German guy
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2010
- Messages
- 5,187
- Reaction score
- 4,255
- Location
- Berlin, Germany
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Moderate
Depends how you define it. I have no idea how the term "white guilt" is defined, if it is, in general debate and/or academia.
But I voted "yes", because I believe to see an attitude among some that seems to match the general idea, a kind of prejudice:
There are lots or prejudices among most, if not all people. Everybody has some. No less in politics. That's inevitable, because in order to be able to understand anything at all, and whenever it's about groups larger than one, you have to generalize. You can't even avoid generalizing. A prejudice occurs when the generalization is too broad, based on false assumptions, or when an individual is without justification held hostage for the group he belongs to.
You find a lot such prejudices in politics: "liberals/conservatives suck/are leeches/warmongers/whatever". "Blacks are welfare leeches". "Muslims hate gays and women". "Rich people exploit the poor". And so on ...
Some may be closer to the truth than others, or be more often right than wrong than others.
White guilt? There is a kind of attitude among some people, to always compulsively blame "themselves", "us", "the West", "the white race" for everything that goes wrong on this world. People in developing countries are poor, because "we" exploit them. Muslims don't integrate because "we" show too much racism towards them. People abroad hate us because we employ imperialism on them. And so on.
Some of these accusations may be true to some extent, and there may be individual examples for phenomena when this explanation indeed applies.
But as so often in politics, there are many people who generalize these observations and turn them into a knee-jerk reaction they use to explain everything, whenever the opportunity arises. They *always* look for the fault in their own Western culture or government, and don't even try to look for other explanations or other responsibilities. And they will even defend these prejudices when confronted with evidence to the contrary.
So yes, this kind of "white guilt" prejudice exists among many, as a political prejudice that makes self-criticism a default reaction.
The opposite exists among other people too, of course -- *always* blaming the other first. Just because "white guilt" exists, doesn't mean "racism" doesn't exist, too.
