Race and Guilt

Various thinkers have written about the harm done to people by guilt and its attendant sense of unworthiness. Some have noted particularly the crippling effects of inappropriate and undeserved feelings of guilt on decent people who  haven’t done anything wrong and thus the desirability for would be tyrants of making those they wish to tyrannize feel guilty and sinful.   We can see a mild example of  this in this country with regard to race where a big part of the dishonest game being played by politicians, their allies in the traditional media,  and so called civil rights leaders depends on white people’s being guilt ridden enough to accept their impositions, rules, and demands cravenly and uncritically.

This requires getting  people to accept blame  for something they never did.  Jim Crow segregation laws and government rules were abolished over time in the United States in the two decades following World War II. By 1964 they were gone completely.  The voting age at that time was twenty one. So no one under the age of seventy today voted for segregation laws or the (almost all Democratic) politicians who created and maintained them because none of them could have,  and a majority of the people now over seventy did nothing to support Jim Crow either. They  have nothing to feel guilty or blameworthy about on the issue and should realize it. (In fact the only government imposed racial discrimination in the adult lives of anyone born after World War II  has been the direct, explicit, and systematic discrimination of the last forty years  in favor of blacks and, to some degree,  Hispanics and against whites and others in the form of affirmative action quotas, rules, double standards, and mandates. That this discrimination has been nowhere nearly as damaging or severe as that which black people endured under Jim Crow does not make it right.  It just makes it less bad.)

 Things are even clearer with respect to slavery. The last surviving former slaveholder has been dead a very long time. Most died over a hundred years ago.  No one alive today bears any responsibility for the crimes of slavery. The supporters and defenders of slavery (again almost all Democrats) paid for their crimes with death and destruction in the Civil War.  Much of the wealth stolen by slaveholders from the labor of slaves, which wealth was never spread widely among southern whites, was destroyed in that war. Today’s white Americans  are no more to blame for slavery than today’s Italians are for  Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.

None of this is meant to ignore or diminish the wrongs done to black Americans in the past or to deny that the some of the harm done in the past has had lingering effects.  Rather it is to say only that innocent people should not accept guilt or punishment when they have done nothing wrong. Americans need to reject both the punitive policies of the politicians and bureaucrats and the strictures of hypocritical political correctness. News and events of the last few days illustrate the need to do so.