White Guilt Research Articles

The age of White Guilt and the Disappearance of the Black Individual

The age of White Guilt and the Disappearance of the Black Individual

White Guilt and Racial Compensation: The Benefits and Limits of Self-Focus

In two studies, the authors investigated guilt as a response to group-based advantage. Consistent with its conceptualization as a self-focused emotion, White guilt was based in self-focused beliefs in racial inequality. Thus, guilt was associated with belief in White privilege (Study 1) and resulted from seeing European Americans as perpetrators of racial discrimination (Study 2). Just as personal guilt is associated with efforts at restitution, White guilt was predictive of support for affirmative action programs aimed at compensating African Americans. White guilt was not, however, predictive of support for noncompensatory efforts at promoting equality, such as affirmative action programs that increase opportunities (Study 2). In contrast, the other-focused emotion of group-based sympathy was a more general predictor of support for different affirmative action policies. Our findings demonstrate the benefits and limits of group-based guilt as a basis of support for social equality and highlight the value of understanding the specific emotions elicited in intergroup contexts.

Celtic Women and White Guilt: Frankie Silver and Chipita Rodriguez in Folk Memory

Celtic Women and White Guilt: Frankie Silver and Chipita Rodriguez in Folk Memory Get access Rachel Jennings Rachel Jennings San Antonio College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 28, Issue 1, March 2003, Pages 17–37, https://doi.org/10.2307/3595244 Published: 01 March 2003

The Children of Someone Else's History: Reading for Restorative Justice

What is wrong with our justice system that Aboriginal people find it so alienating? Murray Sinclair [1] Aboriginal justice issues have been amply studied in Canada, but the studies have not led to many changes in the system. Bridging the Cultural Divide: A Report on Aboriginal People and Criminal Justice in Canada (1996), part of the massive Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) study, is thorough and intelligent and gathering dust, along with the rest of the report. proportion of Aboriginal people in Canadian (and U.S.) jails and prisons continues to rise; reservation and urban Native communities continue to suffer from poverty, crime, alcoholism, and abuse; and the majority community continues to respond with a legal system based on punishment and retribution (however much seasoned with useless white guilt) that simply makes all these conditions worse, while successful community-based programs die for lack of support, translated into lack of funding, from the dominant society that holds the purse strings. As a position paper by the Community Holistic Circle Healing (CHCH) project put it: The use of judgement and punishment actually works against the healing process. An already unbalanced person is moved further out of balance.... What the threat of incarceration does do is keep people from coming forward and taking responsibility for the hurt they are causing. It reinforces the silence, and therefore promotes, rather than breaks, the cycle of violence that exists. In reality, rather than making the community a safer place, the threat of jail places the community more at risk. [2] What we--and I self-consciously mean a we of all human beings--need to effect change is a tool like Uncle Tom's Cabin that makes Aboriginal justice issues viscerally compelling in terms the dominant society can not only understand but claim as its own. Such a text, I argue, is available in the shape of Richard Wagamese's novel, A Quality of Light. This comparison, of course, raises all manner of questions and problems. American racism--with its history of chattel slavery as well as its overtly violent and proudly invoked pioneer past--is different from Canadian racism. Harriet Beecher Stowe was attacking slavery, not racism. Yet Uncle Tom's Cabin was a revolutionary document in its ability to create in dominant culture readers not only empathy toward Tom and Eliza and George but also an awareness of their own complicity in the system that enslaved the characters. Similarly, Wagamese's novel entails empathy and a willing acceptance, not of guilt but of complicity, in a justice system that does not work. In fact, on one level the book is about learning to take responsibility for complicity and working around the current western democratic tradition of justice as retribution and punishment. Alliance Party's focus on toughening Young Offender, parole, and other policies and the consequent shift to the right in Canada's discussion of crime and punishment make such a responsibility more difficult to realize and more important to advocate for. At the same time, the explicitly Christian elements that Stockwell Day increasingly inserts into the debate may make A Quality of Light an even more effective tool than it was when it was first published. A Quality of Light A Quality of Light begins during the Oka summer of 1990 and continues in flashbacks as the narrator, Joshua Kane, looks back across his life and the life of his best friend, Johnny Gebhart, who is engaged in a hostage-taking in the Federal building in Calgary, through which he hopes to focus national attention on the underlying inequities of Native affairs in general. Josh is Cape Croker Ojibway, but he has grown up in an adoptive white farming family and has become a Christian pastor. Johnny is of German-Canadian heritage. As a boy he coped with his alcoholic father by imagining himself an Indian and systematically educating himself, through books and experience, on indigenous issues in Canada. …

