Diagnosing "White Guilt"

The white liberal has built Hell, moved into it voluntarily and called it enlightenment.

I. The Spectacle of Self-Flagellation

You have seen the rituals. Perhaps you have performed them.

The white woman weeping at the diversity training, overcome by the revelation of her complicity. The white man at the dinner party, unprompted, parsing his privilege, flagellating himself with the lexicon: problematic, complicit, centering myself, doing the work. The social media confession—I have been silent, I have benefited, I am learning, I am unlearning. The white academic who cannot write a paragraph without genuflecting to their positionality, cannot make an argument without first confessing the original sin that taints their mouth.

The kneeling. The literal kneeling. Masses of white people, in public squares, kneeling before black strangers, begging forgiveness for sins they did not personally commit, from people they have never personally wronged.

What is this?

It is not politics. Politics aims at outcomes—laws, resources, power. This aims at nothing. No policy is demanded, no reparation calculated, no redistribution enacted. The kneeling white person does not get up and write a check. They do not get up and vote differently than they were already voting. They get up and go home, lightened by the performance, ready to resume their lives in the same houses, same jobs, same neighborhoods.

It is not ethics. Ethics involves action, responsibility, the alignment of conduct with principle. The guilty white liberal changes nothing. They continue to live in the white neighborhood, send their children to the white school, hire the white job candidate. They simply feel bad about it. They acknowledge it. The acknowledgment is the thing.

It is not even expiation. Expiation implies an end—you have paid, you are clean, go and sin no more. But this guilt never ends. The work is never done. The more you confess, the more you discover to confess. Each layer of awareness reveals a deeper layer of complicity. It is an infinite regress of self-accusation.

No. What this is, is religion. Specifically: Christianity. More specifically: Christianity stripped of everything that made it survivable.

II. Born Into Sin

Christianity has a doctrine of original sin. You did not eat the apple; Adam did. But you inherit the guilt. You are born fallen, tainted, indebted. Not through any action of your own—through your nature, through the mere fact of your existence as a descendant of Adam.

This is strange. It offends modern sensibilities. How can you be guilty of something you didn’t do? How can sin be inherited?

And yet.

You are white. You did not choose this. You did not enslave anyone, colonize anyone, redline anyone. Your ancestors may not have even been in this country when these things happened. Perhaps they were Jews in shtetls, Italians in slums, Irish under the boot of the English. No matter. You are white. You inherit the guilt. You are born fallen, tainted, indebted. Not through any action of your own—through your nature, through the mere fact of your existence as a possessor of white skin.

Original sin, secularized. The doctrine you thought you’d outgrown, smuggled back in under new vocabulary.

But Christian original sin came with a solution: baptism. The sacrament that washes away inherited guilt. You did not earn your way out—you couldn’t—but grace was offered, and you were restored. The stain was real, but so was the cleansing.

What is the baptism for whiteness?

There isn’t one. That’s the point.

III. Confession Without Absolution

The Catholic Church built an elaborate technology for managing guilt: the sacrament of confession. You enumerate your sins. You express contrition. The priest speaks the words of absolution: ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis. You are forgiven. You do penance—real, finite penance—and then it is done. You are clean. You can begin again.

This technology worked. For centuries, it allowed millions of human beings to live with their guilt, to be relieved of it regularly, to function. The guilt was real, but it had a discharge mechanism. Pressure was released. The psyche was maintained.

Now observe the white guilt confession:

I acknowledge my privilege. I acknowledge my complicity. I acknowledge that I have benefited from systems of oppression. I acknowledge that my voice should be centered less. I acknowledge that I have work to do.

Where is the absolution?

There is none. There cannot be. The priest—if we can call them that—does not have the power to forgive. No one does. The sin is structural, systemic, ongoing. You are complicit by existing. Every breath you take in a white body is another moment of benefiting from white supremacy.

You could give away all your money. Still guilty. You could move to a black neighborhood. Gentrifier. You could marry a black person. Fetishist. You could devote your life to anti-racism. Centering yourself, white savior, taking up space.

There is no action that absolves. There is no amount of penance that suffices. The guilt is designed to be permanent, because permanent guilt is the point.

In Christianity, eternal guilt is Hell. It is the worst thing imaginable—to be forever conscious of your sin, forever separated from forgiveness. The white liberal has built Hell and moved into it voluntarily, and called this enlightenment.

IV. The Payoffs of Self-Damnation

But wait. If this guilt is interminable and absolution impossible, why would anyone participate? Humans are not infinitely masochistic. There must be something in it.

There is. Several things.

First: distinction. The guilty white liberal is not like those other white people—the unaware ones, the red-state ones, the ones who have not done the work. The confession of guilt is simultaneously a claim of superiority. I am aware of my sin, and this awareness elevates me above the unaware. The more abject the confession, the higher the status. It’s competitive self-abasement: I am more aware of my privilege than you are of yours, therefore I am better.

This is not humility. It is pride in the costume of humility. It is vanity with a hairshirt.

