Randy Best, the Ethical Leader of the EHST, wrote a post on this blog declaring himself a racist. One of my comments on that got way too long, so I am posting it here instead.

Randy wrote in a comment that “[a]lthough there are types and degrees of racism, as a person who is deemed by society to be white, I recognize my culpability. I do not feel guilty about this. Through the help of others I have glimpsed America’s structure of racism and white privilege. I am tarnished by it. I am part of it. It must change.”

But Randy is not complicit, as he works against racism. And while he says that he does not feel guilty, this is immediately after he says that he is culpable for racism, which he is not. The only thing he has presented that even approaches a rational justification for his claim of guilt is the obvious non sequitur from White privilege to racism.

What bothers me about this is that in Ethical Culture and Humanism we are supposed to be doing something better than mainstream religions. But this redefinition of “racist” goes against common sense and simple logic, as religion so often does. It is an “article of faith” Randy and others have, and can not back up with good reasoning, like so many religious beliefs. And it is no better than the guilt-ridden habits and dogma one sometimes finds in Catholicism, Judaism and elsewhere.

With a few exceptions, such as for an institutional setting where a person in a leadership position assumes responsibility for the organization, like the Japanese corporate executive who resigns after a scandal they were unaware of, it is obvious that a necessary condition for culpability is that you did the thing in question.

All of us are responsible and culpable for any racist things we might say or do. But Randy did not create slavery, racism or Jim Crow in America. He did not turn the fire hose on the demonstrators in Birmingham. The slave trade started long before he was even born. He is not culpable for these things because he did not do them. Duh!

I can already hear the defenders of White Guilt launch into the murky language of their discourse, saying something like “You still don’t get it. Just because someone deemed “white” did not engage in those particular activities does not mean that they are not enmeshed in a multidimensional structure of institutionalized white supremacy, and therefore participate in implicit systemic racism.” This is, of course, just a highfalutin way of repeating the non sequitur of “benefits from” implying “guilty of.”

I have some doubt that the White Guilt discourse is one that allows for genuine rational discussion, because the purpose of the discourse seems to be for the White person to express self-loathing as a response to racism, not to advance the cause of addressing the problem of racism in a rational way. It is an almost poetic use of language that seems to be all about intellectualizing shame and guilt so that, even if they are not felt as such,  these emotions drive the discussion, diverting it from taking practical steps to actually help Black people and work for racial justice.

Trying to reason with someone who indulges this discourse is sometimes just like trying to talk with fundamentalists about the existence of God. Our efforts against racism should be based on reason, a desire to do the right thing, and on compassion for the victims of racism, not a false sense of being the perpetrators of racism.

I’ve encountered this discourse of self-flagellation many times before, and I think it is not driven by reason, which is part of what we are supposed to be all about in Ethical Culture and Humanism. So I expect that it does not matter that I point out the obvious facts of the non sequitur or that Randy simply did not do these things.

However, I may be wrong. If we are capable to discussing this rationally, let’s get to it. Here is a valid argument. If Randy or anyone else disagrees with the conclusion they must disagree with one or both of the premises. And so they must present a good argument that the premise is false.

(1) One is responsible only for what one has done.
(2) Randy did not do the things that constitute the history and present reality of racism in America.
Therefore, Randy is not responsible for racism in America.

Randy can not deny (2), because this is a straightforward matter of fact. So it must be (1) he denies. He will have to claim that, in this instance, one is responsible for something one did not do. The first thing to note is that there is a difference between being responsible for something and being responsible for doing something about it; thus, the position I take here against this quasi-religious self-flagellation is entirely compatible with a sense of responsibility for doing something to fight the moral evil of racism. Indeed, I think the guilt hampers the fight against racism.

But the main point is that there is no way he can make sense here unless he somehow subsumes his claim of culpability under some exception to (1), like the Japanese businessman example. There are certainly other exceptions as well. Parents are sometimes responsible for things their children do, for instance.

But what the logic of this drives him to is something very different from these common exceptions. He is going to have to argue, in part, that people are responsible for what their ancestors have done. It is not we White people, but many of our White ancestors, who are responsible for the history of racism.

Here again, we see the failure to help fashion a new approach in Ethical Culture and Humanism that represents an advance beyond mainstream religion. This idea that one is responsible for what one’s ancestors have done is a familiar “Old Testament” way of thinking. Consider for example Exodus 20, verse 5: “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” (Emphasis added.)

This is barbaric moral thinking, and it is the sort of thing that those of us who have rejected Judeo-Christian ethics in favor of Humanism thought we were getting away from. But this backward notion that the “sins of the fathers” project moral responsibility on subsequent generations is exactly what underlies the White Guilt discourse. This shame-based thinking is a shallow, irrational and self-indulgent approach to the moral evil of racism.