[Conor Friedersdorf]
Imagine a Vietnamese American, 18 years old, born to second generation immigrants in Southern California. He is talking about his excitement at voting in a presidential election for the first time this November. "I like John McCain for a lot of reasons," he says, "but part of why I'm voting for him is to alleviate my guilt for the way he was tortured in that Hanoi prison cell so many years ago."
That would be odd, wouldn't it? An 18 year-old Vietnamese American hasn't any reason to feel guilty for Vietnam War era crimes. Now let's say that this youth's grandfather and great uncle personally tortured prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton. It would be easier to understand the guilt felt by the youth, but as easy to assure him that he shouldn't feel personal guilt for the crimes of his ancestors -- and that he shouldn't let any guilt he wrongly feels sway his vote for the most powerful electoral office in the world.
My hypothetical doesn't exactly map onto the racial guilt some white Americans feel for slavery and Jim Crow. It's worth keeping in mind, however, as we consider Ron Rosenbaum's weird argument about "liberal guilt" and voting for Barack Obama because he is black. He begins by wondering why it is that liberal guilt is a term of derision:
You hear it all the time now from people who sneeringly dismiss whites who support Obama's candidacy as "guilty liberals." There are, of course, many reasons why whites might support Obama that have nothing to do with race. But what if redeeming our shameful racial past is one factor for some? Why delegitimize sincere excitement that his nomination and potential election would represent a historic civil rights landmark: making an abstract right a reality at last. Instead, their feeling must be disparaged as merely the result of a somehow shameful "liberal guilt."
Already his argument is confused. It is one thing to feel sincere excitement at the prospect of a black president, or to believe that his blackness will itself benefit the United States. It is quite another thing for those feelings to be rooted in guilt.
"Not one of us is a slave owner today, segregation is no longer enshrined in law, and there are fewer overt racists than before," Rosenbaum writes, "but if we want to praise America's virtues, we have to concede—and feel guilty about—America's sins, else we praise a false god..."
Actually, its perfectly rational to acknowledge America's historical sins, even to the point of supporting government action to remedy them, whereas it is irrational to feel guilt for events that occurred before one's birth.
That irrationality explains disdain for "liberal guilt." So it's striking when Rosenbaum writes the following:
It's especially surprising to hear "guilt" being disparaged by conservatives, since they present themselves as moralists; they are quick to decry liberals for seeking to abolish guilt over various practices conservatives deem immoral. But was slavery not immoral? For those conservatives who make a fetish of "values": Was not the century of institutionalized racism and segregation that followed the end of slavery a perpetuation of "flawed values" that the nation should feel an enduring guilt over? For those conservatives who are forever speaking of the way they value history and memory more than liberals: Should we abolish the history and memory of slavery and racism just because they're no longer legally institutionalized?Do we abolish its memories and its effects? Do we abolish the very consciousness of the past and pretend we have a clear conscience?
For heaven's sake, does this man see no distinction between guilt for an act one actually committed and guilt for another's action that one couldn't have possibly prevented? Critics of liberal guilt (it isn't just conservatives) don't disagree that slavery was immoral, or that America ought to remember as much! We disagree about whether people should buy into collective guilt, if such a thing even exists, not due to complicity in an evil act, but because dead people who shared one's race, ethnicity or nationality committed some evil act.
In that way lies madness!
Later in the piece we're given a perfect illustration of where this mindset might take us:
As a Jew, I think I have a right to be angry, still, about the Holocaust, even though it happened before I was born. It would be hard for me to understand an African-American not being angry about 400 years of murder, rape, and enslavement on the basis of race. Anger, like guilt, shouldn't be the endpoint, but anger at injustice is not illegitimate and can be a starting point, a spur to moral action.
Surely it is legitimate to be angry about the murder of millions of Jews, or the enslavement of millions of African Americans, whether or not one is a Jew or an African American. I am a Caucasian gentile. Does Mr. Rosenbaum imagine I have less reason to be outraged by those horrors?
I'll leave it to others to highlight the other egregious slurs against conservatives found in the piece. And to those who think that collective guilt over past misdeeds should help determine one's vote for president, suffice it to say that the debate over whether blacks or women are worse off is going to get even more complicated if the relevant data points extend back throughout all of human history.
UPDATE: see also Reihan and Sonny Bunch.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Also see Matt, and my rejoinder to him.
Some Americans feel vicarious guilt over the way their white ancestors (whether literal ancestors or "spiritual" ancestors) treated Blacks. Why is this any more illogical or ridiculous than the vicarious pride many Americans feel over the heroic exploits of people like Washington, Lincoln, etc.?
