Guilt and shame are generally things you don’t want to enforce on people.
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Why not? I mean - not to excess, but a bit can be pretty helpful to certain learning (morality, empathy, etc).
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In our (Catholic) school, one would feel ashamed if one didn’t feel guilty about something.
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Sounds like you have a little too much pride in your feelings of shame…
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Internalizing that you are wrong for something you cannot change (skin color) and that it is shameful to be if your skin color seems pretty obviously wrong. Same way that shaming someone who is gay is wrong. No matter what you do you cannot overcome who you are. While most people won’t be affected by this, those already prone to depression and anxiety can be negatively harmed through it. They may perceive themselves as fundamentally flawed.
Teach people to love others and not to hate themselves.
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I agree. Teaching a child that it is bad to run out into the street is pretty different from teaching them that it is bad to have descended from Europeans.
Teaching them that their ancestors did some pretty bad things that have negative impacts that last to this day is also pretty different from an implicit message that it’s their fault those bad things happened.
And I’m not sure that in its purest form CRT does that (bad to be white, your fault that slavery and Jim Crow and genocide of tribal people and internment of Japanese-Americans happened) but here again, there’s a gap between the theory and the implementation.
Watch Attach on Titan!
I think characterizing crt as saying you should feel guilty about being white is a bit of a straw man.
Some people do advocate that a white person is racist for participating in, and benefitting from, racist systems. Guilt is a reasonable inference from that. But that is not the same as feeling guilty for being white.
And framing it that way also sidesteps the valid point that white people do receive benefits from being white.
I tend to think it’s the inference of guilt that is less reasonable, or at least too facile. But it isn’t at all clear to me that is really crt, which seems more concerned with systems and laws than with personal guilt.
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Your post is basically what I am getting at when I discuss the gap between the theory and the implementation.
What teachers are told to teach with CRT is not “you are bad for being white”.
What some teachers are actually teaching with CRT comes a lot closer to “you are bad for being white”.
I don’t agree that this is a valid point. White people don’t receive benefits they shouldn’t, they just don’t receive disadvantages others do that they shouldn’t. It is an important distinction. White people aren’t being treated any better than they should be. Non-white’s are sometimes treated worse than they should be treated. Everyone should be treated with common courtesy regardless and given the respect that their actions deserve.
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The benefit they receive is a reduced competition for opportunity.
Well put. Thanks.
I agree with other that “white shaming” isn’t the goal of CRT, but it is probably the “easiest” route, so that’s what many people would take. And it could easily be framed that way by detractors - regardless of any intent or even action by those trying to teach the theory.
From a friend’s facebook page:
This is a somewhat effective framing - although it seems like Pearl Harbor and Slavery are somewhat different - one being an event and the other being a multi-century institution and it’s resulting culture and what not.
But… if the young girl is receiving a benefit from Pearl Harbor, she should probably be made aware of it (although - give her a couple years first…).
I agree with this but think you take it too far. And this also relates to the later comments on innocence, not made by you.
White people do benefit from an unfairly large share of our collective cultural heritage compared to non white people. This is not incompatible with the idea that we should all be lifted up to the same level privilege.
But it is important that white people are responsible for the problems created by historical and current racism because they are the inheritors of the benefits. To further the analogy, if you inherit the assets, you also inherit the liabilities. This responsibility is not identical to guilt.
I think the danger in stressing innocence of racism is that, when combined with the myth of rugged american individualism, it easily turns in white people having no responsibility to fix things. Rugged individualism turns into selfishness. And you have people who are rich only because the stand at the pinnacle of a highly developed civilization imagining taxes that support that civilization are somehow theft, because they earned it.
Even the settlers could only settle that land because the armies helped purge the american indians who lived there. And slaves built much of the foundation of our collective wealth.
How do we imagine guilt and innocence in such a situation? If we are not simply guilty, we are not simply innocent either.
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I think this is an uncompelling line of argument because the family of many here today immigrated after slavery. What about all the poor Italian/Irish immigrants who came in the early 20th century? Did they inherit the assets and thus need to “also inherit the liabilities”?
We are not guilty. They were guilty. We are innocent. They were not.
Now- we can see the consequences of what they did. So we need to fix them. To ignore that and not even try is when we would lose our innocence
They still benefit from the entire society. It’s not inheritance in individual families.
Note that i would argue that people who are minorities also have a responsibility to help fix things. However, I think they do not suffer the same temptations to ignore the effects of racism.
This inheritance, though, is what is opposed to this idea of rugged american individualism. Yes, immigrants who came here after slavery had to work hard to establish themselves in a new country. But this was not sufficient. They also benefited from the already created country they moved to.
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So this gets me to what are the consequences? Many for sure but in my mind the largest is economic status. So we target low income individuals. We don’t limit to race of who we help because if it is so bad to be poor, then why leave any behind? That is step #1. And a big one.
From there other concerns should be addressed and worked on. But tackle the biggest one first.
But how does a poor Italian immigrant family more inherit the assets of America than a poor black family living in the same area? I agree the black family would likely face opportunity limitations on the basis of their skin color but that’s an opportunity gap, not an inheritance gap.
I think this is a rather sentimental idea of guilt and innocence that americans are particularly fond of.
I think it ignores the ambiguity of “fixing it” vs “not fixing it”. When have we met the required threshold for fixing it? And if we are really entirely innocent, why do we have to fix it at all?
I think the answer is that we all do the best we can, and that has to be enough because it is all we have. But that is grace, not innocence.