My last post dealt with fear. This post, by contrast, will deal with loathing.
Self-loathing, to be exact.
As soon as it became clear Trump was going to win the election last Tuesday night, a wave of despair swept over liberals and progressives alike. Even leftists who’d up to then feigned indifference to the result now joined in the outpouring of emotion that followed Clinton’s defeat. Generally this took the form of anger, anguish, or grief. Usually it was some mixture thereof. One reaction was particularly useless, however: guilt.
White guilt, to be exact.
Numerous thinkpieces and editorials appeared over the course of the following days. Representative titles include “Dear White Women: We Fucked Up” in The Huffington Post, and “I am Ashamed to be Part of the Demographic that Elected Trump” from Affinity Magazine. Sarah Ruiz-Grossman wrote in the former: “I am ashamed of my country and ashamed of white people. But more than anyone else, I am ashamed of white women.” Cassie Baker sounded off in the latter: “I cannot even begin to convey how embarrassed and ashamed I am that this is what it has come to.” Public announcements of this sort had already begun to pour in on social media the night before. Laurie Penny, a frequent contributor to The Guardian and New Inquiry, confessed on Twitter: “I have had white liberal guilt before. Today is the first time I’ve actually been truly horrified and ashamed to be white.” Another author, who has written for Marxist publications like Salvage and Socialist Worker in the past, echoed Penny’s sentiment on Facebook: “Not sure if I’ve ever felt as ashamed to be a white American man as I do today.”
Honestly, though I’ve been known to be a bit cynical, I wonder what such statements actually aim to accomplish. Often they seem like virtue-signaling rituals of atonement, meant to convey to others what a good ally someone is. Either that or assuage their guilty conscience. And the same goes with the safety pins activists have started to wear, as in the aftermath of the Brexit vote this summer. Ruby Hamad put it bluntly in an editorial published by The Sydney Morning Herald: “Safety pins are meaningless acts of solidarity made to assuage white guilt.” “Make no mistake, that’s what the safety pins are for,” Christopher Keelty wrote with equal bluntness in a blog entry for The Huffington Post, “helping white people feel better.” Christopher Lasch diagnosed long ago the narcissism that motivates many individuals committed to activist causes: “Political movements exercise a fatal attraction for those who seek to drown the sense of personal failure in collective action.”
The most egregious instance I witnessed came in a comment thread just hours after Hillary conceded the race. “Keep having the urge to apologize to all the people of color and Muslims who I encounter,” he revealed. He then resolved to himself (and everyone else who was reading): “Going to talk to my Muslim immigrant coworker tomorrow. Just want her to know that we value and respect her as part of the community, because I can’t even guess what she’s feeling right now.”
Imagine being this poor woman sitting in the breakroom, drinking a coffee, enjoying your Boston creme — a beacon of light in a world gone to shit. Suddenly, the office softboi slides in next to you and clasps your hand.
“Fatima,” he says, “YOU’RE WELCOME in America.”
Grinning to himself, he gets up and returns to his desk, to tweet about his not at all random, entirely premeditated act of kindness.
One could equally imagine a scenario in which Muslims and undocumented immigrants are being herded onto trucks by Trump stormtroopers. Valiant white allies run toward them, tripping over each other to shout “I’m sorry for my privilege!!” louder than the rest, as the doors shut and the convoy drives away.
Don’t get me wrong. Accusing someone of being “a self loathing X” is something I find utterly abhorrent. Nine times out of ten, such accusations are made by nationalists looking to denigrate other members of their community for not showing enough pride in it or loyalty to it. The version I’m most familiar with, of course, is that of “the self-loathing Jew” — i.e., any Son of Abraham who doesn’t demonstrate sufficient love for Israel. It’s a phrase that originated with Theodor Lessing’s 1930 book, Der Jüdische Selbsthaß, an extended polemic against assimilated Jews who refused to join in the project of building a Zionist homeland in British Palestine.
Epithets have likewise been directed toward African-Americans unwilling to adhere to black nationalism, dubbed “Uncle Toms” or “domestic Negroes” by their detractors. This is basically what is meant by alt-right white nationalists when they refer to other whites as “cucks” — men who like to see their women get fucked — what used to be designated by hateful terms like “nigger-lover” or Judenfreund. Hopefully this explains why I’d be the last person to accuse someone of being “a self loathing X.” Unless, of course, that person is literally saying he or she is ashamed to be Jewish, or black, or white. Besides being self-indulgent and alienating to normies, this only confirms the worst suspicions of nationalists.
Complaints about the unfair burden of “white guilt” are nearly ubiquitous on the European and American far right, so I won’t bother reprising them all here. Instead, I’ll just provide a general sketch. Suffice it to say, for the time being, that it’s a response to supposed vilification of white people in history textbooks and popular media, which hold them responsible for all the world’s past wrongdoings and present ills. Most often this is seen as a nefarious plot perpetrated by university professors and Hollywood moguls, nearly all of whom turn out to be Jewish.