If we enjoy the feeling of pride in being Americans, then it's only right that we should take the same kind of responsibility for the other side of our historic legacy.
Liberal guilt is a sensible thing insofar as the historical acts of shame have consequences that are still with us. You wrote earlier about white privilege, indicating that you understood the idea that today, we still benefit from slavery insofar as it provided an ongoing underclass on which our privilege still rests.
Of course it's silly to beat your breast and feel intense guilt for the actions of your ancestors. But it's not silly to feel a little guilty for the privilege you personally enjoy, and can't easily rid yourself of. And if that translates into a motive to support Obama, that's also sensible, if it isn't the only motive you have.
To put it a bit differently: feeling guilt over what Jackson did with the Trail of Tears is silly and self-obsessed in the same way that young Vietnamese's guilt is silly. It's not silly to feel some guilt for enjoying living in the house your grandfather cheated someone else out of, if that person's descendants live across the street in a hovel.
Guilt about racism is about as rational as patriotism and has many of the same associations. If you can feel pride in your country and its accomplishments despite not having much to do with having produced them, you can feel guilt about it. Each phenomenon is a matter of identifying with your country in a way that goes beyond anything that directly follows from your own actions. Now, maybe the right response is to reject patriotism (see Will Wilkinson). My general attitude is that both are ok in limited forms. Of course guilt is probably also a more destructive emotion than pride.
On the other hand, it does seem absurd to elect a president based on guilt. Thankfully this Obama guy has some other things going for him.
I posit a different thought experiment.
What if 100 years from today, abortion is considered as abhorrent as slavery. (For the record, I agree with Bill Clinton - it should be safe, legal and rare.) In both cases, the Supreme Court upheld it; religious leaders preached against it. And in both cases, it was the law of the land.
How would we then view people who supported it?
In my humble opinion, it is unjustifiable to use today's morals to judge historical actions.
Silly screeds like this one by Rosenbaum are one of the reasons I start to question if "socially liberal" carries much meaning in defining a libertarian's social views. Because, if social liberalism must entail divisiveness, tribal reasoning and guilt among individuals of the present on the basis of our common gender, race or creed with the sins of individuals of the past, then I want no part of it.
Rosenbaum is all over the place with his reasoning and it's pretty ugly.
Imagine a Vietnamese American…
Ah, see, there's your problem righ there. It's not about ethnicity, it's about nationality. Your hypothetical misses the point. A Vietnamese America has no cause to feel guilt. A Vietnamese Vietnamese does.
Your analogy is silly. Why would a Vietnamese child feel "guilty" about being bomkbed to shit by Americans?. A better analogy would be if a child of a Vietnam War supporter felt guilty toward a presidential candidate of Vietnamese heritage.
Peter, I think guilt is irrational regardless of whether the operating characteristic is ethnicity or nationality, so long as the sin occurred prior to one's birth.
On the other hand, if one's nation commits a sin while you are alive I understand guilt insofar as it is based upon a democratic polity's responsibility for the actions of its representatives.
Ed, the hypothetical isn't meant as a perfect analogy. I state as much explicitly. If you'd rather, consider my arguments without it. They're just as valid.
Already his argument is confused. It is one thing to feel sincere excitement at the prospect of a black president, or to believe that his blackness will itself benefit the United States. It is quite another thing for those feelings to be rooted in guilt.-MM
But Megan's "sincere excitement" about Obama's "blackness" and its supposedly salutary effects on the US is also quite irrational. The rational position is to judge a man by his policy views and his character, and to ignore irrelevant details like race.
I couldn't care less whether the President is of African descent or Asian descent, or whatever. I care about his ideas. I'd be very pleased to see Condi Rice in the Oval Office, and not pleased at all to see Barak Obama there.
I think the nationality vs ethnicity distinction is valid, because it point to where guilty is valid.
Guilt is rational when it's an acknowlegment of complicity in some wrong. As we are all benefactors of the actions of past generations, it's perfectly rationale to express some guilty (and hence some acknowledgment) of the way we are benefitting from past injustices. It's not rationale if you aren't deriving any benefit from those past actions. Hence someone who leaves their own country can't really rationally feel guilty for any past sins of their former country. The Vietnamese American has no more connection to the North Vietnamese torturers (OTOH, he has inherited complicity with the past crimes commited by earlier Americans).
There's no sinless nation, of course, so everyone, if they're honest, ought to feel some guilt, regardless of where they live. But I agree that historical guilt alone is an insufficent reason to say, vote for someone (I also think that, in addition to liberal guilty, we ought to have liberal virtue... people in the past did good stuff as well)
What if your father stole millions before your birth, and your entire life was immeasurably enriched thereby? Guilt towards one's current situation seems appropriate when it's the product of bad acts in which you bore no part, but from which you continue to profit.
