> If you are a white man born in America, feeling guilt is what you’re supposed to feel, as a human being.

Nonsense.

You should feel thankful.

Thankful that you had the luck being born in the most prosperous time in human history, where you have access to better healthcare, transportation, human rights and democratic privileges, to name just a few.

Once you realize how good it is to live in this day and age and feel grateful, helping others who are a bit less fortunate will come naturally to you.

Working from positive emotions is a much better strategy, both for your own sake and - by extension - also for the sake of society at large.

So feel guilty that you don't feel thankful, but only if you're white?

You know that skin colour doesn't make you immune to poverty, or disease, or any adversity?

Your comment comes across as supporting the parent comment; and as exceptionally racist.

Almost certainly some kids living in USA didn't eat today. Your comment sounds like "well starving white kids can just eat their privilege".

I don't understand why you're all so obsessed with skin colour and not with actuality of real people.

Are the powerful people in USA principally white men, I don't doubt it. Don't let your ire at such inequality make you racist.

The whole point of the posted article is to _not_ guilt people in to doing the right thing. You should push positive emotions about doing the right thing, not negative emotions.

From the article: "These findings suggest that inducing people to consider positive rather than negative self-directed emotions might recruit more people to a climate-change mitigation agenda, and to prosocial behaviour more broadly."

There are more emotions than guilt and thankfulness. They also aren’t even the apparent dipoles you appear to imply. Being thankful doesn’t mean you’re not guilty. I’m sure there are plenty of scenes of Lex Luther being thankful on YouTube of something he should feel guilt over-might even.

There certainly are more emotions. To add on to what you're saying, being thankful doesn't mean you're not guilty. However, it also doesn't imply guilt either.

I think that what you're saying about how skin color doesn't make you immune to adversity is true. I also think that they are trying to say that you shouldn't focus on guilt and instead should focus on gratitude, that relatively speaking and from their perspective, white people are privileged.

I can see how in some ways, some subset of white people have had much better fortunes than others and people of color. There are, like you said, other subsets of white people who've had it worse or suffer similarly.

> Thankful that you had the luck being born in the most prosperous time in human history, where you have access to better healthcare, transportation, human rights and democratic privileges, to name just a few.

That's the whole point - people in poverty do not have many of these privileges. They don't have access to good education, healthcare, transportation, and they are consistently denied their human rights. After growing up without these privileges, they are funneled into dead-end jobs or prison. Minimizing the injustice to saying they are "a bit less fortunate" is frankly disgusting.

MLK said "large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity." That is just as true today as it was fifty years ago.

The fact is the US Government promised to keep treaties with indigenous Americans, and it didn't. It promised 40 acres to every survivor of slavery, and that was never delivered. What's the value of all the real estate in America plus 400 years of enslaved labor? Probably a lot less than what their descendants are asking for today.

So don't feel guilty. Be responsible. Be accountable. Do the right thing, and recognize that as a beneficiary you owe some of that debt.

Should you self-flagellate for being born in the situation you are in? How would that benefit anyone?

Guilt is a negative emotion, and in my opinion you shouldn't have to do penance for things you have no control over. Instead, you can use your position of privilege to do good in whatever way fits.

My small contribution, I run an online community (~1000 members in our Discord server) with a zero tolerance policy on racism, racist / sexist / orientation stereotypes, etc. It's ran and frequented by a highly diverse range of people from all over the world. It's not much, but I know I'm not contributing to the problem and I like to think my community is making the world a better place.

I don't tend to visit too many communities that are "run", but am member in quite a few where it works without zero tolerance policies. They tend to be more peaceful and honest in my opinion. Maybe they require common ground, but it works somehow.

Again, you shouldn't feel guilt for yourself, but you should feel guilt for your ancestors. Not self-flagellation. And you should attempt some penance if you are able - sometimes that just involves welcoming people into spaces with you.

What is not tolerable to me is to pretend you are not, at least in part, a result of a long string of advantages. That your relative power comes with responsibility. And to not put your head in the sand and grow hateful of the disadvantaged.

