The Incredible Burden of White Guilt

Every human being who has ever lived (except, Christians claim, Jesus) has sinned. We all know this is true, even though we cannot easily define sin. Every culture group, race, and country consists of people all of whom have sinned, many of them in a spectacularly evil fashion. There is no group from which we cannot find a long list of atrocities, from prehistory to the present.

But whites have committed atrocities way out of proportion to their numerical importance in human history, and in human culture today. The example I will examine now is slavery. Every cultural group has had slaves, primarily from among captives from other social groups. But whites have had more slaves, treated them worse, and continue to honor the tradition of slavery, more than any other group.

Take, for example, black slavery in the southern colonies, later the southern states. (These thoughts have been inspired by reading Geraldine Brooks’s novel Horse.) The main reason that southern whites started buying black slaves was that they had killed most of the Native American slaves. Native slaves were cheaper, but they were mostly dead by about the year 1600. So the whites bought slaves from Africa who were captured from their tribes and transported as cheaply as possible (tied up in their own filth in slave ships) to the South. The shrewd slave traders took into their calculations that many of their captives would die while on board.

The Southerners treated their slaves much more cruelly than was necessary or even profitable. The slaveowner men would force not just work but also sex on their slaves. I remember an exhibit of slave artifacts in a museum in Tulsa (which is the reddest red state, but museums everywhere tend to be progressive) that showed a bill of sale for slaves. A 45-year-old man went for about $50, while a seventeen-year-old girl went for $600. What did the girl have that made her twelve times as valuable? Sexuality, that’s what. Not only was it legal rape, but it was the way that plantation owners could keep up their slave populations without having to import more of them, which was theoretically illegal after 1808.

The owners would force the slaves to do whatever they chose, regardless of the strengths and talents of the slaves. In Brooks’s novel, a very skillful slave horse trainer was forced to work in the fields while inept white trainers allowed a champion racehorse to be injured. If slaves were an investment, southern white enjoyed abusing their investments in a stupid fashion. Few slave owners would permit slaves to learn to read and write; illiterate whites would look down upon even the free blacks who could read.

Not only that, but the white slave owners would take credit for any innovations or improvements in land and property that the slaves came up with.

In some cases, southern whites were nearly crazy with their lust for cruelty. A prime example was the Confederate terrorist William Quantrill, who exulted in cruelty not only against blacks but against any whites he suspected of not being racist enough. He is one of the characters in Brooks’s novel.

Whites would find or create opportunities to insult and injure even free blacks, that is, the few that were allowed to purchase their freedom. Any black person could be arrested and detained until their status as a free black could be established. This may sound uncomfortably like ICE detaining anyone they suspect of being in America illegally, but at least ICE once in a while allows claims of legitimate presence in America to be investigated.

Slaves were considered property of their white owners, but they treated their slaves worse than they would have treated any of their other property, whether mules or saddles. In some cases, they enjoyed torturing their slaves.

White racists try to use the imperfection of blacks as an excuse for past slavery and ongoing cruelty. A vendor of Confederate flags, at a roadside market in Oklahoma, told me that it was the blacks who began enslaving other blacks, that’s how the slave trade got started. But who was the market? When I told him that what he was doing was offensive, he called the sheriff, but I got away before being arrested. No, this was not back in the 1960s. This was about 2015.

I am Cherokee. Some of my ancestors owned slaves. But our collective Native guilt is far less than that of southern whites.

What about northern whites in America? Some northern whites, and some Europeans, profited from black slavery, but the entire southern American culture was based upon it.

I did not contribute to any of this. I am not responsible for the sins of my ancestors. But part of my white privilege has resulted from the oppressions of the past. Maybe nothing can be done about it now, but when I look a person of color in the eye I feel a level of guilt that goes beyond the calculus of legal liability. I cannot simply pretend that it is not there.

White guilt is a heavy burden, but the only people who feel it are those who, like myself, are trying very hard to live in a redemptive fashion and contribute to a fair and just society. I love people of color (with a few individual exceptions) even if they do not, and cannot, know it. In contrast, racists do not feel any guilt.

The burden of white guilt continues today. In Brooks’s novel, the twenty-first-century black protagonist gets shot by police who assumed, at a glance, that he was a criminal. His white friend was very upset by this, but his black friends said he should have expected it. If a black man sees police, he should just assume that he is likely to be shot. I hate to admit that this is true.

The black protagonist from the nineteenth century in Brooks’s novel chose to live in Canada, and explained why: even after emancipation, he could feel white hatred all around him.

I live in France. I am embarrassed to be an American right now, with unabashed racists in charge of the country of which I am a citizen. I am always instantly ready with an apology on behalf of my country. What can I say to the Lebanese woman in my French language class, whose cousin was just killed by an Israeli, or American, bomb? I can see in her eyes that she does not blame me, but I have to go further and assure her of my sympathy, and that I do not support Trump’s war, nor was I or American citizens in general consulted before He chose to start it as if He is God who can decide everyone’s fate.

