These people need some self-confidence, a la James Belushi:

I'm a white guy, and I take no crap
When I deliver my white rap.

If white guilt was a disease, these people would be terminal.

When you're asked to teach a class on media arts, either say no and don't do it, or say yes, and teach it. It's a class on media arts, not a class on media arts from whitey.

"Another woman described her torment when a friend asked her to give a presentation about media arts to a group of black students -- an exercise that would have made a spectacle of her white privilege ... [and blah, blah, blah]"

Feeling guilty about white privilege sounds like a false piety to me. It's easy to feel guilt over other peoples' sins, but she can't atone for them by taking half her own experience and privelege and giving it to somebody else, so there's not much point. She can, however, take a less patronizing attitude toward presenting to the class. They're there for media arts training, not to listen to her sobbing.

Amy, here is a blog item for you. The fifth paragraph is hilarious.

http://www.pressherald.com/news/Women-march-topless-in-Portland-without-incident.html

'Minds me of that Kid Rock song, "Amen", one line goes: "...how can we see salvation when our nation's race relations got me feeling guilty for being white?"

I'm white, I was born that way, and there ain't nuthin' I kin do about it. NO ONE can change the color they were born with, although some have tried (Michael Jackson comes to mind). It's been better than 200 years since the Civil War was fought, and the slaves freed. Isn't it past time to get over the skin color issue and just move the frak on already?!?

Uh. The American civil war occured from 1861 through 1865. Not two hundred years ago

Some people just need a smack upside the head. This lady is definitely one of them.

Dear god. I feel dumber just having read that. I need to go read some National Inquirer to get the taste of dumb out.

The suggested answer to the quiz at the beginning of the linked article is so obviously wrong! Sandy should not ask Karen how Jim's racist behavior makes her feel; she should talk to Jim about it. He is the one with the problem behavior. (And, since it's his actions that matter, I would argue that his underlying thoughts and motivations are irrelevant and none of his employer's business.) If Karen were doing the same thing -- going to the back of the store every time a white man entered -- I'd talk to her about it, too. I would not interview a white male employee to see if he was hurt by her behavior. I am a shopkeeper here, not a therapist. How can this store even function if everything is so subjective? Aren't there clear, objective standards for employee conduct, ones that don't delve into people's psyches? The person not following the rules should be corrected and reprimanded as necessary.

The comments at the original article are very good. One of them sums up pretty accurately why this attitude is offensive:

"Whites don't, by the way, have a lock on [racism], though they are taught, by fools such as noted in this article, that their whiteness somehow makes them so vastly superior that they've got to go round profusely apologizing for it all day long."

In business, there's one color and it's in people's wallets.

I sold some rental property in Southern California a few years back. After the house had been on the market for a few weeks, the real estate agent called and told me she had an offer, but needed to ask me something. She asked if I had any objection to selling the house to a Mexican couple. I told her that as long as the money was green non-negotiable legal US tender, I had no problem selling to anyone. She breathed a sigh of relief and told me she had had owners in the past object to selling to Hispanics (who were, by the way, becoming the dominant ethnic group in that area).

"In business, there's one color and it's in people's wallets."

Trouble is, the little drama mentioned in the article takes place in a downtown community center, not a business, so I doubt that the quality of customer service would have any bearing on their bottom line. Now of course I don't really know, but I'll bet it's tougher to fire slacking employees of the community center than it is slacking employees of a retail outfit.

It's easy to pour on the scorn & ridicule because this was an entirely voluntary meeting of brainwashed Marxists. Whiteness workshops will be a lot less funny if they ever succeed in making them mandatory.

Flynne: I'm white, I was born that way, and there ain't nuthin' I kin do about it. NO ONE can change the color they were born with, although some have tried (Michael Jackson comes to mind). It's been better than 200 years since the Civil War was fought, and the slaves freed. Isn't it past time to get over the skin color issue and just move the frak on already?!?

Interesting comment, Flynne. I think the whole "white guilt" thing is the conclusion some people reach when they encounter concepts like "black pride," assuming that if someone should be proud to be black, then one should be ashamed to be white.

I have mixed feelings about the whole "pride" issue. At least as it applies to "gay pride." On the one hand, homosexuality is an accident of birth, not something I accomplished through hard work and perseverence, so you could argue that I should not be feeling "gay pride." On the other hand, it could be argued that it's intended to counter the oppressive culture that dictates I should be ashamed merely for being gay.

