On his terrific blog, Legal Insurrection, Cornell law professor William Jacobson has a perceptive and instructive discussion (Saturday Night Card Game [“I didn’t call you racist, I just pointed out you’re white”]) of a revealing blog-based “spitting match” between Aaron Worthing of Pontifications and Matthew Yglesias of Think Progress over whether Yglesias argues, believes, writes, implies (or some combination) that whatever most whites want must be racist.
Read Jacobson’s post and follow his links to fathom this debate, a debate that in my opinion is increasingly reminiscent of the Cold War debate here between liberal anti-communists and progressive anti-anti-communists. Jacobson objects, for example, to Yglesias’s almost phobic fascination with “whites” in the post Worthing criticized, Stuff White People Like: Republicans. And not just there:
Focusing on race as the explanation for politics is something Yglesias does with great frequency, as reflected in these posts:
Jacobson goes on to note that “Yglesias is not alone, nor is he the worst,” citing a number of media obsessions with the white, racist Tea Party, the color of the crowds at Palin events, etc.
For progressives like Yglesias et al., racism was not only America’s original sin; it remains a stain so deep that it can be erased — or perhaps only attenuated — only by generation after generation of national mea culpas in the form of field-leveling racial preferences.
If by now you haven’t thought of Shelby Steele and his soul-searching writing about white guilt, you should have. A good place to start — and if you’re only going to read one of his pieces, finish — is his November 30, 1999, article in Harpers, “The Age Of White Guilt: And The Disappearance Of The Black Individual.” Here’s a taste:
What is white guilt? It is not a personal sense of remorse over past wrongs. White guilt is literally a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality, and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America’s historical racism. It is the stigmatization of whites and, more importantly, American institutions with the sin of racism. Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative — that they are not racist — to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity. If they fail to prove the negative, they will be seen as racists. Political correctness, diversity policies, and multiculturalism are forms of deference that give whites and institutions a way to prove the negative and win reprieve from the racist stigma.
Today whiteness is stigmatized by liberals like Yglesias in much the same fashion that blackness has been stigmatized by white racists. It is viewed as a badge of superiority that must be shorn by penance in the form of support for continuing racial preference policies.