White Guilt, Political Activity, and the Analyst: Commentary on Paper by Neil Altman

White Guilt, Political Activity, and the Analyst: Commentary on Paper by Neil Altman

For Whites Only

"Abstract: The following article is largely a stream-of-consciousness reflection on being a racially-conscious white therapist in racially divided America. It focuses specifically on working with African-American patients, addressing such themes as white anxiety, white skin privilege, lack of awareness of whiteness as a socio-political power construct, and white guilt. An illustrative case example takes the reader through how the themes listed shaped the therapist's subjectivity and alternately enhanced and inhibited the therapeutic pmcess. Key words: race relations, crosscultural therapy, whiteness, black-whi te relations, sociology of therapy."

James Baldwin Now (review)

Reviewed by: James Baldwin Now Amy Abugo Ongiri James Baldwin Now. Ed. Dwight A. McBride. New York, NY: New York UP, 1999. x + 427 pp. Recently cited by Crompton-Noll committee of the Modern Language Association for making an outstanding contribution to the field of lesbian and gay studies, James Baldwin Now is in many ways a groundbreaking anthology that makes important interventions across a variety of fields and disciplines. With innovative section headings such as “Baldwin and the Transatlantic,” “Baldwin and Intertextuality,” and “Baldwin and Sexuality,” which seek to defy the easy categorization of Baldwin as “black writer” or “gay writer,” the collection enriches Baldwin scholarship that has, in the words of the collection’s editor, “tended to relegate Baldwin to one or the other of these identity categories” (2). Roderick A. Ferguson’s “The Parvenu Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption: Modernity, Race, Sexuality and the Cold War,” which won the Crompton Noll Award for “best essay in lesbian, gay, and queer studies in the modern languages,” is typical for the collection in that it not only pushes boundaries of lesbian, gay, and queer studies around the question of Baldwin’s construction of homosexual identity but also pushes for the reconceptualization of the political and ideological underpinnings of Cold War era cultural politics and the avant-garde around questions of gender and sexuality. It is this sort of disciplinary innovative and genre-exploding methodology that makes the collection indispensable as an intervention into Baldwin studies as well as a statement on the power of cultural studies work that takes its interdisciplinarity seriously. In the introduction, McBride writes: “it seems more possible today than ever before to engage Baldwin in all the complexity he represents to critical inquiry” (2). Essays by Josh Kun, Nicholas Boggs, Lawrie Balfour, and Rebecca Arnuad utilize methodologies as diverse as music and performance theory, queer studies and theories of political economy to address topics as varied as Baldwin and listening practices, Baldwin and children’s literature, and Baldwin and “white guilt.” Essays by Sharon Patricia Holland, Marlon B. Ross and Maurice Wallace successfully revisit old territory, i.e. Baldwin’s relationship to Richard Wright and the absence of a Black queer presence in Giovanni’s Room, with startling new conclusions that should resonate importantly throughout critical race and queer theory. The collection charts the construction of African American desire in a consistently sophisticated manner and in doing so charts critical territory that has largely been insufficiently mapped until this moment. In reading each of the essays it is not hard to arrive at the sense that important work is being done not only in relationship to the work of James Baldwin but also in terms of complicating existing critical notions around the production of African American culture. The many important critical interventions that are enabled by Baldwin’s work in the volume attest to McBride’s claim that “Baldwin has spoken to most every issue of great importance of our time” (2). Each essay is anchored in the particularity of its discipline and the volume as a whole makes an important contribution to scholarship in these fields while remaining highly accessible to students. The collection should thus be of interest to those invested in expanding the boundaries of literary studies as well as those firmly situated in the disciplines of lesbian, gay and queer studies, African American Studies, and English. Amy Abugo Ongiri University of California at Riverside Copyright © 2001 symploke