Some may have a screaming fit because I've interjected the "insulting" comparison of homosexuality to racial minority status. To them, I say, it's the only minority status I have that I can speak about with any authority.

But the point is, now that I'm finally getting to the point, is that the idea that you or I should be ashamed of being white is irrational. The idea of black pride doesn't come from the idea that one should be proud of something they had nothing to do with, such as the color of one's skin, but from the idea that one shouldn't be ashamed of it, despite what the mainstream culture dictates. And, yes, the culture that dictates shame over one's race is still very much alive.

This is what white supremacy looks like nowadays.

I think oldrpmdaddy nails this one as false piety. Essentially it's a self-Flagellant, and then saying "see how good I am, why aren't you this good?"

Betcha if you talked to these people about other things, they are just as bad about them... one wonders if that feeling causes them to be much less charitable in other ways.

Be sure you read the comments that follow the piece. Most of them are better than the article itself. The average National Post readers are educated conservatives.

Having been adopted gave me a sort of non-racial identity that I wish more people could have. Although I'm fair-skinned, I could never be completely sure what my racial identity was. One of my grandfathers even feared I was part black, so he was never as affectionate with me as the other grandkids (until he went senile and couldn't tell us apart).

After I found my biological family, I learned that I was a mixture of Irish, American Indian, and German Jew. A pretty much typical American Heinz 57.

But not knowing that growing up kept me from feeling either pride or shame. I am who I am. Skin color or ethnicity seemed to have nothing particular to do with it, and I think that's how we should strive to treat anyone else.

I just watched this movie trailer and I am so sickened and scared for life that I came here to find some kind of distraction. Please, someone. SCRUB MY BRAIN. PLEASSSEEEEE.

http://io9.com/5509362/first-trailer-from-horrific-human-centipede-makes-us-queasy

Attempt to distract myself: A good friend of mine said that, sometimes, she feels guilty for being white. I never knew what to make of that. And always felt too unedumakated to respond in a way that wouldn't incite her to riot against me.

I typically love our Northern neighbors, but that kind of self-indulgent navel-gazing just hurts my brain. This is the kind of article that shouldn't even register on the mind of a productive citizen. Its 15 minutes of billable time that you'll never get back.

Let's be kind and tally this among the many reasons to dislike academics (on either side of the border) with too much time on their hands.

And, yes, the culture that dictates shame over one's race is still very much alive.

Oh I know, Patrick. I've been amazed at the crap lately that's going on around here, specifically, in this part of CT. There was a gathering of jewish people on the Fairfield green not long ago (I forget what exactly for) and some nazi supremist people went there with their nasty signs and such. It was awful. The cops were called, it was just really ugly. Shortly before that, there was a noose found under or near a black cop's patrol car that caused a furor. And last Halloween, someone took exception to a hanged man in someone's yard, that was a small part of a big display, because it looked "black". I saw the thing, it was gray and looked like a zombie. I dunno how the person who complained got black out of that, but there were protests and evntually, the homeowner had to take it down. I just don't get it. I mean, I do, to an extent, but I think it's totally ridiculous.

The American civil war occured from 1861 through 1865. Not two hundred years ago

Yeah okay but you get my drift. It was a LONG time ago. Time for people to get over it, already!

White privilege exists only in the imaginations of racist blacks, who also claim their blackness means they can't be racist. How racist.

There are millions of blacks in the US who have a higher socioeconomic level than I ever had, and have more education, and more important jobs than I ever had. Oh, poor me, just because of my skin color, I am guilty of racism.

This is definitely in the WTF category. Beam me up, Scotty!

One of the reasons I like Mexico is because there is no racism here. There is, strangely, colorism. That means light skinned people are considered more attractive, but the ethnicity has nothing to do with it. It is just a strange standard of beauty. If I weren't a faithful husband, it would work well for me, because there are some extremely beautiful dark-skinned women here.

Conan- As a grammarian, did you mean "negotiable legal US tender" rather than "non-negotiable?" [Technically neither's correct for currency / bearer paper, but ... I'm just sayin' is all ...]

Anyhoo - Mrs. Teflon and I were shocked not TOO many years ago when a potential buyer of a relative's rental property asked the seller if the renters were "blacks." I was impressed that he chased her off with a "why would that possibly matter?" This was on the north side of the mason-Dixon line ...

"White privilege exists only in the imaginations of racist blacks, who also claim their blackness means they can't be racist. How racist."

