Paul Gottfried, The Politics of White Guilt

Once when asked why I was not a “white nationalist,” I responded by explaining that it is the whites far more than the blacks who have produced our anti-white and anti-bourgeois regime and culture. The whites have done this to themselves, in a gesture of cosmic stupidity and moral arrogance that I could never imagine any other race engaging in. The people in our government who enact laws and dictate policies discriminating against whites, males and Christians were put there overwhelmingly by white Christian voters. Mayor John DeStefano of New Haven, who was responsible for the anti-white policy leading to the Ricci challenge, is an Italian Catholic elected mostly by white ethnics. The state in which DeStefano resides, which is the one whence I come, is preponderantly white, and most of the whites in Connecticut vote for the political Left. Moreover, the WASP Republican Party makes about as much noise as the Democrats lamenting America’s racist past and promising to make amends for their alleged sins of commission and omission. There is nothing that Obama said this summer while visiting Ghana about our evil past as a slave-holding country that could equal the declaration of shame that his Republican predecessor had uttered on the same continent two years earlier. While Republicans get no credit for their groveling from black Democrats, no one can accuse them of not “reaching out.”

The culture of white guilt has spread so far that it seems entirely incidental if black parasites have joined the game. Far worse than Gates’s chutzpah is the toxic waste that we put into the minds of the young here and in Europe about the burden of Euro-American history. The politics of atonement is based on gross exaggerations and selective treatments of the past, which are then combined with adoration of the bizarre and anti-Western. But this approach to civilization is precisely the one that my students and most academics of my acquaintance have absorbed; and they have taken over this perspective out of inertia or the desire to rise socially. The answer for most of our young is not a crash course in the great books, even if we could decide on which ones to teach. Most people have neither the inclination nor the ability to ponder such funded wisdom; and not a few of those who teach it are already full of the multicultural ideology and politics of guilt that have contributed to our problem.