"Bomked" means the same as "bomb, bomb, bomb,. . . bomb, 'K' 'aNam"
I take it back. It was Conor I was aiming at.
Your critique is right on the money, but there's another obvious point as well. Suppose we did feel guilt about slavery and Jim Crow, and we decided to act on it in electing our next President. Well, if historical guilt flows with one's ancestry (as Rosenbaum seems to be arguing), then so too does historical victimization.
In that case, Obama would be no more sensible a candidate than McCain. Obama's mom was white and his dad was from Kenya. So far as we know, he's not even descended from anybody who suffered from American slavery, and if his Dad experienced Jim Crow, it was in a pretty minor way.
If we're going to expiate our white guilt about slavery by electing a black guy, we should at least find a black guy whose ancestors were slaves.
If Mr. Rosenbaum feels angry about what happened to the Jews in Germany, why hasn't he taken revenge on Germans, Germans the same age as Obama perhaps? Maybe his share of the guilt against Blacks weighs more heavily than his share of the grievance against Germans? If guilt were fungible and/or contagious, we should all feel guilty toward everyone else and angry at them as well.
I agree that inherited guilt is silly. Even guilt about contemporary problems - someone who worked and voted against Bush has no personal reason to feel guilt regarding the various crimes and disasters of the Bush administration.
But, inherited responsibility is a sensible concept. If we have to pay higher taxes to compensate Japanese Americans who were interned, fine - it's our responsibility. While historical guilt is often expressed in a muddleheaded and annoying way, in most (but not all) cases it's not much different operationally than thinking about our historical responsibilities.
Peter: I have no idea how to judge whether some set of feelings is rational or not. But FWIW, I can't even imagine feeling personal guilt about stuff done by someone else, over whom I had no control.
If you start feeling guilt over every evil act from which you've benefitted, surely you will never be free from guilt, as it's almost certain that many of your ancestors survived partly by massacring other tribes, and stealing land and food. And the government on which you rely for day-to-day protection has a long, horrible list of misdeeds in its history. So does pretty much every government, church, and movement that led to the settling of North America. So, as far as anyone can tell, do a great many Indian tribes who held the land before they were massacred and pushed aside by Europeans with better weapons and greater numbers.
So...where's Rosenbaum's outrage about the genocide of the Armenians? The Cambodians? The Ukrainians (by Stalin)? The Chinese (by the Japanese)? The Marsh Arabs? The Kurds genocide?
Anger in this context might be understandable, but certainly is not productive. The perpetrators are generally gone from the scene, and those who are on the scene now generally had no part. Sins of the father, indeed.
Karl Weber: You capitalize "Blacks" but put "white" in lower case letters. Is this an expression of your guilt feelings?
Surely it is legitimate to be angry about the murder of millions of Jews, or the enslavement of millions of African Americans, whether or not one is a Jew or an African American. I am a Caucasian gentile. Does Mr. Rosenbaum imagine I have less reason to be outraged by those horrors?
Um...probably, yeah. You may feel the same amount of abstract moral outrage, but your life has probably not been shaped as concretely by your forbears' loss of life, liberty, and/or any material wealth. Your outrage probably doesn't carry the visceral quality of being on behalf of individuals whom you know and love as family.
The question you ask could be rephrased:
"Does Mr. Rosenbaum imagine that I have less reason to be outraged about wrongs done to someone else's grandfather than his grandson does?"
Again, I'd think: yes.
rwe:
I think a lot of people like the idea of electing Obama president based on his race, because they like the example he'd set. Like maybe this would kill off that horrible stigma of "acting white" applied to black kids who study hard and get good grades. Or would offer lots of black kids a public role model who worked hard in school, got good grades, and then spent years working to make the world a better place. Or just would give black kids the idea that success was really possible for them.
I'm not sure how big an effect any of these will really have, and I am somewhat skeptical that those effects will outweigh the impact Obama will have by his choices as president. But it's not obviously nuts, to my mind, to see those effects as added bonuses of an Obama presidency.
Harvey,
No, the capitalization has nothing to do with guilt feelings. I work in book publishing and for some reason most publishers' style manuals specify initial caps for "Black" (as well as most other ethnic designations, like "Latino" for example), but lower case W in "white." Like most style things it's pretty arbitrary.
uh...where to begin.
Maybe there isn't a lot of racism among Ph.D economist circles, but I live in the rest of the country, and racism is alive and well.
Those internet memes of mancurian-muslim-obama don't chain letter themselves.
