White guilt: the assurance that your fair skin color pegs you as prejudiced.
Privilege guilt: the conviction that the wealth you were born into makes you a greedy, morally inadequate person.
Male guilt: the belief that you are a misogynist because you are biologically a man.
When we use the word guilt, we are not always referring to one of the guilts listed above. Usually, we are describing conventional, after-the-fact guilt, the kind of feeling you got when you stole candy as a child or the pangs that come after upsetting a friend. According to some evolutionary psychologists, this guilt may even be a result of natural selection, a personal incentive that functions as a source of community cohesion. This guilt is ordinary, temporary and not a concern of this article.
The other kind of guilt, the kind based upon identity, of which white, privilege and male guilt are just a few examples, is a relatively new phenomenon, a result of social evolution. In the last few decades, we've become a nation willing to acknowledge, rather than gloss over, our own historical faults. Today, we as a country are more aware of the damage wrought by whites, the wealthy and males in American history than perhaps ever before. And some of us, particularly those who are the modern-day representatives of those same groups, also feel more guilty about that damage. This guilt of identity, attached to a personhood that you can neither choose nor change, doesn't disappear with simple action like conventional guilt, and it doesn't result in a cohesive community. It stays with you, potentially even guiding your behavior, and therein lies the problem.
Identity-based guilt may serve as a successful incentive, but it is ultimately a selfish one that defeats the goals of social justice.
For example, if you are motivated solely by this sort of guilt toward moral or charitable behavior, the whole enterprise of social justice becomes a source of relief for your guilt. Whether you volunteer for a struggling public high school, work the line at a soup kitchen or take a homeless guy out to lunch, not one portion of your motivation has anything to do with actually improving that high school, feeding those hungry or giving that man the comfort of kindness. It has everything to do with you and your feelings, but virtually nothing to do with them and their welfare. When this is the case, you lose the incentive to actually understand the systems of injustice that make those acts of kindness necessary in the first place and, accordingly, the ability to change those systems for good.
Moreover, guilt-based giving lacks virtue. Through it, we remain in our natural "default setting," in the words of David Foster Wallace - when we go through our days focused on no one but ourselves. A guilt of identity doesn't force us to step off this setting or confront the egocentric habits we grow accustomed to. Rather, it begins in self-conscious shame and ends in self-conscious satisfaction.
In the case of moral behavior driven by compassion, the opposite is true. Social justice of this sort has little to do with you and your feelings and everything to do with the welfare of those you want to aid. And if you begin your action with this genuine empathy for those you hope to help, a concern for the systems that oppress them will come naturally. Only with this concern do we have the hope of permanently transforming those systems.
On top of that - and in contrast to guilt-based giving - charity built upon empathy instills virtue. As we care for others and step off our "default setting," we engage with others and lose our own selfish concerns, for at least a moment. Empathy becomes a defense against self-centeredness, and this is its virtue. Not only does moral behavior bring good to other people, it also brings out the good in each one of us.
Sixty years ago, when Wounded Knee was written off as a battle, not a massacre, and race-based equality was out of sight and out of mind for so many Americans, our country was less than aware of its painful past. Today, things are different. We are more conscious of injustice, and some of us also feel more guilty about it. To a certain extent, that's unavoidable, but it would be a sad state of affairs if this guilt, based upon identity, were to replace compassion and empathy as the feeling that drives us to justice and charity.
Kevin Carty '15 is a political science concentrator from Washington, D.C. He would love to hear any responses and can be reached at kevin_carty@brown.edu.