Second: tribal membership. To confess white guilt is to identify yourself as a member of the educated progressive class. It is a shibboleth, a password, a secret handshake. The vocabulary—privilege, complicity, centering, doing the work—marks you as one of the elect. Not the Christian elect, saved by grace, but the secular elect, saved by awareness. The credential class. The people who read the right books and went to the right schools and know the right things.

Working-class white people do not talk this way. This is not because they are more racist—studies show minimal difference in measurable racial attitudes by class. It is because they have not been to the seminary. They have not learned the liturgy.

Third: absolution by proxy. You cannot be forgiven for being white. But you can be thanked for your awareness. You can be told you’re one of the good ones. You can receive the approving nod of the diversity trainer, the ally cookie from the black colleague, the social media likes on your confession. This is thin gruel compared to ego te absolvo, but it’s something. It’s enough to keep you coming back.

Fourth: power. This is the one you really won’t admit.

To be ostentatiously guilty is to be safe. The white person who has publicly confessed their privilege has inoculated themselves. If accused, they can point to the confession. I already know. I’m already doing the work. The guilt is a shield.

More than this: the elaborate vocabulary of white guilt is a weapon, deployable against other white people. Against competitors. Against those you resent. To accuse another white person of privilege, of racism, of not doing the work—this is a powerful move. It can destroy careers, reputations, relationships. And who is most fluent in this vocabulary? Who can deploy it most effectively? The white people who have studied it most intensely. White guilt becomes white power, transmuted through the alchemy of critical theory.

The master’s tools, and all that.

V. The Class Dimension You Won’t Acknowledge

Here is an uncomfortable fact: white guilt is a class phenomenon.

It is not distributed evenly across the white population. It is concentrated among the educated, the affluent, the urban, the professional-managerial class. The people who went to good colleges. The people who work in non-profits, academia, media, HR. The people who have the luxury of spending time on their inner states.

The white working class—the plumber, the waitress, the long-haul trucker—does not do this. Not because they are morally inferior, but because they are not in on the game. They were not inducted into the guild. They do not benefit from the status economy in which guilt is currency.

And notice: it is precisely the white working class that the white guilt class most despises. The deplorables. The racists. The unaware ones. The ones who vote wrong.

This is not a coincidence.

White guilt is a class marker. It distinguishes the educated from the uneducated, the refined from the crude, the aware from the oblivious. And like all class markers, its purpose is to stratify, to separate, to allow the upper class to recognize itself and exclude others.

The white liberal does not feel guilty toward the black underclass—not really, not in any way that changes behavior. The white liberal feels guilty at the white underclass, in a performance meant to distinguish themselves from it. “I am not like those white people. I am one of the good ones. See how I flagellate myself? They would never.”

This is why white guilt coexists so comfortably with actual material inequality. The progressive white professional confesses privilege while living in a neighborhood, sending their children to schools, and maintaining a social network that is functionally segregated. The confession is the action. The guilt is the penance. Nothing need change in the actual structure of life.

The working-class white person who never confesses privilege but whose children attend integrated schools, who works alongside black colleagues, who lives in mixed neighborhoods—this person is the racist. Because they have not spoken the words.

Speech is the act. The word is the deed. Confession is the whole of the law.

VI. The Masochism of the Master

Nietzsche identified the slave revolt in morals: the weak, unable to compete on the terms set by the strong, invert the values. Strength becomes evil; weakness becomes virtue. The masters are recast as villains; the slaves as saints.

But what happens when the masters adopt slave morality? When the powerful begin to flagellate themselves?

You get something very strange. You get masochism as a power move.

The white guilt liberal is not a slave. They are, by any material measure, among the most privileged people who have ever existed. They have education, wealth, security, status, mobility. They are the masters.

But they have adopted—selectively, performatively—the morality of the slave. They denounce themselves. They confess their power as sin. They abase themselves before those they have designated as the oppressed.

This is not the surrender of power. It is the exercise of power in a new register.

Only the powerful can afford to be guilty. Guilt is a luxury. The actually oppressed do not have time for it. They are busy surviving. It is the master, secure in his position, who can indulge in the pleasures of self-denunciation.

And what pleasures they are! The frisson of abasement. The thrill of confession. The ecstasy of being found guilty and accepting the verdict. There is something almost erotic in it—the pornography of penance.

Masochism is not the absence of will to power. It is will to power turned inward, eroticized, made into a game. The masochist controls the scene. The masochist sets the limits. The masochist gets what the masochist wants.

The white guilt liberal kneels, and in kneeling, dominates.

VII. The People You Claim to Help

But what of the supposed beneficiaries? The black people, the brown people, the oppressed in whose name all this guilt is performed?

Ask them. Not the professional activists, the diversity consultants, the academics—they benefit from the guilt industry and will say what is required. Ask ordinary black people what they think of white liberals weeping at diversity trainings. Ask if they want white people kneeling before them in public squares. Ask if the endless performance of guilt has improved their lives in any material way.

The answers may surprise you. Or they won’t.

There is something deeply patronizing about white guilt. It centers the white person’s feelings. It makes the black person into a prop, a stage piece, a receptacle for white emotion. The black colleague must now manage the white colleague’s guilt. The black friend must reassure the white friend that they’re one of the good ones. This is not liberation; it is a new burden.

