White Guilt is Not Enough to Save the World

Why Racism Still Defines Our Lives and Poisons Our Societies — And Why It’s So Hard to Unravel

I woke up to pictures of Minneapolis burning — after waking up, the day before to footage of a black man being horrifically choked to death, slowly, with a knee to the throat, as stunned onlookers pleaded for his life, and so did he.

Why is America still so racist? There are easy answers — it was a slave state, then a segregated state. Just until a few years before I was born, “interracial marriage” was illegal in the great state of Virginia where I grew up. What would it have made of my marriage to a nice white lady? Would it have put me in prison, or her — or both? The easy answer: America’s still so racist because within the living memory of a middle-aged person it was still the world’s biggest apartheid state and we forget that all too easily.

But there’s a deeper and harder answer. You won’t like it. I wonder to myself — I hesitate to write this essay — whether if it can be held at all.

There’s the obvious, violent, spectacular kind of racism — like in the now infamous picture above — and it’s easy and important to condemn that. People have been condemning it my whole life. And yet the result of all that condemnation seems to amount to nothing. Why is that? Is there another kind of racism, deeper, subtler, harder to spot, but no less damaging to a society in the end? Let me put it as simply as I can.

10% of the world is rich. It’s white. 90% of the world is poor. It’s black, brown, and Asian. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a relationship. We live in a deeply, deeply racist world. One scarred and wounded by the legacy of centuries of brutality. The world is racist.

Now, there are a few exceptions to that rule. Eastern Europe is poor, but white. And South Korea and Japan aren’t white — but they’ve grown rich. But those are exceptions which prove the rule. 10% of the world, which is white, is rich, and 10%, which is black, brown, and everything else, is poor.

America is one part — one extreme part — of that picture. Our entire human civilization is still racist. How are we to change all that? To fix it? Can it even be done? Should we even…