My White Guilt

A column in the Toronto Star suggests "white people" should feel more guilt than they do about slavery.

Kate McMillan, of Small Dead Animals, writes of her struggle in feeling any such guilt. After all, her own Scottish ancestors were relatively slave-deprived.

Ditto. My ancestors were Irish. Why should I feel any more guilt for slavery or for English colonialism than might an Indian or a Zimbabwean? Their ancestors, after all, were rather more benevolently colonized by the English than mine. And, leaving aside the English, slavery was traditionally practiced domestically in both those places until modern times. It has not been for many centuries in Ireland—not since its Christianization in the fifth century. Similarly, there have been both Indian and Zimbabwean empires; the British were apparently just better at it than the locals were. There has, by contrast, never been an Irish Empire. Perhaps due to mere incapacity, of course; who knows?

But why then am I guilty of anything the Zimbabwean or Indian are not? Just because of the colour of my skin? What position could be more perfectly racist?

Then again, the problem starts when anyone is held responsible for what their ancestors did, in the first place. Over such things, we of course have no control; so the premise is nonsensical. If your ancestors are better than my ancestors, or vice versa, doesn’t this logically require reinstatement of a class system? And doesn’t any kind of racism become reasonable—say, the supposed racial inferiority of blacks or natives (what did their ancestors accomplish?) and the notorious “blood guilt” of the Jews (their ancestors historically did have a hand in killing Jesus)?

Not where we want to go. is it? And after all, if we are going to hold the English of today to blame for imperialism and slevery, and if the English really were worse imperialists and slavers than other races, as opposed to better at it, don’t the English then also get credit for ancestors who invented science, parliamentary democracy, the free market, industrialization, vaccination, and the rights of man? Or for saving the world from Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler?

Heck, you’ve just made the case for a British Empire.