And the implicit premise—that black people are defined by their oppression, that they exist primarily as victims of white action, that the most important thing about them is their relationship to whiteness—is itself a form of supremacism. It cannot imagine black people except in reference to white people. It makes whiteness the center of the moral universe, even—especially—in its denunciation of whiteness.

The white guilt liberal says: “My whiteness is the most important thing about me, and also about you.”

This is not anti-racism. It is a racism of abjection, which is still racism.

VIII. The Sin Against the Self

Here is what you have done to yourself:

You have taken the identity you were born with—an identity you did not choose, cannot change, and bear no personal responsibility for—and made it into a sin. Not a disadvantage, not a complexity, not a historical situatedness. A sin. An ineradicable stain on your soul.

And then you have denied yourself any means of absolution.

What does it do to a person, to believe themselves essentially guilty? To wake every morning inside skin that indicts them? To know that their very existence is an offense, that they cannot open their mouths without complicity, that their children will inherit the same stain?

It produces neurosis. It produces masochism. It produces a desperate search for ways to discharge the guilt—through performance, through accusation of others, through the accumulation of ever-more-refined awareness. It produces people who are manifestly psychologically unwell, who radiate anxiety and instability, who cannot function in simple interactions without the specter of their sinfulness rising up.

And it produces, eventually, one of two reactions:

The first is doubling down. More confession, more abasement, more work. The true believer, kneeling deeper, confessing longer, finding ever more subtle forms of complicity to denounce. This is the person who has made a career of their guilt, who has found in self-denunciation a vocation.

The second is backlash. The person who, exhausted by the impossibility of ever being clean, simply rejects the entire framework. Who says: “If I am to be called racist no matter what I do, why should I try?” Who feels—correctly—that they have been asked to play a rigged game, and refuses. Who becomes, in reaction to the endless accusation, actually hostile. The alt-right troll who began as a liberal arts student. The MAGA convert who once voted for Obama.

The white guilt regime produces both its priests and its apostates. What it cannot produce is healthy people.

IX. What You Lost and Will Not Recover

Let me tell you what you discarded when you discarded Christianity:

You discarded the possibility of forgiveness.

In the Christian framework, you were guilty—yes, guilty from birth, stained by original sin. But you could be washed clean. Baptism for the inherited guilt, confession for the personal sins. The blood of Christ, poured out for you. Grace, unearned and undeserved, given freely to those who would accept it.

You could do wrong, acknowledge it, receive forgiveness, and begin again. The past was real but not determinative. You were not trapped in your sin. There was a mechanism for moving through guilt into something else.

You thought this was weakness. You thought forgiveness was a cope. You thought you could do better with a rigorous system of accountability that never let anyone off the hook.

And now here you are: never off the hook. Accountable forever. Guilty unto the last generation.

The Christians knew something you didn’t: humans cannot bear permanent guilt. It must be discharged or it will destroy. The elaborate apparatus of confession and absolution and penance and grace—all of it was technology for managing the unbearable weight of moral awareness.

You have the awareness without the management. You have the weight without the relief. You have invented a religion that consists entirely of Lent.

X. The Exit You Will Not Take

Here is the door:

You are not guilty for your skin.

You did not choose it. You cannot change it. It is not a sin, not a crime, not a stain. It is an accident of birth, morally neutral, like your height or your eye color or the century you were born in.

You are responsible for your actions. Your actual actions, taken by you, in your life. You can be generous or selfish, kind or cruel, just or unjust. These are choices you make and for which you can be held accountable.

But you cannot be held accountable for history. You cannot be held accountable for other people’s actions. You cannot be guilty of crimes committed before your birth, by people you never met, in places you have never been.

This is not a denial of history. History happened. Its effects persist. There is work to do. But the work is political—a matter of policy, resources, power—not spiritual. It does not require your self-flagellation. It does not require your guilt. It requires your action, and your action is enough.

You can work for justice without hating yourself. You can acknowledge history without bearing its guilt. You can be useful without being damned.

But this requires you to give up something: the specialness of your guilt. The distinction it confers. The membership it grants. The power it provides.

It requires you to be ordinary. Just a person, doing what they can, responsible for their own actions and no more. Not a sinner. Not a penitent. Not one of the elect who has seen their privilege and now does the work.

Just a person.

And that is intolerable to you. Because you have built your identity on the wound. Because the guilt, however painful, is yours—the one thing you have that the unaware ones don’t. Because to give it up would be to become common, and you would rather be damned than common.

So you will continue. The trainings, the confessions, the kneeling, the work that is never done. The endless Lent. The permanent Friday.

The door is open. The forgiveness is available—not from the diversity trainer, not from the black colleague, not from the Twitter mob, but from yourself. From reality. From the simple recognition that you are a human being, flawed and finite, but not essentially guilty.

You could walk out.

But you won’t.

You prefer the cell. You have decorated it so nicely. And the company—the other inmates, also doing the work, also never finished—is really quite good.

Ego te absolvo.

You do not want it.

Go and sin no more.

You would rather sin forever.