Oh, were that only true.

When I earned my second BS at forty-three, one of the whitest women one could ever know said to me, "Yes, you used your privilege."

Uh, no. I took out student loans, a full course load at which I worked very hard (cum laude, Thank You Very Much), and worked pretty much a full time job to pay my bills. I didn't party, date, or have HBO. And then to have some sanctimonious knee jerk liberal egghead woman tell me that my accomplishment was earned because of my "privilege" as a white male was pretty offensive.

This article makes my stomach sick. It's political correctness run amok, and PC wasn't pretty from the gate. These pseudo-intellectual idiots have nothing better to do than to spew their mental diarrhea.

It's interesting how superior they feel about themselves - that they would consider a group of black students unable to understand media arts. Talk about racism.

I can't help but believe that most of them, underneath their smiles and nods and platitudes, were thinking what a crock of shit the discussion was.

Conan- As a grammarian, did you mean "negotiable legal US tender" rather than "non-negotiable?" [Technically neither's correct for currency / bearer paper, but ... I'm just sayin' is all ...]

I believe you are correct. The term should have been "negotiable" (and, thus, should be technically correct if applied to currency since legal ownership the money passes with transfer - but there may be other legal considerations which make it technically incorrect for currency).

=========================

I think the poster earlier who likened this type of thought exercise to self-flagellation hit the nail on the head. It's a mental cilice for secular humanists.

My bf is getting another degree and is taking a class in which the TEXTBOOK, not just the instructor, makes the claim that there is no biological basis for race. Isn't that interesting? It would mean, by the PC Left's own creed, that there is no BIOLOGICAL basis for "white privilege." Yes, according to their passionately asserted, deeply held belief, "whiteness" is just some crap they made up, but for which there is no hard evidence.

PC has always sickened me and I keep feeling sicker by the minute.

Lovelysoul: One of my grandfathers even feared I was part black, so he was never as affectionate with me as the other grandkids (until he went senile and couldn't tell us apart).

Oh, my God! That must have been horrible for you, at a young impressionable age, thinking that there might be something "wrong" with you. When in fact, there's not, whether you're part-black or not.

BTW, I highly recommend "The Human Centipede" for minds as sick as my own.

The idea of "Race" is itself racist.

It comes from the idea that various groups of humans could be classified like various species of animals.

Certain studies have shown that there is in fact greater genetic variety within groups of a designated race than between them. I'd have to hunt down that information, and for all I know it has since been disproven.

But ultimately we're all just people, its our culture and ideals, our values and how we act or fail to act upn them, which decices our worth, not our skin color.

Funny thing.

The only people that would attend that class...are the people who are already self flagellating liberal nuts.

It can't make things any worse where they're concerned.

After a certain point, getting a little bit dumber no longer makes a difference, stupid is as incredibly stupid does.

Black Pride / White Shame
flaunting what you're born with
is really kinda lame

Some people are overly fixated on *what* they are rather than *who* they are.

Methinks they are insecure, with a dearth of character.

About as lame as my rhyme.

"makes the claim that there is no biological basis for race."

This never made sense to me because clearly, our skin color (and all of our looks) aren't completely random.

My sister, brother and I have the same parents. We are not identical, however we all look much alike. My brother looks more like my father. My sister like my mother. And I am somewhere in between. My sister tans; I burn and am relentless pasty. However, we each fall within an expected range of appearance similarities as two biological siblings. If my sister were black wouldn't my mom have gotten a few interesting glances in the delivery room? ...Yes, and it's because there seems to be some biological correlation between our genetic material, given to us by our parents, and us.

Just as it would have been statistically improbable for my siblings and I to have brown eyes (since we have 3 blue-eyed grandparents and 1 green-eyed one: gooo Punnett squares!), it is even more improbable for me to look Asian or have really dark skin.

If race had no biological basis, wouldn't it be possible - in fact, wouldn't we be seeing this - for a white couple to biologically have black kids? Am I missing/not understanding something here?

"Lovelysoul: One of my grandfathers even feared I was part black, so he was never as affectionate with me as the other grandkids (until he went senile and couldn't tell us apart).

Oh, my God! That must have been horrible for you, at a young impressionable age, thinking that there might be something "wrong" with you. When in fact, there's not, whether you're part-black or not."

It was ok, Patrick. I didn't really notice, to be honest. I found out later, and then it sort of made sense looking back, but luckily, that sort of bigotry just doesn't occur to young kids.

