White guilt

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 whites, she said, because she found this led whites to focus on getting acceptance and forgiveness rather than changing their own actions or beliefs.[8]

A report in The Washington Post from 1978 describes the exploitation of white guilt by con artists: "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."[9]

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.[10]

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.[11]

One academic paper suggests in France, white guilt may be a common feature of management of race relations – in contrast to other European countries.[12]

American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote that reparations for slavery would be an exploitation of white guilt and damage the "integrity of blacks".[13] In 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope that "rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America".[14] His view on the subject was based on an interaction in the US Senate, where he witnessed a white legislator complain about being made to "feel more white" when a black colleague discussed systemic racism with them.[15]

Shelby Steele, a conservative black political writer, discussed the concept in his 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Steele criticizes "white guilt" saying that it is nothing more than an alternative interpretation of the concept of "black power":

Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed by it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty and so on. [...] The authority they lose transfers to the 'victims' of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why white guilt is quite literally the same thing as Black power.[16]

George F. Will, a conservative American political columnist, wrote: "[White guilt is] a form of self-congratulation, where whites initiate 'compassionate policies' toward people of color, to showcase their innocence to racism."[17]

In 2015, when it came to light American civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal had been posing as African American, Washington Post journalist Krissah Thompson described her as "an archetype of white guilt played to its end". Thompson discussed the issue with psychologist Derald Wing Sue, an expert on racial identity, who suggested that Dolezal had become so fascinated by racism and racial justice issues she "over-identified" with black people.[18] In 2016, the school district of Henrico County, Virginia ceased future use of an educational video, Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race, which visualized white privilege and structural racism. Parents complained, calling it a white guilt video, which led to a ban by the county's superintendent.[19][20]

In October 2018, The Economist proposed that an increase in Americans claiming Native American ancestry, often incorrectly, may be explained by attempts to "absolve them of collective European guilt for the genocide of indigenous people".[21]. In 2019, it was reported how liberal white Americans were being influenced by white guilt, changing patterns of political and social behaviour to be more racially inclusive since the election of Donald Trump. This included the methods by which Democratic nominees were being considered for the 2020 presidential election.[22][23]

In October 2019, students at middle school in Massachusetts raised money for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, after learning that the tribe had dealt with the first colonists from The Mayflower. The school director said it had "left all our students with this sense of European guilt", and one student remarked "If we don’t try to repair what our ancestors did, the tribes will die off".[24]

Author Sally Morgan 1987's book My Place, which explores Aboriginal identity, has come under critique for providing European Australians with a narrative of colonization in Australia which, critics argue, too generously assuages white settler guilt.[4] Marcia Langton has described the book as a kind of an unearned catharsis for European guilt: "The book is a catharsis. It gives release and relief, not so much to Aboriginal people oppressed by psychotic racism, as to the whites who wittingly and unwittingly participated in it".[25]

In New Zealand, the legacy of Pākehā settlers has created a localized sense of white guilt in relation to the resulting damage to pre-existing Māori culture and mistreatment of indigenous people.[26][27] Then opposition leader, Bill English, in 2002, gave a speech rejecting the "cringing guilt" said to be a result of the European colonialism to Aotearoa, and the Pakeha settlers who enacted it.[27] This was in response to the government Race Relations Commissioner, comparing the impact of British settlement in New Zealand to the Taliban's vandalism of the Buddhas of Bamyan.[28]

Academic Elizabeth Rata has proposed that "without the mirror image of unexpiated guilt, a necessary process in the recognition and validation of a shared reality, Pākehā guilt moved, not onto the next stage of externalised shame, but into an internal and enclosed narcissism". In her analysis, she suggests that the Waitangi Tribunal has been a missed opportunity to reconcile white guilt in New Zealand.[29]