Cry Because You’re White: The Fallacy of White Guilt

If you’re unfamiliar with the term (which is unlikely given its pervasive media presence), white guilt is the concept of individual or group guilt said to be felt by whites for the historical treatment of non-whites. A ubiquitous phenomenon, white guilt has spread from its traditional home in the Americas, now reaching its tendrils broadly across the sea to Europe and anywhere else with a polarity of “whites.”

Guilt is a strong psychological motivation in humans. It can dictate the type and degree of positive action but also works largely as a preventative measure which curtails perceived negative behavioral outcomes. In the case of white guilt, which is present in the socio-political realms occupied by whites (whether or not they choose to acknowledge it), governmental and social policy is affected through laws, prevailing taboos and social mores.

Left-wing commentators posit a straw man to combat the charge: Our motivation is not guilt, they say, but empathy and compassion. While in some cases this is probably true, inasmuch as the impetus and implementation of polices and procedures, in practice—as far as convincing a white polarity to accept particular anti-white legislation such as affirmative action, mass migration, racial pluralism, etc.—the liberal machine will pound the wicked white devil in the head with the Mallet of Historical and Contemporaneous Injustice. Guilt, guilt, guilt! Feel bad about what you’ve done, White Man, and pay.

The fallacy here isn’t so much that injustices didn’t happen, but that they aren’t as pro-white specific as the liberals would have you believe. They see white guilt as “a tool for extortion, reparations and income redistribution based on race rather than merit.” [1] However the history sings a different tune: proportionally, if we are to consider the sorts of things used to validate white guilt (slavery, exclusive immigration practices, ethnically specific discrimination), whites were more “unjust” to themselves than to others—and it is the same with nearly every other ethnic in-group.

White slavery in Briton and America is often underappreciated and overlooked. The phrase “indentured servitude” lessens the relation of European slavery to African slavery, but the treatment of white and black slaves was remarkably similar. Sometimes, things were worse:

Ships carrying White slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, "Scattered data reveal that the mortality for [White] servants at certain times equaled that for [Black] slaves in the 'middle passage,' and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for [Black] slaves." Salinger reports a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for Black slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for White slaves enroute to America. [2]

Most of today’s American working stock is descendant of these servants. If blacks are entitled to slave reparations, so are the “white trash”, “crackers” and “rednecks” that are so unabashedly ridiculed in today’s media. Additionally, as far as reparations go, who is paying whom?

Tens of millions of nonblack Americans are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who arrived after the Civil War. The vast majority of the rest are the offspring of whites who never owned slaves. (Even at slavery's peak, three-fourths of Southern whites held no slaves.) [3]

Regards to slavery, there isn’t even much for whites to feel guilty about that any other ethnicity involved shouldn’t also share: competing African tribes captured and sold each other to Arab traders during the American slave era, and black-on-black slavery is still largely happening in Africa today. An added note: the etymology of “slave” is “Slavic”; from the frequent enslavement of Slavs in central Europe during the early Middle Ages. [4]

The position of holding white guilt as legitimate is pathological and historically incorrect, and those that tout it are either self-hating, valetudinarian, white cosmopolitan liberals, misinformed common folk or nepotistic minorities.

Guilt is a weak and embarrassing place to be motivated from. Those who try to foist it on others for their own psychological capitulation are cowards and are unworthy of your association. Others—outsiders—who flex guilt at your group for their own advantage…well, recognize that they’re only doing what is instinctual: humans developed in-groups from the pressures of nature and the necessity of survival, and the struggle for one’s own group advantage is, evolutionarily speaking, correct; it is the responsibility of ones own group to fight for itself. So quit loathing about your heritage, crying about being white, and stand up for yourself.

Shayne