This insidious anti-European narrative, so the story goes, is then unwittingly imbibed by unsuspecting whites, internalized as a kind of “ethnomasochism.” Guillaume Faye, a French journalist associated with the Nouvelle Droite, describes this as “the masochistic tendency to blame and devalue one’s ethnicity, one’s own people.” According to Charles Lyons, another neoreactionary writer from France, it’s a collective psychopathology provoked by a concerted propaganda campaign to make whites feel guilty about how they have treated other peoples. Europeans are intrinsically racist, as a kind of original sin for which they must feel guilty.
Paranoia notwithstanding, this is a fairly convenient catchall explanation. Furthermore, it attains a scintilla of plausibility from the fact that there doubtless is a tendentious habit among academics to present European imperialism as a unique evil perpetrated on the world. Histories and counterhistories written in recent decades have sought to undermine the triumphalist accounts of Whig historians, who depict Western development since the Renaissance as following a path of linear progress down to the present. In so doing, however, they’ve bent the stick a bit too far back in the other direction, overcompensating. Japanese and Ottoman imperialism ought to show that brutal chauvinism in modern times is not the exclusive preserve of “the West.”
Besides, there’s also a more sinister aspect to all this. Returning to Laurie Penny’s tweet mentioned above, in which she stated she felt “truly horrified and ashamed to be white,” the exchange that took place afterward is instructive. Another Twitter user, “Hopping Bunny,” innocently inquired: “You wouldn’t happen to be Jewish, would you?” This is the back and forth that followed.
Laurie Penny: Half Jewish.
Hopping Bunny: Every. Single. Time.
Laurie Penny: Every single time what?
Hopping Bunny: Jews are not white. No need to feel guilty then. Please stop posing as white.
Super Moniac: Seriously, every time I come across some “white” person hating on whites, they’re actually Jewish.
I guess that settles it, then.
And Russian
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Historically, world-wide, liberals do have a lot to feel guilty about and to answer for; not the breast-beating and self-flagellation expressed by some well meaning but very callow folks such as Laurie Penny and friends. One irony in that vacuous exchange is that, only considering their deep involvement in progressive causes in the thirties, forties and fifties in the United States up to putting their lives on the line during the sixties civil rights campaigns, Jewish people have nothing to feel guilty about.
Now back to liberals and liberalism in general. The working masses have not been able to grasp since the ’30s what political theories and actions are necessary which favour their own self-interest.
Since the end of the Second World War, western liberalism has been able to thwart such understanding since it was glimpsed in Canada by supporters of the Regina Manifesto and in the U.S. by supporters of Eugene Debs.
Aside from the U.S. election results, all you have to do in the contemporary agora is observe the people out and about on an average day on the streets and sidewalks and public transit.
Those that aren’t tragically suffering from mental illness (and there are plenty of those) have an air of either anger and despair or are so completely self-absorbed in their own bubble-world of portable smart devices, they are oblivious to any thought of mutual cooperation which would ease everyone’s journey through the workaday world.
This may simply sound like an old fashioned rant by an old man, but the idea of giving up one’s seat at the front of the bus to a frail elderly person or a heavily pregnant woman has become an anomaly, instead of common practice. As I used to say, “Good manners are the KY of social intercourse.”
Such has been the juggernaut of the widely received and then promulgated misrepresentation of history, by mass media, pop culture and within our formal educational institutions that we have raised up generations of truly ignorant populations. Notwithstanding the high rate of literacy and education of Canadians and Americans, the inability of most the 99% to understand their position and power (or lack thereof) within our society as a member of a given class has been thoroughly entrenched since the 1940’s.
I actually think the chattering classes of the mainstream media and the entertainment industry are not purposely promulgating the idiocy so apparent on both sides following the election, but are actually delusional. The network comedians, Colbert, Fallon, Meyers, Cordon, et al., are among the worst, all in a state of shock following their year-long derision of Trump and his hillbilly followers, as these talk show “sophisticates” liked to think of themselves.
Nothing could have reinforced this view more than seeing Dave Chappelle (he of the “Niggar Family” skits) on Saturday Night Live make some funny zingers and then conclude by talking with great admiration about Obama who Dave, self-described in his monologue as a “rich nigger”, seemed to have deemed worthy of admiration by the rest of America’s blacks.
All these talking heads, white, black or brown, truly still believe in the “if you work and try hard enough, anyone can become rich and famous one day” mantra. And, of course, many of them are very very rich indeed and spend their personal lives hanging out with each other, reinforcing this patently ridiculous notion.
It appears the newly literate factory workers and supporters of the Bolsheviks on the eve of the 1917 revolution were a historical anomaly, partly insofar as they were a product of their times with attention spans longer than a few minutes and information in print tended to sink in better than a five-second sound bite. They had been weaned on Iskra and Pravda and, along side the Bolshevik cadre on their shop floors, knew what was to be done to move forward the interests of the class they also knew they were inextricably a part of.