My ancestor died in the Civil War, on the Northern side. Other of my ancestors moved from nice safe Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Lawrence, Kansas, at a time when it was "Bleeding Kansas", to try to keep it non-slave.

Explain to me again why I should feel guilt for my ancestors?

I don't think that's what the article was getting at. Feeling guilty is the exact thing that you're supposed to avoid, if you want to help others. Instead, focus on the gratitude and how fortunate you are. From there, because you feel so grateful and compassionate, you want to help others alleviate their suffering.

> you have no control over

Faulty assumption here. You do have control over maintaining the system of privilege that you were born into. That's how it continues from generation to generation, by white people holding on to their money and power instead of working on ways to distribute it.

>white people holding on to their money and power instead of working on ways to distribute it.

Why is the emphasis on white people and not wealth? There are so many different historical groups of "white people"

I completely fail to take a submissive approach to the whole us race debate. Sure you guys have massive issues that stem from a long line of segregationist policies. Europe has its problems, but implying that this should lead to some sort of White only redistribution of wealth will lead to bloodshed.

Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to equate class war with race war? Henry kissinger?

It’s a handy ideology. It allows Californians to feel super enlightened while having a ridiculous homeless population at the same time.

Precisely by making it a race issue instead of wealth distribution/class issue it becomes easier to shut people down who would support social programs, mostly by driving the well meaning masses into looking at it from the race perspective.

Keeping it as a race issue keeps the lower classes on eachothers throats. Heck I’ve seen arguments that Oprah, a billionare, is less privileged than a white hobo, because whiteness. And because it’s not about money but literally the amount of melanin in your skin there is no need to care about the money part.

Otherwise I wouldn’t care less what the yanks do but due to the large cultural dominance they have the issues spill to outside of US.

The most well known mind behind the modern form of that equation is that of Lee Atwater, one of the architects of the Republican "Southern Strategy" [1]. But using race to divide people who would otherwise be unacceptably likely to recognize and act on a common class interest is the oldest play in America, and it's always wild - by which I mean "unsurprising, but regrettable" - to see other white leftists in 2020 still falling for it.

Do better, y'all.

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...

> Why is the emphasis on white people and not wealth?

Because of the amount of violence that has and is taking place entirely on the basis of race rather than wealth.

Wealth is certainly a thing. But those who talk about how all these problems are just about economic class are sweeping the thousands of race-based and racist policies and actions under the rug.

> Why is the emphasis on white people and not wealth?

Because that's who has wealth [1] and they have it because they stole it from other groups via forced labor and literal theft of land and other resources and then explicitly disadvantaged them in post facto competition.

[1]. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/03/politics/black-white-us-f...

The ruling class stole these, not "white people". Throughout the history and the world, all places and races had their own class of oppressors, surprise - usually from the same race as the oppressed, and of course from a very wide racial variety. That US were built first from white colonists, who set the precedent for that place, does not mean whites are any different that other races in oppression. The ruling class also stole their wealth from the working class, including the white people in it, and if your aim is to bring equal racial representation, or a change on the dominant race, in the ruling class, rather than the abolishment of the present social and economoc structure, you are just maintaining the current situation and playing the capitalists' game.

Well said and reasoned; however, not all oppression is class based. My claim is that racism is a secondary oppression upon the first that you describe which white people (or whoever in other places) benefit from and participate in maintaining. It is true the inequality between the classes is much greater than any other but that doesn't mean that the others don't exist. I agree especially with your last point though and didn't intend to communicate otherwise.

> white people holding on to their money and power

That there is a racist statement. Yes maybe intergenerational wealth causes some issues but to cast it as a purely white issue is just stupid. Avarice is a feature common to all of humanity.

> That there is a racist statement.

Hardly. It has nothing to do with who or what they are but rather is literally a description of what they are doing.

> white issue

It is a white issue that white people oppress others and are the only ones with the power to stop that short of violent overthrow.

Wrong. You can find examples of this behaviour right across the world, regardless of race. Doesn’t make it right.

If white people are a monolithic entity, what possible incentive would we have to give our rivals more room to manouvre?

