Not "white guilt" but "white resentment"

Volokh Conspiracy offers this passage about "Little Rock," an event which I only very dimly remember. Little Rock -- Fifty Years Later:

On this 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's troop deployment, the significance of the Little Rock crisis--its place in history--is much clearer. I believe it was the beginning of a profoundly different America. . . . the deeper historical importance of the Little Rock crisis follows from the simple fact that it was televised. It was, in fact, the first time that this still fledgling medium was able to make America into a community by rendering up a riveting real-life drama for the country to watch. Compelling personalities emerged, like the despicable and erratic Gov. Faubus, who kept flaunting federal authority like a little potentate. There was Eisenhower himself, whose grandfatherly patience with Faubus seemed to belie a sympathy with this racist's need to hold on to a fading authority. And there was the daily gauntlet that the black students were made to walk--innocence face to face with evil. And, finally, there was great suspense. How would it all end? Would there by a military clash, another little civil war between North and South?

So Americans watched by the millions and, in this watching, saw something that would change the country fundamentally. Every day for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking. Worse, it was there for the entire world to see, and so it broke through the national denial. The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day. After Little Rock whites stood permanently accused. They would have to prove a negative--that they were not racist--in order to claim decency. And this need to forever beg one's innocence is the very essence of white guilt.

I can't believe that after a stirring account of one of the great moments in American history, when white America finally got off its ass and started to do the right thing, the author (Shelby Steel) focuses on "white guilt." If a bit of "white guilt" -- I hate to even engage with such an odd take -- came out of Little Rock after centuries of slavery I think it's not such a surprising or even bad outcome.

But I don't  think he is even correct on that point. It's not "white guilt" which is most common but "white resentment."

I found this sentence striking shocking, in its combining of two very different outlooks: "The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day." The first clause is correct; the second one is a total exaggeration whose purpose mystifies me. What surrounds us is not so much "white guilt" as "white resentment" for being forced to recognize our stained history.

Comments

[kieth Nissen]

"There was Eisenhower himself, whose grandfatherly patience with Faubus seemed to belie a sympathy with this racist's need to hold on to a fading authority."

I had to go back and read that again. I think I know what he means but the word "belie" makes the sentence a puzzle. It's not clear in the quote whether that's Volokh or someone else who writes in that blog. Whoops, I guess it is clear.

I remember the news coverage of that episode too and my memory of friend's and relative's remarks show a somewhat suspect superiority to the southern whites. There was and is a set of buried racial attitudes that were probably closer to the southern white's than anyone would have admitted, especially to themselves.

We've all got a race and we'd better like the one we are because there's no changing.

[Neil]

dear david et al.:
At home in flyover country, that stigmatization is not operative as far as I can see. When I've been out to the West Coast, I haven't seen it either. But I think that you understand that it is by no means such an inconceivably long step, anywhere that the ethos of the surrounding cultural microclimate is right, from simply "being forced to recognize our stained history" to being shamed if one will not properly demonstrate, any time a tangential subject is raised, that he doesn't *have* to be forced. Here in urban MA, the 20somethings-generation mindset is generally characterized by lowest-common-denominator tolerance, "I'm happy not to bother you, and because of this I expect not to have your moral claims placed on me or my worldview", but there is in the self-consciously ideological Northeast a very present current of what sure would be a total exaggeration when averaged over the whole nation, and the Northeast is the part of the country which most wants the rest of the country to be instructed thus-and-so (the Enlightenment decided to assume, and its assumptions remain in American secular humanism today, that people are basically good and when properly educated and informed will do the right thing and not the ignorant thing, which leads liberal Northeasterners to get continual heartburn from the rest of the country and wish that those others were readily indoctrinated). That comes with a burden of proof, which rears its head from time to time, to prove that one is not one of the perverse ignorant. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that does indicate something, although not what I consider the absolute core characteristics, of the 'x guilt' pattern of phenomena; indicates something other than simply owning the past, discerning where its values were sound and parting ways with its values where they went wrong, which is healthy and present everywhere, even if it's not commonplace with everyone.
At any rate, I am told that "intelligence is the new ethnicity."

[Dan]

Although I think the white guilt concept is overdone -- it is often an excuse used by people to justify their borderline racist attitudes (much like some delight in claiming that they reject "political correctness" to justify boorish behavior).

In any case as a Southerner, I have no doubt that many whites have a lot to feel guilty about, whether they realize it or not. They are still living off the financial and intellectual capital accumulated at the expense of blacks for a century after the 13th Amendment (forget about slavery for the purpose of this).

In my formerly rural hometown, there are many whites who are living in nice houses and have comfortable bank accounts as a result of "daddy's" landholdings that have been sold off to developers.

Meanwhile, across town, many blacks are struggling with the woes that middle class families deal with everyday -- mortgages, heath insurance, childraising expenses. Yet because their parents and grandparents (and beyond) had little opportunity to acquire property and were restricted as to their occupations, they cannot fall back on family money -- sharecroppers had little to show for their labors. Even though their family contributed to the wealth of the white family on the other side of town, there is no way to rebalance the scale.