White guilt is a belief that white people bear a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical (ancestral sin) or current racist treatment of people belonging to other ethnic groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In certain regions of the Western world, it can be called white settler guilt, white colonial guilt, and other variations, which refer to the guilt more pointedly in relation to European settlement and colonization. The concept of white guilt has examples both historically and currently in the United States, Australia and to a lesser extent in Canada, The Netherlands, South Africa, France, and the United Kingdom. The feeling of white guilt has been described by psychologists such as Lisa Spanierman and Mary Heppner as one of the psychosocial consequences of racism for white individuals along with empathy for victims of racism and fear of non-white people.
History
Early usage The phrase "white guilt" was first levelled as an accusation, as when James Baldwin wrote that "No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide" in his essay "The White Man's Guilt", first published in 1965. Martin Luther King similarly maintained that racism was a collective national shame, rather than a personal one, saying in 1965 that "Racial injustice is still the Negro's burden and America's shame." Or, as he put it in 1968, "Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt." The phrase has come to be used in a psychological sense, to designate feelings of guilt held by white people. Judith Katz, the author of the 1978 publication White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training, is critical of what she calls self-indulgent white guilt fixations. Her concerns about white guilt led her to move from black-white group encounters to all-white groups in her anti-racism training. She also avoided using non-white people to re-educate white people, she said, because she found this led white people to focus on getting acceptance and forgiveness rather than changing their own actions or beliefs. A report in The Washington Post from 1978 describes the exploitation of white guilt by white con artists making a pretence of representing minority-oriented companies or publications: "Telephone and mail solicitors, trading on 'white guilt' and on government pressure to advertise in minority-oriented publications, are inducing thousands of businessmen to buy ads in phony publications." The companies selling the advertising used white actors putting on Black or Mexican accents to sell advertising space in publications that were never circulated to the public.
Academic research In 1999, academic research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania examined the extent of societal feeling of white guilt, possible guilt-based antecedents, and white guilt's relationship to attitudes towards affirmative action. The four studies revealed that "Even though mean White guilt tended to be low, with the mean being just below the midpoint of the scale, the range and variability confirms the existence of feelings of White guilt for some". The findings also showed that white guilt was directly linked to "more negative personal evaluations" of white people generally, and the extent of an individual's feelings of white guilt independently predicted attitudes towards white privilege, racial discrimination and affirmative action. 2003 research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in its first study, replicated the link between white guilt and strength of belief in white privilege. The second study revealed that white guilt "resulted from seeing European Americans as perpetrators of racial discrimination", and was also predictive of support for compensatory efforts for African Americans. One academic paper suggests that in France, white guilt may be a common feature of management of race relations – in contrast to other European countries. A 2019 review of two studies finds that "among social liberals, learning about White privilege reduces sympathy, increases blame, and decreases external attributions for White people struggling with poverty."
Regions
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