American guilt


Did the aftereffects of the civil rights movement poison decades of American foreign policy?
I just finished Shelby Steele's excellent White Guilt : How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, and I had a dawning realization that his central idea applies much further than just race relations.

As I said before, I really don't like making distinctions because of race, but it is a little hard to avoid it in this context. Mr. Steele's premise is that because of what members of the American white majority had done to blacks over the years, it had willingly abandoned moral authority in any matters concerning race. We'll come back to that "moral authority" in a bit. This was the paragraph (page 72) that thumped my head.

"The point is that we blacks organize our political identity—our consciousness of ourselves as blacks—around those themes that most effectively manipulate white America. And the stoic "Rosa Parks" black identity of the civil rights era had actually worked. This was the identity that morally "manipulated" white America into an open acknowledgment of it's racism and, thus, ushered in the age of white guilt. Dick Gregory was simply a part of my personal white-guilt reeducation program. He, along with the new generation of militant leaders, was schooling blacks in the best identity for this new age. Ideas like social determinism and the rejection of responsibility by blacks inspired precisely the angry and petulant black identity that best coerced white guilt."

And just a little later on the next page, this one.

"Unfortunately, all this gave blacks a political identity with no real purpose beyond the manipulation of white guilt. Worse, because this identity was thought to be absolutely essential to black power, it quickly became the most totalitarian and repressive identity that black America has ever known. All dissent became heresy, punishable by excommunication, because anything less than the uniform militancy weakened the group's effectiveness with white guilt. Dick Gregory was not just spelling out this new identity; he was also making it clear that our identity—our "blackness" was contingent on our militance, And failing the litmus test of militancy incurred the Uncle Tom stigma."

Why was this such a revelation? After all, I had been saying similar things, if not as well.

Last week I had been working on an entry for my Pagan blog on Pagans who avoided discipline in their faith. While thinking about how to address the subject, I speculated on how the situation happened. Much of the modern American Pagan movement borrows heavily from the feminist movement. Like anything else, the feminist movement had some good things and some bad things, but one of the bad things it borrowed in turn from the civil rights movement was this idea of political power from victimhood.

And then it hit me.

We're doing the same thing with the Mexican illegals.

We've spent decades teaching them that the best way to get an official response is to claim victimhood.

It doesn't just stop there.

Since Vietnam, that has been pretty much the only foundation of our foreign policy. We've conditioned entire nations to accept American guilt and profit by it.

America goes in, rattles swords, abases itself, cedes moral authority, and pays through the nose.

No wonder before 9-11 America was considered a paper tiger.

We felt guilty about being powerful. And along with that guilt, we prostrate ourselves hoping to be loved.

Mercy may be the gift of the strong, but this behavior invites irresponsibility. Like any serial victim, the actions of our government appeal to the worst side of human nature. Abase ourselves and expect to be rewarded for our sacrifice? Hardly.

That brings us to today and people like me.

First things first. I was born after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I'm not responsible for what happened before I was born. I am not responsible for what people did when I was a child. I am responsible for me.

America screwed up with slavery, civil rights, and a number of other things. That doesn't mean that we do everything wrong. Western Civilization screwed up with a number of things. We also got a number of things right. As an American, I can recognize the long, proud tradition of using what works and getting rid of the rest. That is exactly what I plan to do. I do not cede moral authority to any group for any reason. Let me see individual actions and then we'll judge individual guilt.

My nation happens to be strong, perhaps stronger than any nation in history. I do not believe that we should abase ourselves because of that strength, no matter what happened in the past.

I oppose the politics of victimhood. Although it's probably too early to tell, I think most Americans under 50 do as well. Our political leadership is trying to capture moral authority by playing to victims we've placated in the past.

But the times they are a'changin.

Think about North Korea in terms of what I have told you. Always before, they made noise and we ended up giving something away to "keep the peace." We've done it more times in the Middle East than I can count. We can't keep doing it without making things worse. Every single time we do it, we're telling someone that they aren't human enough to be trusted with responsibility. We specifically exempt them from any consequences. We "keep them in line" by buying them off. And all they have to do is play our guilt once in a while.

Time to skip the guilt and move to the responsibility.

And consequences.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sat - July 8, 2006 at 04:48 AM  Tag


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