I never felt adopted until I was 16, and one of my cousins tried to kiss me. I said, "You can't - I'm your cousin!" and he replied, "You're not my REAL cousin."

That stung. But I'm sure it would've been far worse if he'd not wanted to kiss me because I was "black". lol

I don't fully agree that the concept of race is racist itself. There are certain biological factors that have to do with race. I'm more vulnerable to the burning rays of the sun because I'm white (and pale). I will not get sickle cell anemia. I have a rare blood type that is virtually unheard of in non-Caucasians, but is very useful for pregnant women who share my abnormality (Rh negative). But beyond these physical factors, I agree that the concept of race is pointless.

Lovelysoul, glad to hear you grandfather's narrowmindedness did not result in lasting damage to you, darlin'.

Isomber, your rhyme was one syllable from being a haiku. Throw in the extra syllable, and I think you've got it.

"I'm unloading so much whiteness on you now"??? How patronizing and condescending. Her colleague of color musta felt AWKward!!!

White/Black/Whatever Americans have this weird sense of race.

The latino concept of race is you are what you look like - in a sense. My grandfather was blonde green eyed guy who married a brown girl. It was never considered mixed race marriage. When I was with a blonde blue eyed Brazialian again we were not considered mix raced in latin america. But if I dated a white guy here it would be considered mixed race.

"I approached him afterward and apologized," she told the class. "I said to him. 'I'm so sorry! I'm unloading so much whiteness on you right now.' "

Good Lord. Condescending is right.

My understanding about what it means to be responsible about white privilege has nothing to do with apologizing for it (or internalizing it into some kind of self-hate, and taking attention away from the real issue) - it is acknowledging its existence and conducting individual choices accordingly. "Now that I know what I know, what will I do with it?" It's not about apologizing.

It's finding out where exactly systematic racism does exist (because it does) and making a conscious effort to withhold support from any system, program or institution which establishes dominance over another race (e.g. going to the ballot box and NOT voting for legislation which continues oppressive policies such as welfare that unequally target non-white communities in a destructive way because you feel sorry for them.) This is racist. This is non-acknowledgement of your white privilege (especially considering whites out number non-whites here as a percentage of the population).

I find the same flawed reasoning in the ideology white liberals promote behind "equal opportunity employment" on behalf of non-whites (condescending again).

They do this by promoting a system of so called "equality" while establishing themselves in a position of dominance and denying that very system of dominance even exists..because they've now made discussions about race taboo. This is the key political tool used to keep this unequal privilege in place.

Deny and avoid the real problem so the solution can never be reached.

As an indirect follow-up to Jonathan Kay's piece, if you'd like another example of what crazy thinking goes on amongst too many of my fellow Canadians, read this brilliant satire from Lorrie Goldstein. He makes mincemeat out of those who think free speech is great ... as long as it's approved by their like minded ilk.

You're missing the point quite drastically Gretchen.

The idea of race is a taxonomic view of humanity. The idea that we are in some way significantly different from each other. Not just, oh well this group of people has slightly larger lips, or darker skin, or more varied hair color. But that the groups themselves are actually born as different qualities of human.

Certainly there are genetic differences in basics of appearance, but these are only a small part of the overall genetic make up of a human being. There are vast vast vast amounts of information encoded in our bodies, much of which has nothing to do with our appearance.

And it was based upon our appearance, that the first attempts were made to classify humans as not just "human" but as various levels and types of humans.

Take a look into the actual history of race, not racism itself, but at the early attempts to classify humanity, and you'll start to see just how mad the very idea of differing "races" really is.

As the term was used, we might say it most closely relates to classifying Neandertals as a different race compared to ourselves. Or in Star Trek, the term "race" is used interchangably with species. That is how it was most closely intended.

And that is why it is quite mad.

Robert, that helps, thanks.

I understand that "race" - using skin color and other core physical attributes to differentiate humans (by categorizing them based on those characteristics, e.g: shade of skin color; lip size; hair texture) is arbitrary in an objective sense, but I see how that categorization of humans happened based on past social norms and limited thinking. It's easy to look at a person and SEE that they look different, and to a person who doesn't think very hard, it might follow that they must BE different.

But there is a biological component to how to we look. Race is a human social construct, but there are also real physical differences between certain groups who tend to make babies with like-looking people. Perhaps in 500,000 years there will be very little variation between humans' appearances, but variation in looks is biologically rooted.