I enjoy this blog, but this is the dumbest post I've ever read. If you have an advanced degree, live in a large city, and make a lot of money you need to shut your fucking mouth (sorry) and listen when people tell you that racism still exists. I'm a white liberal atheist among uneducated laboring whites in central california. They will note vote for barry because he is black and a "muslim".
aaand another thing...
How many white men get gang raped with broom handles by police officers in New York? How many get shot pulling out their wallets? My father's office in Berkeley overlooked a shared alley with the police station--countless minority suspects got roughed up as he recounted to me.
Are those men still not alive and voting? Do they not live next door? When were blacks allowed into the Mormon church? Who still lives who remembers that time? Why do you have to go back to slavery and jim crow?
I don't feel guilt for myself for these and other atrocities, I feel shame for my country (which I love) and I wish to help make things better.
We're not bombing Vietnam right now--racism lives now. I'm shaking my head at the retard analogy.
And a bunch of uneducated laboring blacks (not to mention some highly educated white non-laboring whites) will vote for "Barry" for precisely the same reason(s).
What's your point?
Awsome! haha. "What's your point?" you say?
Why...it's almost as if the "white" people and the "black" people in all my examples could be interchangable.
All those black establishment-types keeping the poor white man down for all this time. You are so right, what was I thinking, it's not like black people have ever voted for a white president before.
So...the racial allegiance of an actor needs to be considered before his actions based upon race can be judged?
Got it. Yep, you're right: racism is alive and well, certainly among the adherents of the party that historically supported slavery and segregation.
"Interchangeability," I believe, is exactly what we're working toward, once we overcome the Neanderthals who insist on judging actions in light of the race of the actor.
Liberal, heal thyself.
Who's a liberal?
not me.
Democrat? nope. Voted for Bush twice. Honest. However, when 7 out of 8 hands go up at a republican convention saying they "don't believe" in "evolution".
Then...well, I really don't care then if they think taxes should be lower.
Justin - "Guilt about racism is about as rational as patriotism and has many of the same associations."
Incorrect. Guilt about racism was discussed in a historical context in the referenced article, whereas patriotism about one's nation is primarily rooted in the present (Though rationale of why the present nation is worth defending can have historical evidence introduced as proof of why The People are worthy..)
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I couldn't care less whether the President is of African descent or Asian descent, or whatever. I care about his ideas. I'd be very pleased to see Condi Rice in the Oval Office, and not pleased at all to see Barak Obama there.
Posted by rwe
1. Agree with the 1st sentence. Add women, Mormons, whacky lifestyles...I don't care. The cancer of identity politics was on full display in the Democratic primaries and with the Fundies bigotry towards Romney. Both were ugly.
2. Disagree with the 2nd sentence. Nothing says "4 More Years of Bush and Bush Policy Disasters" like Condi Rice allowed to be anywhere near the Oval Office after 2008 to continue her dismal string of failures of judgment. Obama has big problems himself - but may still end up in the White House not because he deserves it as a smooth-talking Lefty, but because the Republicans blew it so badly the last 8 years.
******************
How many white men get gang raped with broom handles by police officers in New York? How many get shot pulling out their wallets? My father's office in Berkeley overlooked a shared alley with the police station--countless minority suspects got roughed up as he recounted to me.
Are those men still not alive and voting? Do they not live next door? When were blacks allowed into the Mormon church? Who still lives who remembers that time? Why do you have to go back to slavery and jim crow?
I don't feel guilt for myself for these and other atrocities, I feel shame for my country (which I love) and I wish to help make things better.....
James Dean
What a Lefty asshole. They all seem to feel shame for their country.
Any talk about police interactions and the present status of black relations with whites, asians, hispanics has to factor in astronomical levels of violent black criminality as well as "racist" actions by whites, asians, hispanics, and cops. The black murder and rape rates are 6 to 7 times that of other groups. Blacks now constitute the majority of stranger-on-stranger murders and rapes of whites, asians as well as blacks. They account for the majority of armed robberies and muggings on all races.
And the majority of cops killed in the last 30 years have been by black criminals.
What is described as racism is frequently simply bad judgment (and protective actions) of whites, hispanics, asians - and cops - that perceive themselves in danger of criminal acts by blacks, when the object of their fears turns out to have no criminal intent and are offended by other race's protective behaviors. That might be a woman fearing an aggressive black panhandler, an Asian woman crossing the street or locking her doors to stay clear of young blacks, or cops perceiving themselves in imminent danger from black toughs in a car they believe are armed and dangerous.
I apologize for the imputation.