But, as Trotsky admitted in “Socialism in One Country” written near the beginning of the world-wide depression of the late 20s and ’30s:
If you admit the possibility of its [the then current capitalist stagnation] flourishing anew for a period of decades, then the talk of socialism in our backward country is pitiable tripe.Then it will be necessary to say that we were mistaken in our appraisal of the whole epoch as an epoch of capitalist decay. Then the Soviet Republic will prove to have been the second experiment in proletarian dictatorship since the Paris Commune, broader and more fruitful, but only an experiment …
As for our planet’s future under Trump, check out his potential Cabinet nominees, largely a frightening bunch of social and political troglodytes, including those short-listed for head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior (hint, Sarah Palin anyone?) – their level of mean spiritedness only challenged by their ignorance or stupidity.
Since another juggernaut is upon us, consumerism on steroids on the ever earlier launch of Christmas shopping hysteria, may I paraphrase Tiny Tim:
God help us everyone!
“Aside from the U.S. election results, all you have to do in the contemporary agora is observe the people out and about on an average day on the streets and sidewalks and public transit.”
This is obviously an observation to found in dense urban formations and, frankly, unchanged in the 40 yrs that I have lived in and experienced cities like NYC, SF, PHL, etc. I tend think that is the real culture of cities and the experience of the vast majority of city dwellers contra the perception of cities as some sort of cultural Utopian, the ultimate yuppieville where all is cool. If you have a lot money and power, cities are a playground, if you don’t they are socially brutal and thoroughly dehumanizing landscapes unless you exist within an enclave that has its own sort of internal compensating economy that places social cohesion and community well-being above money…you know the kind….where there is one menu for the yuppie invaders and another one for the locals.
The suburbs are also riven with the same sort of dynamic but the dearth of genuine public space allows you to really only experience others in traffic, all hermetically sealed in their freedom or at the temples engaged in ritual consumerism.
Out on the margins and in the hinterlands, long abandoned, is the only place I have found any measure of freedom and solidarity. Close to the earth’s edge provides a different context and forms a different kind of soul. It has been noted in the election the role of the hinterlands in Trumpf’s rise, something attributed to the very ancient dynamic of extracting too much surplus from the landscape and the peasantry.
Any map of material flows delineating the areas of extraction and of concentration clearly mark off the cities as the centers of accumulations, as the center of power that are generating the imbalances and ravaging the planet – and of course – these centers are the progressive strong holds. I have known many progressives whose daily corporate life is inextricably bound up in the looting of the hinterlands and the peasantry here and aboard and I would venture to say that a progressive identity is little more than mask turned inward that serves more to deceive one’s self about the nature of one;s complicity in the crimes of empire than reveal any sort of stable set of preferences or true ‘self’.
Progressives are, I would hate to say it, largely ignorant asses and they do not even know it or understand how that could possibly be because in their minds they are so good and so smart and so superior. It is a fact of nature to them that every human being is a middle class liberal white person trying to get out – sort of an apex of human evolution everyone is aspiring to. That is, of course, what ‘education’ is all about – manufacturing copies.
The combination of “education” and middle class affluence produces a obnoxiously arrogant morality play that always places them center stage. The ruling elites love to roll doobs and blow smoke up the ass of these poor souls. But we should always keep in mind that they will always betray any effort perceived to threaten that position.
Whatever support for poor and working slobs they claim to offer, would quickly vanish if it altered for one moment, the material and psychological comforts that underpin their existence – this is why their message is always ‘everyone can have what we have’.
btw, Russ, greatly appreciate your writing and blog….thanks.
Someone I know told me of a post-election conversation with a black woman. She said, “Now you see how we’ve felt for hundreds of years, worried or scared about something.” His response was to say that as a white person he felt terribly embarrassed.
When I questioned him about this, it became clear to me, and to some degree to him, that a primary driver of his response was that he felt that he needed to “do something” and that all he felt that he had to give her was shame and an accompanying sense of indebtedness to her. Because he is thoroughly enmired in a traditional loyalty to the Democratic party, meaning that his political subjectivity and imagination is nullified, it did not occur to him that what she was really interested in was some guarantee of solidarity in action on his part. As he related more of the conversation, it was apparent that his shame didn’t do much for her, at all. But, given the confusion prevailing in an already withered catchall party, a response conveying the idea of “Never Again” just wasn’t available to him.
There’s an important distinction to be made between guilt and shame that you didn’t include. I know this may seem like mere semantics, but it is important from a psychological standpoint in that narcissism is associated with shame rather than guilt. Guilt involves recognizing you’ve done something wrong and a move towards a corresponding act to try and remedy it. Shame is more about one’s ego/ideal image being tarnished. That’s what is at work here. They feel dirty and feel as though being white makes them look bad. It’s not as if any of them feel as though they did something wrong, took a mistaken action. They’re worried about looking bad.
So of course the remedy is going to be to do something to correct that image, to overcompensate, to make loud public displays tolerance and disgust at their ethnic group. That was the main motivation behind these cries of “I’m ashamed to be American.” Everybody needs to be told they aren’t one of them, one of the bad ones.
excellent points and not splitting hairs. anyone surprised at the election of trumpf is pretty clueless as to the nature of our society…they do not know or understand this country, its history, very large swaths of its people and its system of social control, governance and power.