Alyssa Rosenberg writes about going to see David Mamet's play, Race:
Mamet's argument seems to be that white people bend over backwards for black people, both out of guilt and fear of being called racist, but that they expect those black people to betray them, and still intend to be wounded when they and their generosity is betrayed. And that all black people hate all white people. And that all white people perpetually want to confess and be shriven of their sins towards black people. It's an ugly and astonishingly unsubtle framework for a racial conversation, especially one where white ethnicity is dancing around the edges, but is never really addressed. The play's ideas just felt enormously stale to me, and yet the predominantly white audience ate it up, just as the Times review said they would, as if they felt like they'd been confronted with hard truths. As if attending the play was an act of contrition.
There's been a great deal of ink spilled on "white guilt" as the chief motivating factor of white American liberals -- namely, in a wrongheaded attempt to rectify the racial injustices of an earlier age, white liberals engage in reckless attempts to re-engineer society to be more "just." Less attention is paid to how white guilt manifests itself among white conservatives. And recent ideological convert Mamet, based on my reading of Rosenberg's summary, appears to offer a pretty good example in his latest play.
Among conservatives, white guilt manifests itself as a persistent fear that blacks are, just below the surface, filled with a simmering wrath they intend to inflict upon white people at any given moment. That's why they imagine blacks and whites to be trapped in an eternal zero-sum struggle for social resources, whether it's a seat on the Supreme Court or a spot at Harvard. The irony of this emotional position is that it implicitly acknowledges the validity of past racial grievances with its implicit fear of retribution.
This is also why the writings of Shelby Steele are so popular among conservatives. Steele's consistent narrative is that whites have fulfilled their ethical obligations toward black people, racism no longer exists in forms that affect black advancement, and blacks are the "real" racists. The difficulties blacks have advancing in society are the result of "cultural" problems that look very familiar to the "intrinsic" racial characteristics once used to justify anti-black oppression. Steele then gift-wraps his argument with the notion that he is telling white people a hard truth they absolutely need to hear, so that shirking that nagging obligation toward social justice becomes an act of moral integrity.
Just as with liberal white guilt, black people aren't so much people as they are the vehicles of white redemption. In either case, black people are fundamentally the sum of their grievances toward white people -- it is impossible for the guilty white liberal, or the guilty white conservative, to imagine that we have lives of our own. It is equally impossible for these people to imagine that racism does damage society as a whole, rather than just to black people or other minorities.
It's really not hard to imagine why such a narrative would appeal to a certain kind of audience -- American culture is veined with guilt of all sorts, from missing Church on Sunday to breaking your diet by noshing on a doughnut, so products that alleviate guilt are in high demand.
-- A. Serwer