I only hope to live long enough to see the day when people cannot judge the actions of A vis a vis B without knowing the sex and race of A and B.
Sorry, that should have read can, not cannot.
I recast the sentence partway through, but neglected to reread the entire revised sentence.
Reminds me of Ann Althouse's cruise trip with the libertarians.
I agree with the last poster. Black men are dangerous drug users. Their violence and anti-social behaviors are a threat to all of us.
I've vote for a man who spends recklessly, inflates our debt, adds many levels to the useless programs in education.
But, a black man who's a democrat? Well, well, I must stand by my convictions as a fiscal conservative. I'm not racist you see...I just can't abide someone who inflates our debt and spends our tax dollars recklessly.
Faith based goverment pork? ok! No child left behind? alright!
Any excuse at hand...
oh...these are all guest bloggers....feh....I'll come back when I can woo the beautiful-gap-toothed-amazonian.
Slavery was the original sin of this country's founding. For 400 years, black men and women were robbed of everything they owned, including their autonomy, for the benefit of others. After the fall of slavery, some states instituted a legal regime (legal in only the weak sense that the laws really were on the books. I tend to agree with St. Augustine's contention that an unjust law is no law at all) which further kept them down for generations, including with ubiquitous brutal lynchings.
This is all to our national shame. There is no denying it.
But Rosenbaum is wrong to raise guilt over this past injustice into virtue. He is wrong for one simple reason; because it ignores the most important and most hopeful aspect of Obama's candidacy and what it means for Americans.
In 2007, during a Martin Luther King Jr. event, a speaker sharing the stage with Obama said, in reference to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it was a great moment for African American history. Obama immediately corrected him: no, he said, it was a great moment for American history.
The story of our nation is not one of perfection. Only a fool would think this. Rather it is a dialogue in which we learn, embrace and grow. Casting it in terms of guilt for past acts is simply to ignore this core message.
I do think there are a number of benefits to an Obama presidency that he, as a black man, can bring. Some of those have been mentioned above. And taking those benefits into account does not require the fetishization of guilt. Indeed, to do that, almost seems to trivialize how momentous the occasion would be for our country.
Barack Obama's father was visiting African, and his mother was a well-educated American white.
This means he has no ancestors that were American slaves, quite possibly some ancestors that were American slaveowners, and quite possibly some ancestors that were African slave-merchants.
So white liberals, feeling guilty about ancestral American slavery, are falling over themselves to elect a man due to his ancestry - and this man's ancestors, if involved with American slavery, were the ones holding the whip. But hey, his skin is dark!
It's like a Germans atoning for killing Jews by voting for Mengele's son, and justifying it because he's got a big nose.
White people scare me sometimes.
"Some Americans feel vicarious guilt over the way their white ancestors (whether literal ancestors or "spiritual" ancestors) treated Blacks. Why is this any more illogical or ridiculous than the vicarious pride many Americans feel over the heroic exploits of people like Washington, Lincoln, etc.?" Karl Weber
TR: This is an interesting point. However this "vicarious pride" is in a way generalized and not specific. It rarely effects specific situations. We are not electing people because they look like Abraham Lincoln or are somehow related to him. Whether a candidate is "like Washington" is not usually much of an issue. The subject and object of the pride is generalized, not specific to any group today.
A generalized guilt about the nation allowing slavery would lead more to a generalized urge to see it as a national shame. After all the nation that did it still exists so can be seen as still guilty. So it'd be about trying to learn from it as a nation and community.
The difference with the "white guilt" described is that it indicates individuals should or may have inherited a personal guilt that can/may effect behavior to specific individuals. This is different. If white Americans voted for someone because they contain genetic ancestry from Lincoln or even has his appearance they'd be deemed foolish. There'd be little to no debate on that.
Besides which it's naive, and slightly patronizing, to think that having a black President would/could even magically heal anything left unhealed. A President is not a King and socio-cultural issues on race will likely remain regardless.
"For heaven's sake, does this man see no distinction between guilt for an act one actually committed and guilt for another's action that one couldn't have possibly prevented?"
I think he does see a distinction, though maybe his choice of words is misleading. If someone alive today were truly "guilty" of enslaving people, all of us would agree he belongs in jail. Rosenbaum isn't saying that people today should actually be treated as though they committed the crimes of the historical past. If he did, it would be fair to compare it to a tribal feud -- but it's not quite the same.
What he calls "guilt" I would call "shame" or "dismay," a sense of being tainted by continuing to belong to a country that could permit slavery and still can permit racial injustice. I knew a man who confessed, with great shame, that his grandparents had been fascists in Mussolini's Italy. He knew he wasn't a fascist himself, and he couldn't have prevented their actions -- maybe you would call him "irrational." But, irrational or not, good people usually feel sickened by association with evil things. I am not culpable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib - the people who committed them it are. But I do feel nauseous, and implicated, to belong to the same country as they do.