How we use physical differences to make assumptions about groups of people and treating them a certain way is the thing that has no basis in biology.

Am I making sense/am I getting this? I struggled with this very topic in college in my "Cross Cultural Understanding" class.

Many of the physical characteristics of European populations - light skin, blond hair, red hair, blue eyes, green eyes - are the result of variations in a single gene, MC1R (the melanocortin-1 receptor), which regulates the production of pigments. In the tropical African climate where our species evolved, having lots of melanin was essential to block UV rays & prevent skin cancer. But in Ice Age Europe, lighter skin was an asset, because it maximized vitamin D synthesis & prevented rickets & similar diseases. As a bonus, women with blond hair & blue eyes, or flaming red hair & green eyes, stood out from the crowd & made very attractive mates for cavemen. By the end of the Ice Age, this combination of environmental pressure & sexual selection yielded a rich harvest of MC1R variants in European populations that were absent or extremely rare elsewhere.

Similar genetics underlie other variations among races. These genetic mutations are certainly not social constructs. Races are just populations in which characteristic genetic mutations have arisen & expressed themselves over time. There's nothing inherently sinister about this.

On the bright side, as long as people continue to live in different environments & find different things sexually attractive, we won't all look alike a million years from now. It would be nice if whiteness workshops would go extinct by then.

Quite right in that it is a social construct. (Yes I know appearance based differences are obvious enough, but its a little more complicated than that) See below:

At its inception, it was just a natural outgrowth of the explosion in scientific knowledge, lots of quackary was found here and there in those early days, and we shouldn't be surprised that some of their efforts went the way that they did. They were just people trying to understand the world, and that included human culture, human biology, our appearances, everything. Its true we have some obvious physical differences, height trends, skin color trends, eye or hair traits, why there is even a small population in Tibet which grows ear hair that is rather like the hair on one's head, and can grow just as long. (They braid it just as you might your own) In certain South American countries with large deviations in elavation, people up higher developed much larger barrel chests compared to their lowland cousins, better adapting them to the environment. Inuit people tend to have noses of a particular shape which make them better suited for breathing in the cold northern conditions. Nobody is arguing that there are not some physical differences between regional populations or people with a given regional heritage. But rather that breaking them down into different segments of humanity is meaningless or worse. Especially given the root of those efforts.

Our biology is certainly shaped by the needs of those who came before us.

However, that is very different from classifying people by race. If you look back to the origins of the term, you'll actually find charts classifying races just in the exact same way as charts classified differing species. And complete lists not of physical traits alone, but rather including behavior. Roma (Gypsies) were thought to have wanderlust which made them roam, Jews were biologically compelled towards greed, quite an...interesting, list. And of course the list glorified the biology of those who made it, and since science as we know it got its boost in the west, well the west glorified its own "racial heritage" putting itself as the pinnacle of the their little tree of humanity. These were the same ideas which suggested that violent criminals would be brutish in appearance, and that pedophiles would appear soft and childlike. Documents and publications at the time also recommended that men and women not attempt to reproduce when either of them was angry, upset, or in some other sort of unpleasant mental or physical state. Why? Because they believed that this was detrimental to the biological nature of the child to be.

Those are the origins of the idea of race. Each biological heritage had different behavioral traits, levels of intellect, and fit in somewhere else on the tree of human evolution, and every person's behavior and personality was impacted by their taxonomic classification, and their own parental heritage.

The west gets alot of flack for this, but the bottom line was that these were people just trying to understand the world with a crude scientific understanding that was still developing at the time, and not widely understood, and trying to understand what made people into people, societies into societies, and why their society (the west) became dominant while the rest fell behind.

Frankly, if things had turned out differently, I doubt any other culture at the time would have behaved in a way other than the west did, ethnocentrism is not unique to the west. It can be found in any culture anywhere at the same period of time, the only difference lay in the power to make it policy that rested with the west.

We would do a great deal of good if we cast aside the very idea of race entirely. It doesn't seem to provide a useful framework for much of anything, its nothing but a holdover from a much cruder scientific era, which was latched on to by people who had a use for it politically, and hasn't been let go since.

I just think of my abolitionist Quaker forebears having their hometown burnt to the ground by pro-slavery raiders whenever I feel any 'white guilt' coming on, and then it goes away and I get back to work.

Gotta pay taxes for those invisible bombers and anchor babies, ya know.