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Interesting point. Martin Luther King Jr spoke quite a bit about addressing GUILT before he was killed. Unfortunately for all of us, he was incredibly unpopul

• taurath 6y ago
  And I must say, though this thought is controversial. If you are a white man born in America, feeling guilt is what you’re supposed to feel, as a human being. Not personal guilt, as few even living today are directly responsible for the systems that came before. But guilt from being born into privilege in a society built entirely to benefit you, from the net worth of your parents, to the quiet mono-racial neighborhoods that are the after effects of federal redlining. Born poor? That means you should understand the plight of people trapped in hopeless poverty more.
  • galkk 6y ago
    No, they aren't supposed to neither feel the guilt nor repent for color of their skin.
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Should you self-flagellate for being born in the situation you are in? How would that benefit anyone? Guilt is a negative emotion, and in my opinion you shouldn't have to do penance for things you have no control over. Instead, you can use your position of privilege to do good in whatever way fits. My small contribution, I run an online community (~1000 members in our Discord server) with a zero tolerance policy on racism, racist / sexist / orientation stereotypes, etc. It's ran and frequented by a highly diverse range of people from all over the world. It's not much, but I know I'm not contributing to the problem and I like to think my community is making the world a better place.
    • guerrilla 6y ago
      > you have no control over Faulty assumption here. You do have control over maintaining the system of privilege that you were born into. That's how it continues from generation to generation, by white people holding on to their money and power instead of working on ways to distribute it.
      • rusk 6y ago
        > white people holding on to their money and power That there is a racist statement. Yes maybe intergenerational wealth causes some issues but to cast it as a purely white issue is just stupid. Avarice is a feature common to all of humanity.
        • guerrilla 6y ago
          > That there is a racist statement. Hardly. It has nothing to do with who or what they are but rather is literally a description of what they are doing. > white issue It is a white issue that white people oppress others and are the only ones with the power to stop that short of violent overthrow.
          • rusk 6y ago
            Wrong. You can find examples of this behaviour right across the world, regardless of race. Doesn’t make it right.
  • mpfundstein 6y ago
    what kind of twisted stuff is this? what could I do to not be born to well off parents? nothing lol people who carry this pointless guilts should see a shrink maybe. they might suffer from something
    • flippinburgers 6y ago
      It is what intersectionality and "social justice" is continuously trying to teach in the US school system these days.
    • rusk 6y ago
      I think you're on to something here. That a lot of the most enraged people probably have some underlying condition that isn't being addressed. Furthermore en masse such folk are being actively manipulated to political ends. Sadly, professional treatment in certain jurisdicitons seems to involve prescription of opiates which likely just exacerbates things. Maybe that's the point.
  • depressedpanda 6y ago
    > If you are a white man born in America, feeling guilt is what you’re supposed to feel, as a human being. Nonsense. You should feel thankful. Thankful that you had the luck being born in the most prosperous time in human history, where you have access to better healthcare, transportation, human rights and democratic privileges, to name just a few. Once you realize how good it is to live in this day and age and feel grateful, helping others who are a bit less fortunate will come naturally to you. Working from positive emotions is a much better strategy, both for your own sake and - by extension - also for the sake of society at large.
    • pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      So feel guilty that you don't feel thankful, but only if you're white? You know that skin colour doesn't make you immune to poverty, or disease, or any adversity? Your comment comes across as supporting the parent comment; and as exceptionally racist. Almost certainly some kids living in USA didn't eat today. Your comment sounds like "well starving white kids can just eat their privilege". I don't understand why you're all so obsessed with skin colour and not with actuality of real people. Are the powerful people in USA principally white men, I don't doubt it. Don't let your ire at such inequality make you racist.
      • SeerKlein 6y ago
        I think that what you're saying about how skin color doesn't make you immune to adversity is true. I also think that they are trying to say that you shouldn't focus on guilt and instead should focus on gratitude, that relatively speaking and from their perspective, white people are privileged. I can see how in some ways, some subset of white people have had much better fortunes than others and people of color. There are, like you said, other subsets of white people who've had it worse or suffer similarly.
      • animal_spirits 6y ago
        The whole point of the posted article is to _not_ guilt people in to doing the right thing. You should push positive emotions about doing the right thing, not negative emotions. From the article: "These findings suggest that inducing people to consider positive rather than negative self-directed emotions might recruit more people to a climate-change mitigation agenda, and to prosocial behaviour more broadly."