I see two options - either race doesn't matter to anyone worth listening to, or white people aren't being aggressive enough in securing our own interests. Or can you articulate a third position?

>You do have control over maintaining the system of privilege that you were born into. That's how it continues from generation to generation, by white people holding on to their money and power instead of working on ways to distribute it.

An alternative way to look at it: what did western civilisation do to grow such a huge amount of wealth compared to the rest of the world? What could the rest of the world learn from this, so that they could build wealth of their own? Fortunately the answer is relatively simple, as evidenced by how most east Asian countries have now become just as wealthy/developed as western countries: by embracing markets, the rule of law and personal responsibility.

> what did western civilisation do to grow such a huge amount of wealth compared to the rest of the world?

Many civilizations have taken turns at doing this, from ancient Mesopotamia, now part of the Middle East, and onwards. There's nothing exceptional about Western civilization, in this regard. Nor, I suspect, will the US hegemony -- which was gained by selling arms to both sides of 2 world wars which both crippled the former hegemony -- be exceptional.

They gained a lot of that wealth by fucking over the rest of the world with superior military power. I'm British, and the British empire was literally 1/3rd of the world at one point. A lot of the infrastructure in Britain which enables to compete favourably against other countries in competitive markets was built off the back of trade in goods that we forced the populations of other countries to produce then took the profits of for ourselves.

Capitalism? That's what you're describing.

Is the 'forced' a stretch? Or was it based on slavery. I don't know.

I'm not describing capitalism, I'm describing straight up military occupancy and subjugation of the local population. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj for example.

If you want a US perspective, then consider Cuba. Would you describe the US embargo against Cuba as capitalism? It's disingenuous for someone to say that countries have struggled because they failed to embrace markets when the US has actively interfered against governments that didn't embrace markets with sanctions and support for coups.

I’ve got bad news. Wealth isn't a number in your bank account that you can carve up and redistribute. Its the output of a properly managed system of assets and liabilities. If you just seize the outputs and give them away it will turn to ashes in the mouths of the recipients. They’ll have nothing after it’s spent while those who produce the wealth will have taken their knowledge and capabilities with them. All this has been tried before and it always fails because it’s the wrong way to solve the problem.

> You do have control over maintaining the system of privilege that you were born into.

Do I? I'd be (genuinely) interested to know what kind of power you think I have to change the system. Because from my perspective as a middle class white person I feel just as powerless to change the system as everyone else.

There's not much that any one of us can do alone. Refusing to make excuses for an unjust system, and finding ways to make the shitty bargains required for survival that at least minimize the extent to which we support it, is the best sort of start I can suggest. We may be forced by circumstance, especially those of us who have given hostages to fortune, to be complicit. But we can recover some agency at least over the extent of that complicity.

I'd like to be able to suggest some group or movement here, but I've never been much of a joiner. The BLM folks I've heard from seem to have good heads on their shoulders, though. You could do a lot worse than to consider their suggestions on the question of "how do I help?"

I definitely do understand feeling powerless. But remember also that, as a middle-class white person, especially if you're male and the head of a conventional family household, that puts you pretty close to America's own idea of what America is. Believe it or not, there's a subtle kind of power in that. Things that might likely be ignored when said by - oh, someone like me, for example, who while also middle-class-ish white is a weird queer redneck loner and always has been - often are taken more seriously when said by someone who presents a gestalt of commonplace American normalcy, simply because of the sort of person who's saying them.

That really is a power all its own. If your social and professional circles are anything like mine, you can often enough find opportunities there to wield that power - gently, of course, and with real care for those with whom you're talking; to be, or to be seen as, a humorless woke thought editor, is to fail - in a way that might help redress injustice in a small way simply by convincing someone else to think about whether they should see the world a little differently from how they have before.

It's a small thing, for sure. And it can on occasion be a risk; if nothing else, to speak honestly from the heart on any subject constitutes a degree of vulnerability, and people don't always treat that kindly. But little in my experience worth doing is entirely unattended by risk, and little in my experience does more to ameliorate a sense of powerlessness than to hear someone say "you've given me a lot to think about", and then to see over time that they have thought about it.

