White Guilt: Let’s Feel the Feelings
Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being
When we learn about history, how does it make us feel?
And how (if?) are we taught to hold those emotions, to tend to them?
John McWhorter wrote in the New York Times, in agreement with Condoleezza Rice, that learning about racial injustice should not be about making white kids — people — feel guilty. That that guilt is unproductive.
But I wonder: Can we really control what feelings emerge when we learn the truth of our history? And, what if guilt is a feeling that I have as a white person learning about the violence engendered by my ancestors? Is the guilt — the feeling — really the problem? What, really, causes White inaction? Is it the feeling, or our unskillful inattention to those feelings?
Or, put another way, isn’t guilt, or shame, or heartbreak — or more likely, guilt and shame and heartbreak — simply a human response to bearing witness to brutality? And don’t those feelings come with countless others — why does guilt get all the attention?
When I do historical deep dives it’s true that I find a reality — realities — that break my heart. I have felt (and will feel) guilt, and shame, and fear, and concern, and despair.
But my emotions are not a negative/positive binary. I am human and they are complex!
I have also felt energy and hope and creativity, because I know that I can make different choices.
And because heartbreak can give birth to beauty.
If we feel guilty as White people, we should explore that. We should expand our skills (Layla Saad’s book Me and White Supremacy is one great tool) at recognizing and allowing and caring for the complex feelings that emerge for us in our lives, whether we are learning about our history or scrolling on Twitter. These emotions — these things that make us human — need to be explored, including the guilt and the shame. These human vulnerabilities will make us stronger when they are given the light of day (Brene Brown).
As James Baldwin wrote,
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
Dehumanization is central to white supremacy, and White people denying our own complex emotions is one component of how racism has been maintained as a social structure. These emotional erasures desensitize us and allow for continued structural and interpersonal violence. We do this work for ourselves; we do it to be more skillful, to cause less harm. We need to feel all the emotions in order to heal them and to restore the humanity that white supremacy denies all of us.