A vote for Obama wouldn't -- and shouldn't -- remove that shame. That's where I disagree with Rosenbaum. Voting for a black man doesn't change the facts of either the present or the past, and of course we should vote for candidates based on their merits.
But I do defend the notion of "liberal guilt" or whatever you prefer to call it. Megan McArdle thinks we should be morally outraged, but not ashamed. I see that as dangerous: if you are only outraged, you see atrocities as something "they" did once, and may fail to notice your own complicity in other atrocities going on today. Shame keeps us from feeling too free and easy; is this a bad thing?
Conor, that's a completely ridiculous thing to say. If "it is irrational to feel guilt for events that occurred before one's birth," then it is equally irrational to feel pride in things that were done before one's birth. Are you ashamed that America did nothing to stop the Holocaust? I sure am. Are you proud that America fought fascism? Me too. Are you a white American? Why yes you are. Are you proud, or ashamed, of how white Americans have treated black Americans? Oh, wait -- that particular subject is exempt from feelings of shame/pride on account of "irrationality". How convenient.
I've vote for a man who spends recklessly, inflates our debt, adds many levels to the useless programs in education.
So, uh, why'd you vote for him the second time, given that all these things happened during the first term?
What he calls "guilt" I would call "shame" or "dismay," a sense of being tainted by continuing to belong to a country that could permit slavery and still can permit racial injustice. I knew a man who confessed, with great shame, that his grandparents had been fascists in Mussolini's Italy. He knew he wasn't a fascist himself, and he couldn't have prevented their actions -- maybe you would call him "irrational." But, irrational or not, good people usually feel sickened by association with evil things. I am not culpable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib - the people who committed them it are. But I do feel nauseous, and implicated, to belong to the same country as they do.
SarahC
"Collective Guilt" is cancerous thinking. It doesn't just stop at someone "nauseated" over being part of a country that has misdeeds in the past long before they were a part of that country & culture. It doesn't just stop with people being "nauseated" or upset as individuals about
other peoples historical misdeeds (Those Jewish Sanhedrin that had the Romans kill Christ! Those Vikings! Nanking!)
The notion of collective guilt demands others sign onto it and enforce remedial actions - in addition, foolishly applying today's morality to bygone times that held different values.
1. Drive the Christ-Killers from our village!
2. Swedes and Danes should apologize and give people in the UK money for what their Norsemen ancestors did!
3. All Americans should be ashamed of slavery, even those in the large majority that never had slaves, or died eradicating it, or had yet to immigrate to America...except somehow those former slaveholders or overseers who happened to be black.
Good people do not feel sickened by tenuous historical events. Only the people that have an unseemly emotional need to feel vicarious personal guilt about events they have no culpability or control over.
...the party that historically supported slavery and segregation
And what of the party that has more recently exploited it? (Hint: search for "nigger" on that page)
I grew up in Georgia in the 70s and 80s, during which time it went from the old Democratic Solid South to an equally solid Republican majority. And I saw it happen up close because I have relatives who were very involved in Republican party politics (Newt Gingrich is a family friend).
While there are many reasons for that transition, race certainly played a major role. Just ask my relatives who "know" Obama is a muslim.
The irony is that people like my mom, a transplanted northerner who fervently supported and campaigned for Reagan's libertarian-ish ideas, were very dismayed when the party became overrun by the Religious Right.
3. All Americans should be ashamed of slavery, even those in the large majority that never had slaves, or died eradicating it, or had yet to immigrate to America...except somehow those former slaveholders or overseers who happened to be black.
In point of fact, you will find that many blacks are ashamed at the complicity of their forebears in the slave system. Similarly, you will find that many Jews are ashamed of the complicity of the Jewish Councils of Europe in organizing their communities to be herded into ghettos and ultimately packed off to concentration camps by the Nazis.
However, as a member of the group that by and large oppressed those groups, you don't get to demand that they first confess their shame before you are willing to admit to being ashamed. Jews are willing to air the issue of Jewish complicity and non-resistance precisely because Germans have been so forthcoming in apologizing for what their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did. In countries that have never apologized properly, like Austria and Poland, you find Jews get pretty goddamn pissed off when anyone tries to mitigate their own historical guilt by noting that Jews were involved in the system.
I can understand concern and the notion of it as "a national shame", but to go from that to a personalized shame/guilt doesn't make sense to me.