It's subtle, as I said. It's a small thing, and it doesn't always work. But it is something. And even when you fail - which you will, sometimes at least - at least you will have tried, and even in that there's a kind of consolation to be found.

>I definitely do understand feeling powerless. But remember also that, as a middle-class white person, especially if you're male and the head of a conventional family household, that puts you pretty close to America's own idea of what America is. Believe it or not, there's a subtle kind of power in that.

And if you change white to any other color the power that comes from embodying something people consider good is still there. Arguably a race other that white makes it more powerful because in some contexts that would imply successful social/economic mobility.

The power comes from embodying ideals. They're all boxes to check and depending on what square you start on you'll have an easier time checking some boxes than others. If you're a white guy born to a stable middle class family it's gonna be easy for you to get the power that comes from check the boxes that come with a stable middle class family of your own. But you'll never be able to check any of the boxes that come from overcoming the kind of adversity you never faced and climbing the rungs of the social ladder you never had to climb. Who's more respected the plumber who can afford a Corvette or the engineer who can afford the Corvette? Having a nice family in a nice house in a nice suburb won't give you any credibility if that's the kind of life you were born into and getting it yourself was just a case of going through the motions. If you have a nice family in a nice house in a nice suburb and you were born the son of a police officer in French Indochina in 1955 then you clearly put the effort in to get what you have.

It's not about race. It's about who you are and what you've done. Sometimes race can be shorthand for that but unless you are incredibly lucky/unlucky those are not the kind of events that dominate the arc of one's life.

Who's more respected? The white plumber whose Corvette is seen as the just fruits of diligent labor, or the black engineer whose BMW is regarded as clear evidence of foolish profligacy?

I'd be more inclined to credit what you're saying if I hadn't seen precisely that distinction so often expressed by people who, in contexts not influenced by their perspective on race, uphold pure meritocracy as the highest good, whose primacy is a uniquely American virtue.

And, in any case, people's perceptions aren't as simple as you make them out to be. I think it would be very nice if they were! But to behave in contravention of reality is the best way I know to betray myself into foolishness. Maybe you've had better results with the method.

that is not a fault endemic to white people, but people who are well off. please distance yourself from identarian narratives and treat people as individuals rather than groups of people

Most white people have very little money and even less power.

No, actually, not on average. [1]

[1]. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/03/politics/black-white-us-f...

As reported in the link, median net worth of a white family is $171k. Which is just about enough to buy a median house... Meaning, that the median white family has a house they live in and little else. That's certainly not a position from which you can influence anything.

I am white, granted. However, I have no extraordinary power nor am I really wealthy. Pushing these buttons, implying that I should be guilty for what I am, is only increasing the divide between the races. Accusing me of playing an acitve part in supressing others is simply a false allegation. This is racist. And you dont even realize! Both sides will have to work on how they communicate with each other to improve things.

> implying that I should be guilty for what I am

No, on two levels. First, nobody cares about how you feel, guilty or otherwise. Second, it's not about what you are either. It's about what you have, i.e. wealth and relative power, and what you do. Those are things within your control, unlike anyone's race.

> Accusing me of playing an acitve part in supressing others is simply a false allegation.

You do play that active part by asserting your property rights on wealth and other rights that were taken from others and given to you rather than working distributing them. Nothing false about that.

> Both sides will have to work on how they communicate with each other to improve things.

No, one side needs to give up its power over the other.

All the "wealth" I have results from my own income. And my "power" simply doesn't exist.

Although I think these sort of comparisons are pretty useless, I am sure there are a lot of black people with more power then a blind white man.

Making people feel guilty doesn't enact positive change. This is not the correct way to approach the situation.

It might make you feel morally better in yourself, but all you're going to do is put white people off even listening to you.

>If you are a white man born in America, feeling guilt is what you’re supposed to feel

I've never been a fan of the accusation that social justice uses "original sin" as an argumentative tactic, but here you are unambiguously using inherited sin.

