressmen.
And they’re chomping on a chicken leg while addressing Congress to demonstrate their lack of sophistication and unfitness to govern.
That same film did a lot of heavy lifting to portray Black men as lustful and violent predators who needed to be locked up and, of course, forced to work for free for our protection.
On that trope hangs the rationale for the unrest that caused the Tulsa Race Massacre, that led to the destruction of Black Wall Street, the brutalization of Emmett Till, and the unjust imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys.
It’s a pattern that continues to this day, shutting down conversations about situations like the Nolan Wells tragedy with claims like, “He was last seen talking to a white girl,” which just activates that prejudice and suspicion and makes it easier to dismiss the possibility that he was intentionally harmed.
Doubling down on the comfort of ignorance and animosity is the trap.
Education and awareness are the escape routes.
3. Be Accountable
Recognize how your current actions and attitudes affect the discourse and the people around you.
Understand the damage that racist jokes and tropes cause.
Understand the cumulative effect of millions of white people in denial about what privilege means and the legacy of systemic racism.
What you’ll find, the more you learn, is that in addition to harming an entire group of people, racism offers a psychological compensation that encourages you to accept less than you’re worth because at least you’re not one of them.
That status can make people defend arrangements that are not actually serving them.
Learning the history helps expose that bargain.
And accountability means refusing it.
Discovering that hierarchy in your own life and the world around you can feel threatening.
It can make you feel guilty.
You got to work past that reflex.
Don’t be guilty. Be better.