Americans alive today should not feel a personal sense of pride about Lincoln. If they do they're foolish as they personally had nothing to do with Lincoln. Or Washington or Susan B. Anthony or whatever.
They shouldn't feel a personalized guilt about slavery as they had nothing to do with that. They may profit from its legacy in some ways, but that can get into weird areas and wouldn't be true of whites alone. Harvard Law, which Obama attended, was founded by the estate of Isaac Royall. Royall was a slave-owner and not just any slave-owner. His wealth was from slavery and his home has one of the only "slave quarters" in the North. Many of the wealthier Creoles "profited", in some ways, from having slave owning ancestors. Beyond slavery most contemporary Americans profit, in some way, from the legacy caused by the expulsion of American Indians.
Chances are, any Vietnamese-American you meet is someone whose family had to flee the Communist takeover of Vietnam. The people doing the torturing in the Hanoi Hilton generally weren't the ones who had reason to flee Vietnam after 1975. You might want to pick a better example for your argument, Conor.
Dear Conor,
I am voting for Barack Obama out of guilt. Not guilt over personal inherited responsibility for slavery (my ancestors immigrated in the 20th C) but guilt over the fact that you're a klutz who makes really bad analogies.
The legacy of slavery has been a long history of racial discrimination in this country, which affects us even if we immigrated after the Civil War. The legacy of the Vietnam War has not been that John McCain is still being tortured to this day, unless he has some weird S&M kink that we haven't heard about.
The fact that you conflated Vietnam with Vietnamese-Americans, and that an 18-year-old Vietnamese American (probably descended from refugees) is wholly separate from McCain's treatment or the Vietnam War in general makes me question your judgment. Americans in general are hardly separate from the issue of racial discrimination, even if they do not discriminate themselves.
You drove me to it, man.
In countries that have never apologized properly, like Austria and Poland, you find Jews get pretty goddamn pissed off when anyone tries to mitigate their own historical guilt by noting that Jews were involved in the system.
Whatever the merits of your arguments, you can better make your case when you stick to the facts (see e.g. speech of chancellor Vranitzky in Jerusalem, http://zis.uibk.ac.at/quellen/albrich4.htm#dok3 (link in German)).
To chris ford, I'll just point out that one can have patriotic feelings for one's country based on its history. And respect for that history can preserve your patriotic sentiment even when the country's current course leaves little to be respected.
Frankly, I've always been of the opinion (and I'll be posting an article on my blog to this effect soon), that no one should ever feel any guilt, or pride, at something they didn't have any invovlement in. I feel no guilt over slavery, and no pride over my sexual orientation. Neither of those were within my control. I regard them as facts, nothing more or less.
brooksfoe has it exactly right.
We are all part of the same nation, and our nation has a continuity beyond our individual lives.
We experience that continuity in feelings of love, pride, shame, and guilt over what our nation is and has done.
I have noticed that some conservatives only to countenance feelings of pride or love, and cannot deal with their necessary counterparts, shame and guilt. In Japan it is the the right which fights to sanitize WWII in their textbooks. Likewise in the US regarding slavery.
Why would I feel proud of the Marshall Plan? I wasn't alive. Yet I am proud that we fought the Nazis and were so gracious in victory. Likewise I feel shame at slavery & Jim Crow.
People incapable of feeling shame over the sins of our forefathers are as stunted as those who are not proud of our glories.
Megan's obtuseness on this issue is typical of the libertarian inability to see the communal nature of a nation.
Goodness, all these intense pro- and anti-collective guilt bloviations when the time-honored aphorism ought to apply: "There's no use crying over spilled milk." To which I'd append: but from how it was spilled we should learn to not spill it again. Berating and lamenting the spillers and their misdeeds is one thing, but feeling individual or collective guilt for their animus and misdeeds makes as much sense as the non-veteran impostors who claim to have served in combat and to have been awarded decorations for their bogus heroism: you can't own what you didn't do. Whether you try to own guilt for the misdeeds of the dead, or you try to promote yourself by dint of battle honors earned by them that were actually in the battle, you deserve in each instance nothing but opprobrium, odium, and oblivion.
In this same sense today's blacks may not own the suffering of their enslaved forebears, today's Jews may not own the ordeals endured and mass-murders suffered by their Holocaust ancestors, and whites may not own the repression visited upon their deceased European immigrant father and mothers. All that anyone and any collective can do is what Duke Ellington exhorted us to do: "Accentuate The Positive."
"Feeling shame" for the misdeeds of the dead (of any race, creed, party, &c.) serves no one and no cause: in fact if you feel shame for the misdeeds of the dead, or even for the misdeeds of people over whom you have no influence, then it's your feeling of that phony shame, your wearing of the cloak of smug superiority to others such that you feel that such adopted shame somehow makes you more righteous and "correct" than others, that you should truly feel ashamed of.