Obviously people have a duty to live their lives honorably, but saddling someone with that kind of free floating guilt and anxiety seems like an attempt at setting them up for manipulation.

There's a theme in social justice where everything is systematic until it's people they don't like, then those people are personally morally culpable. It's like soc ail justice read a description of what it means for a social issue to be "systematic", without learning systems thinking. This lens on the issue is a way to gain insight for new systematic approaches to remedies, but instead it's been reduced to new "I'm right because I have bigger words than you" tech for pushing tired old tactics.

The point I was trying to make was not to feel guilt for yourself, but you SHOULD be aware of the advantages the sins of your ancestors have given you. And I would argue you have a responsibility to make up for them, in terms of righting the systemic wrongs. It was not my intent to place moral culpability here, though I understand how its easy to read that. None of that means you need to have free floating guilt and anxiety. But an awareness should naturally lend itself to wanting to help.

The truth is most people aren't aware of history at all. So many believe, internally, that there is a natural order or a superiority based on the economic and social outcomes they see. The more one knows about the true level of violence even in the recent history of the US, the more outraged one should become.

Slavery and racial oppression is not unique to America or White people. It's a small cross-section of the entire history of the world, spanning millennia and across the entire globe.

But to further your point, if you extend your comment to all groups of people (and not just White people), and the moment you use the term "gratitude" and "appreciate" instead of guilt, is when I can agree with you and we can collectively move forward as a society.

We need to appreciate and be grateful for the society, technology, stability and civilization that was built by our ancestors, through a lot of adversity, suffering, poverty and war. And as a corollary to that, we need to preserve, adjust and build on top of that instead of throwing it out entirely because "historic injustice" that at this point seems to be inescapable and ever present with no path to redemption. It almost seem like original sin, and I will have no part in paying penance and reparations for something I had absolutely no part in.

No, they aren't supposed to neither feel the guilt nor repent for color of their skin.

what kind of twisted stuff is this? what could I do to not be born to well off parents? nothing lol

people who carry this pointless guilts should see a shrink maybe. they might suffer from something

I think you're on to something here. That a lot of the most enraged people probably have some underlying condition that isn't being addressed. Furthermore en masse such folk are being actively manipulated to political ends. Sadly, professional treatment in certain jurisdicitons seems to involve prescription of opiates which likely just exacerbates things. Maybe that's the point.

It is what intersectionality and "social justice" is continuously trying to teach in the US school system these days.

To quote a song, I'm not going to spend my life being a color.

But will you spend your life trying to be completely unaware of your color? Such is a possibility only afforded white folks.

I don't believe that is accurate. Homogeneous societies afford their citizens that opportunity, e.g. Japanese.

This is literally the reason people are saying woke liberals are racist.

I think the best clarification of this is to separate out fault from responsibility; and the analogy to explain was snow on your sidewalk. Is it your fault that there's a foot of snow and ice on the walkways in front of your house? No -- you had no control over that. Is it your responsibility to shovel it / put out salt to prevent people from falling and hurting themselves? Yes.

Similarly, if you're white and/or well-off, is it your fault that things are tilted your way? No. Is it your responsibility to try to do something to make the field more level? Yes.

I disagree, and others would call me a "SJW", not coming at it from an anti-left point of view.

You might feel guilt, but will ultimately have to work through it to be a productive person fighting for a just society. If you are motivated mainly by guilt, you can easily end up prioritizing whatever makes you "feel better", instead of trying to figure out what is actually most effective to change society for justice.

Plus the things in the OP article, and others; guilt is simply not an effective motivation, and a movement of guilty people can't build the liberatory society we need.

You should be OPPOSED to all that, you should realize your comfort is not because you "deserve" it but just the luck of the draw, but guilt isn't actually helpful.

> What we as individuals, groups, and societies need is active opposition to racialized discrepancies, not idle, unproductive self-reproach. From awareness grows motivation to make a difference. White guilt tends to warp or subvert the very sympathies that spurred a yearning for change to begin with.

-- https://thehumanist.com/commentary/want-to-help-end-systemic...

> For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

From Ursula K LeGuin's _The Disposessed_