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June 01, 2006

The Collapse of White Supremacy Gave Rise to Age of White Guilt

“ ‘With the passage of both the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965,” says social historian Shelby Steele, “America finally ‘acknowledged that it had done something very wrong, that racism was wrong, that slavery was wrong, that segregation was wrong, that white supremacy itself was wrong,’ said Steele. But, he pointed out, this loss of white moral authority also gave rise to a phenomenon in American culture he calls ‘white guilt.’ White guilt is an extremely influential force, he said, not because people feel guilty but because living under the constant threat of being stigmatized as racist forces them to always prove the negative.”

Nah. If anything the elite don’t feel guilty enough. And probably most don’t feel any guilt at all. Token bullshit like affirmative action, job and business quotas for handpicked and carefully selected minorities is no skin off their nose. The elite’s kids won’t ever have to work at McJobs or enlist in the military because they’ve been displaced; their kids will always get be able to go to college. Their incomes, retirements and wealth will get passed on whatever laws they pass for others to follow.

I think Dr. Steele truly has it wrong here. Maybe he just wishes the (largely) white power elite felt guilt. But they don’t, and prolly never have. I am kinda surprised the Independent Institute buys into this whole idea too. For one “white supremacy” while diminished, hasn’t collapsed; and for another other than a few academics, Hollywood types, and public intellectuals, nobody as far as I can see feels too much “guilt” about what happened many years before they were born and had no control over.

Posted by Ali Massoud at June 1, 2006 11:07 AM

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