Of course one should feel horror at the crimes and barbarisms of the dead, and feel no end of sympathy for the victims of those crimes and barbarisms, but it's rational erudite mindfulness of horror, not shame, that should spur one to "Accentuate The Positive." Why? Because in history it's plain that adopted resentments and shame have too often been the predicates, the excuses, for crimes and barbarism. Ever heard of the Sudeten Germans, of contemporary American southerners who are still grousing about the war their distant forebears lost and deserved to lose, of blacks who react extremely because they fear irrationally that slavery and Jim Crow are ever on the verge of being reinstituted? (For instances: the covert and massive donations by Irish-Americans to the bloodthirsty IRA terrorists; donations to jihadis by untroubled Mohammedans who inveigle themselves into Western polities in which they enjoy untrammeled liberty; and many more such exemplars of adopted resentment and - er - "righteousness").
Let us draft into this discussions one rarely mentioned irrefutable fact: the all-time champions of slavery are not white western Europeans, but Mohammedans; and second place on this scale of colossal ignominy is owned by Africans, and white Europeans come in a distant third, maybe even fourth (behind the Chinese whose historical utter dependence on grinding serfdom went on for millennia through dynasty after dynasty) - the difference being that white Europeans acted from their own refinement of their own Judeao-Christian-Enlightenment ideals (ideals, not guilt and not shame) to abolish slavery, while Mohammedans and Africans hold the all-time record for the most slaves taken, traded, owned, abused, and murdered, and that significantly large, powerful elements of today's Mohammedan and African populations still impose slavery with relish and chiefly with impunity. How many white liberals feel guilt - or righteous indignation - over that irrefutable historical and continuing embarrassment owned outright by Mohammedans and Africans both dead and alive? Once I tried to count all the liberals who are outraged by and ashamed of the depredations committed by non-whites, but found that I had too many fingers left over because nearly all of the liberals were too busy "feeling shame" and guilt only for what their grossly and unfairly mistaken favorite scapegoats - Dead White Men - did. Thus does liberal guilt also suffer, indeed it's crippled beyond its intrinsic self-handicapping, for its failures to know proportion, to recognize that perspective and context give meaning and weight, and to apply what liberals most often complain of the lack of in others - plain old fairness.
Neither virtue, nor vice, is owned exclusively or in greater or lesser proportion by any one race, creed, faction, or what have you. Both are owned in randomly distributed equity (just like, Omygod!, "diversity"! - which, of course, occurs quite naturally without any enthusiasm or rigging by anyone or any group) by just one race: our human one. It's not the amount or the purity of the guilt or shame one feels that advances human rights that count, it's the hard work of living virtuously, chiefly as individuals but also as members of our Enlightenment Liberal collective, that counts, that most effectively advances and widespreads the individual and collective liberty, repsonsibility, and well-being of all people.
"We are all part of the same nation, and our nation has a continuity beyond our individual lives." tomtom
TR: In itself this is fine. Americans can feel pride and shame for their nation in so much as they connect to it.
However individuals are not "America." Should white America feel guilt for every bad policy the US has ever done from 1789 to present? Should we feel guilt over the Asian-Exclusion Acts or the Alien and Sedition Acts? Why? We can say this nation we love has done XYZ bad things, but that doesn't make the nation us.
I'm not even sure feeling guilt helps African Americans. Do they really want to be the object of white guilt? Because to me that's what this does. It once again says African American are passive players even in their own story. This is what I really dislike about liberals. If you are black, disabled, poor, Latino whatever it really doesn't matter what you do. Your life is essentially decided by what white America did or does to you. So Obama's success is no longer about him succeeding. Instead it's about white liberals, their guilt, and how America must "give back" to African Americans. The black man is essentially infantilized all over again. (For a conservative-leaning white person I feel a weird Jeremiah Wright vibe coming on)
"I have noticed that some conservatives only to countenance feelings of pride or love, and cannot deal with their necessary counterparts, shame and guilt.In Japan it is the the right which fights to sanitize WWII in their textbooks. Likewise in the US regarding slavery." tomtom
TR: You must mean "in a national sense." Conservatives certainly believe in shame and guilt for actions people do. In Japan "right-wingers" are perhaps more likely to still commit suicide over shame and guilt. In the US many conservatives are Christians who believe in original sin and that everyone is, metaphorically speaking, capable of crucifying Jesus.
"Megan's obtuseness on this issue" tomtom
TR: I believe this one was by a guest blogger.