Despite Science and Despite Humanitarianism, Racism Continues

I am writing this in late August, 2014, even though I am posting it later. (As of the posting date there have been no new developments.) The flames of racial unrest are burning in localized pockets across the United States right now. In three separate incidents—Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis; Staten Island, New York City; and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live—white police officers have killed unarmed black men. (The black man shot even more recently in Berkeley, Missouri, appears to have been armed.) Wait; you haven’t heard about the Tulsa one? I guess I will have to tell you about it, since Tulsa has no violent protests such as in Ferguson and no Al Sharpton as in New York. You expect this sort of thing—police killings of unarmed citizens—once in a while, but three at the same time seems a bit unlikely.

A Tulsa policeman, Shannon Kepler, and his wife (also a police officer) adopted a girl with a troubled past. After many years, the girl’s troubles were apparently too much for the couple to handle. They took her to a shelter for homeless adults and left her there. Things like this happen sometimes. But what happened next was astonishing. The young woman went the house where her boyfriend, 19-year-old Jeremey Lake, lived. What would you expect her to do? And if you have just kicked your adopted daughter out of the house, you at least need to let her decide where she is going to live.

But Shannon Kepler did not do this. He drove over to Jeremey Lake’s house and shot and killed him, and then shot in the general direction of the young woman also. Was Lake’s killing murder or was it manslaughter? And was Kepler actually aiming for his stepdaughter with the second shot? That is, was there premeditation? Police investigators found that the step-parents had, in their home, a copy of Lake’s arrest records, on which they had written his address. This would seem to be premeditation. Kepler’s defense attorney said that the shooting was understandable because Lake was a sexual predator, which as far as I can determine was not the judgment of any court. So the defense attorney asked for a bail of only $50,000. The prosecutor asked for a bail of $1 ½ million. The prosecutor’s request that Kepler be fitted with an ankle bracelet for monitoring his location was denied by the judge, who imposed a bail about halfway between the two requests. The judge must have considered that this police shooting was not much of a continuing danger to the community. This decision was issued August 22, the same day that Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri were in the news.

What the Tulsa World newspaper article of August 22 did not mention—and which I had to locate finally in the New York Daily News—was that Jeremy Lake was black.

I know that if I were a young black man I would be worried right now, especially if I lived in Oklahoma, a state where apparently police shooting young black men does not get noticed very much by national media.

When are we going to stop thinking of white police shootings (or, in Staten Island, strangling) of black men as normal? (The authorities seem to have thought that the Staten Island victim was manifestly guilty of a dangerous, dangerous crime: selling untaxed cigarettes. That deserves getting someone killed, they seem to think.)

As most readers of this blog will know already, there is no biological basis for considering one race inferior to another. Pseudoscientific claims of black inferiority have been repeatedly discredited. And even if there was such evidence, it would not justify members of one race killing members of another and having it treated lightly by authorities.

Who Is Important?

Today in my general biology class I taught about the techniques and amazing accomplishments of biotechnology. We only got as far as DNA technology (fingerprinting, archaeological identification, evolutionary studies, etc.) One clear message was that, if you commit a crime, you will almost certainly leave some DNA evidence that can be used to track you down. Only felons have their DNA fingerprints in a national database, but the old Perry Mason days (when Lieutenant Tragg could only testify that the blood at the murder scene was the same type as that of the defendant, for example) are long gone. The DNA on a licked envelope or a hair follicle is enough to catch you.

This past weekend in Tulsa, I saw something truly tragic. Underneath a bridge on 71st Street, I found a lot of garbage, but it was not from a dumpster. It consisted mostly of children’s clothes, dolls, a beauty parlor appointment book, an empty purse, a receipt book, etc. It looked as if burglars had ransacked an apartment, and then had gone through the stolen items under the bridge, discarding anything not of value to them. Or, possibly, a woman had taken her child and fled domestic abuse, only to discover that she could not hide under the bridge, and had to abandon personal items. Somebody’s life was uprooted, and thrown to the winds. The most touching item was a notebook in which a little girl had drawn and colored in pictures of princesses.

Are these two paragraphs connected? I believe they are. The police must have known about all the stuff under the bridge, but had apparently not investigated it. If a lower-middle-class woman and child live in an apartment, and all of their belongings are stolen, the police consider this a crime but not a very important one. The police will probably never get around to investigating this. Their attention is taken up by investigating any crimes committed against upper-class people or against corporations. If you want to see the police spring to action, just try shoplifting something out of Wal-mart. I did not try this, but I saw someone who did. At least three police cars descended on the store, and the suspects were surrounded by uniformed personnel.

We have amazing tools for law enforcement, including biotechnology. Much of the biotechnology was developed at public expense. But on whose behalf does law enforcement use these resources? Mainly for the rich and for corporations; they are important. I do not have any reason to suspect the Tulsa Police deliberately ignore the lower-middle class and poor, but it looks to me as if poorer people get pushed down the priority list. Lower-middle class people do pay taxes, including property taxes (through their rent). The same comment could be made about advances in health care. Amazing medical technologies, developed largely at public expense (at least in the early stages of research) are available mainly to the rich.

It is impossible to teach about biotechnology without dealing with political issues such as privacy of DNA information. But you cannot really understand biotechnology without seeing that the main beneficiaries of biotechnology are the rich. Anyone need some bioidentical hormone replacement therapy? Tell that to the woman whose stuff was under the bridge.