White Guilt: Its Antecedents and Consequences for Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action

Four studies examine the strength of feelings of White guilt, the relationship between White guilt and possible antecedents to this guilt, and the consequences of White guilt for attitudes toward affirmative action. Even though mean White guilt tended to be low, with the mean being just below the midpoint of the scale, the range and variability confirms the existence of feelings of White guilt for some. White guilt was associated with more negative personal evaluations of Whites and the theoretical antecedents of stronger beliefs in the existence of White privilege, greater estimates of the prevalence of discrimination against Blacks, and low prejudice against Blacks. Finally, results indicate that White guilt mediated the relationship from White privilege and beliefs about the prevalence of discrimination to attitudes toward affirmative action, and both White guilt and prejudice independently predicted attitudes toward affirmative action.

The culture of deference

I have a white fr iend who has told me many times that he feels racial despite the fact that he was raised in the Deep South before the end of segregation. Though he grew up amid the inequality and moral duplicity of segregation, and inevitably benefi ted ti~om it as a white, he says simply that he did not invent the institution. He experienced it as a fate he was born into. And when segregation was finally challenged in the civil rights era, any solidarity that he felt with other southern whites was g rounded more in a sense of pathos than in any resistance to change. So, he says, there is objective basis for racial on his part. Recently I was surprised to hear the novelist William Styron, a southerner by bir th and upbringing, say on television that he, too, felt no [white] guilt despite the fact that his g randmothe r had owned slaves as a girl. And there was something emphatic, even challenging in his p ronouncement that discouraged questioning. For as long as I can remember , I have heard white Americans of every background make this p ronouncement . This is certainly understandable. threatens the credibility of everything whites say and do regarding race. Specifically it threatens them with what I have called ul ter ioral i tythe suspicion that their racial stands do not come from their announced motivations but f rom ulterior ones driven by guilt. We can say, for example, that the white liberal bends over backward because he is motivated by even though he says he is motivated by true concern. Or we can say the anger of the angry white male is simply his way of denying guilt. We can use to discredit every posit ion whites take on racial matters. So it is not surprising to hear so many reflexive denials. When people like my friend or Styron do this, they are disclaiming ulterior motives. They want us to accept that they mean exactly what they say. But I, for one, very rarely do accept this, or at least not without a glimpse past their words to the matter of ulterior motive. This is because there simply is social issue in American life more driven by ulterior forces than race. One reason for this is that white American motivation in racial matters has gone largely unexamined, except to attribute suppor t for policies like affirmative action to white goodwill and nonsuppor t to white racism. White guilt

