Ross has an interesting rejoinder to Ron Rosenbaum's defense of liberal guilt, and he asks, "Its political consequences aside, is guilt an appropriate response to the sins of your ancestors (whether biological or ideological)? Or is it a character flaw - a form of self-congratulatory scrupulosity...what's at issue in the debate over 'liberal guilt' isn't whether Buckley should feel guilty about what Buckley did; it's whether I, as a twentysomething conservative, should feel guilty about what he did - and, more broadly, whether I, as a twentysomething white American, should feel guilty about what white Americans used to do to black Americans." This merits two replies. The first is whether "guilt" is quite the correct term here. I don't actually know many liberals who wake up feeling personally bad about themselves because their great-grandfathers were complicit in Jim Crow. Rather, I know a lot of liberals who believe we, as a society, bear a debt to African-Americans which is nowhere near repaid. It's easy to get hung up on the word "guilt," but "responsibility" may be a better term.
