Guilt Chic: In Ecru, And White, White, White
There's been a growing epidemic -- uh, fashion trend -- of white guilt.

Nobody wants to get stuck with the social or social media cooties of being accused of being racist and all the rest of the "ists," so many cloak themselves in humiliation that doesn't rightly belong to them.

Shelby Steele has a piece in The WSJ that pretty much nails the reality of "white guilt":

White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America's historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual guilt in the world would never be enough to support the hegemonic power that the mere pretense of guilt has exercised in American life for the last half-century.

White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America's old bigotries--racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having "no name in the street" as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt's central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d'être; moral authority is.

When America became stigmatized in the '60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America's moral legitimacy. (Conservatism, focused on freedom and wealth, had little moral clout.) From that followed today's markers of white guilt--political correctness, identity politics, environmental orthodoxy, the diversity cult and so on.

White guilt is ugly, racist guilt -- pitying people for the color of their skin, seeing people first as members of an oppressed group and not as individuals.

This is the flip side of the anti-individualist notion that anybody with white skin owes something to anybody with black skin.

Um, right. Well, during slavery in America, my ancestors were getting chased around by the Cossacks in some Eastern European shithole, thanks. My great grandpa later lived a life of "white privilege" collecting metal out of the trash in Detroit in hopes of feeding his family.

I absolutely don't deny the existence of racism, but I don't think the answer to it is doling out privileges on the basis of skin color -- any more than the answer to anti-semitism would be giving out special bonuses to people who've experienced it. Like me, for example.

My mother once told me that because some people hate Jews, I'd have to work that much harder to do well in the world. I'm guessing there are black parents who tell their children something similar. (When life gives you oppression...make oppression-ade!)

And yes, success is the best "fuck you" there is.