Black Misery, White Guilt and Amistad

Black Misery, White Guilt and a film produced by Debbie Allen; directed by Stephen Spielberg; written by David Franzoni. the movie about the 1839 shipboard slave revolt and subsequent legal trial, opened to tempered favorable reviews from film critics, African American filmmakers, and scholars in the field of African American studies. Indeed, it has sparked not only heated debate about the nature of slavery in America, but also interest in the story. To date, a number of other artistic productions based on this historical event are scheduled to debut, most notably, the Chicago Lyric Opera's world premiere of a new opera written by Anthony Davis and directed by George C. Wolfe. Notwithstanding the significance of other productions, this movie, more than anything else, has generated intensely positive and negative feedback. While most reviewers agree that director Steven Spielberg maintained, as much as possible, historical veracity to the actual case, they differ on his misrepresentation of the attorney, Roger Sherman Baldwin, who was a distinguished member of the Connecticut bar and not the ingenuous young legal nobody portrayed in the film; the fictionalized Black abolitionist character portrayed by Morgan Freeman; the emphasis on former president John Quincy Adams's humanitarian defense of the Amistad Africans; the allusions to Christianity, which one of the Africans discovers through looking at pictorial depictions of Jesus amongst His people in the Bible; the bonding between Cinque and Adams, through, first, Adams's cultivation of African violets, and later, after the victory before the Supreme Court, the Black Power handshake; the depiction of white abolitionists as hypocrites; and whether Spielberg, a white director, should have made the movie in the first place or yielded to any one of a number of excellent African American film directors. These caveats, however, fail to address the potential impact this film has on those who watch it. I saw this movie recently with my wife and two other African American couples in a mixed-race audience. audience sat rigidly silent during the first part of the movie as Spielberg tells the story. slave revolt aboard a slaveship that left only two of its crewmen alive; the ascendancy of Joseph Cinque to the position of leadership among the Africans who are not homogenized into the subjective category of The Africans, but are differentiated by their tribal affiliations and authenticated by their use of the Mende language rather than the Hollywood stereotyped nonsensical gibberish that has previously been used as the spoken language of Africans in American films; the capture of the slaveship, La Amistad, and her cargo; and the ensuing trial to determine whether Cinque and his comrades should be found guilty of murder, returned to Cuba, and executed, or if they should be declared the property of one of a number of possible owners who present their claims before the court. During this part of the movie, the audience was able to maintain psychological distance from the intensity of the tragedy that was unfolding before their eyes. Spielberg brilliantly moderates this potentially devastating drama with moments of social commentary and comic relief. For example, the liveryman is inserted into the narrative to represent an Americanized African who acquiesces to the standards of white society. As he drives by the African captives as they are being led to trial without acknowledging them, one of the chained men calls out to him in the Mende language, but the liveryman does not respond. Cinque responds to the man's silence by saying that not a brother ... he's white. While some critics have suggested that this moment constructs from Cinque's perspective a simple-minded dichotomy between the authentic African and the sellout, I think Spielberg uses this scene to deconstruct the social system that pits Africans against one another through offering privileges to those who accept their inferior status and are commodified by antebellum society. …

Black anxiety, white guilt, and the politics of status frustration

Progress and Anxiety: Defining the Racial Problem Status Anxiety and the Paradox of Progress Visions of Victims Stereotypes and Contemporary Race Relations The Case Against Affirmative Action Conclusions: Race, Status and the Limits of Public Policy Selected Bibliography Index

Guilt: Yours, Ours, and Theirs

On June 9, 1968, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Dr. Michael Halberstam that raised and examined the question, “Are You Guilty of Murdering Martin Luther King?” The question was addressed to all white Americans, and it presupposed a concept of collective or corporate white guilt. It was prompted by a. particular event, but its application was not limited to that event. As the question itself implied and Halberstam's argument made clear, the question applied to problems of white guilt and white racism as collective phenomena in the whole history of black-white relationships.The question was not unique at that time, for collective guilt had emerged as a fairly common aspect of social protest.

They Have Not Spoken: American Indians in Film

inable id-a projection of the bestiality white culture could not face in itself-or as a stand-in for the hostile nature that Americans thought they could overcome, it is hardly surprising that with the turmoils, re-evaluations, and rebellions of the sixties a different image of the Indian should have begun to emerge in American films. Recent Indian films make a point of advertising their sympathy for the Indian point of view. Generally real Indians play all minor Indian roles and occasionally even major speaking parts. At first sight, no effort seems too great to obtain an aura of authenticity in regard to speech, music, customs, and history. Usually white guilt is admitted through the device of at least one rabid saliva-at-the-mouth racist ready to command a massacre of a sleeping village. This beast is contrasted to the dignified Indian spokesman who is invariably peace-minded. Such an approach is an improvement over the grunts and howls of an earlier period but only at the lowest level: the new films tell us very little about the Native Americans and even less about ourselves and our own history.