  • throwaways885 6y ago
    This is literally the reason people are saying woke liberals are racist.
  • belorn 6y ago
    To quote a song, I'm not going to spend my life being a color.
    • taurath 6y ago
      But will you spend your life trying to be completely unaware of your color? Such is a possibility only afforded white folks.
      • mrmuagi 6y ago
        I don't believe that is accurate. Homogeneous societies afford their citizens that opportunity, e.g. Japanese.
  • zo1 6y ago
    Slavery and racial oppression is not unique to America or White people. It's a small cross-section of the entire history of the world, spanning millennia and across the entire globe. But to further your point, if you extend your comment to all groups of people (and not just White people), and the moment you use the term "gratitude" and "appreciate" instead of guilt, is when I can agree with you and we can collectively move forward as a society. We need to appreciate and be grateful for the society, technology, stability and civilization that was built by our ancestors, through a lot of adversity, suffering, poverty and war. And as a corollary to that, we need to preserve, adjust and build on top of that instead of throwing it out entirely because "historic injustice" that at this point seems to be inescapable and ever present with no path to redemption. It almost seem like original sin, and I will have no part in paying penance and reparations for something I had absolutely no part in.
  • gwd 6y ago
    I think the best clarification of this is to separate out fault from responsibility; and the analogy to explain was snow on your sidewalk. Is it your fault that there's a foot of snow and ice on the walkways in front of your house? No -- you had no control over that. Is it your responsibility to shovel it / put out salt to prevent people from falling and hurting themselves? Yes. Similarly, if you're white and/or well-off, is it your fault that things are tilted your way? No. Is it your responsibility to try to do something to make the field more level? Yes.
  • finnthehuman 6y ago
    >If you are a white man born in America, feeling guilt is what you’re supposed to feel I've never been a fan of the accusation that social justice uses "original sin" as an argumentative tactic, but here you are unambiguously using inherited sin. Obviously people have a duty to live their lives honorably, but saddling someone with that kind of free floating guilt and anxiety seems like an attempt at setting them up for manipulation. There's a theme in social justice where everything is systematic until it's people they don't like, then those people are personally morally culpable. It's like soc ail justice read a description of what it means for a social issue to be "systematic", without learning systems thinking. This lens on the issue is a way to gain insight for new systematic approaches to remedies, but instead it's been reduced to new "I'm right because I have bigger words than you" tech for pushing tired old tactics.
    • taurath 6y ago
      The point I was trying to make was not to feel guilt for yourself, but you SHOULD be aware of the advantages the sins of your ancestors have given you. And I would argue you have a responsibility to make up for them, in terms of righting the systemic wrongs. It was not my intent to place moral culpability here, though I understand how its easy to read that. None of that means you need to have free floating guilt and anxiety. But an awareness should naturally lend itself to wanting to help. The truth is most people aren't aware of history at all. So many believe, internally, that there is a natural order or a superiority based on the economic and social outcomes they see. The more one knows about the true level of violence even in the recent history of the US, the more outraged one should become.
  • jrochkind1 6y ago
    I disagree, and others would call me a "SJW", not coming at it from an anti-left point of view. You might feel guilt, but will ultimately have to work through it to be a productive person fighting for a just society. If you are motivated mainly by guilt, you can easily end up prioritizing whatever makes you "feel better", instead of trying to figure out what is actually most effective to change society for justice. Plus the things in the OP article, and others; guilt is simply not an effective motivation, and a movement of guilty people can't build the liberatory society we need. You should be OPPOSED to all that, you should realize your comfort is not because you "deserve" it but just the luck of the draw, but guilt isn't actually helpful. > What we as individuals, groups, and societies need is active opposition to racialized discrepancies, not idle, unproductive self-reproach. From awareness grows motivation to make a difference. White guilt tends to warp or subvert the very sympathies that spurred a yearning for change to begin with. -- https://thehumanist.com/commentary/want-to-help-end-systemic-racism-first-step-drop-the-white-guilt https://thehumanist.com/commentary/want-to-help-end-systemic... > For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think. From Ursula K LeGuin's _The Disposessed_
• loopz 6y ago
  People must be acknowledged as people. This requires deliberate practice to be able to embrace all people as people.