Systemic White Guilt and Its Groveling, Gutless Conformity

White guilt is an attempt by today’s Progressives to regain the sense of moral authority they once had during the desegregation protests of the 1960s.

This is the gist of Shelby Steele’s psychologically insightful 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.

The guilt, writes Steele, is a secular version of original sin—cloaked variously as structural, systemic, or unconscious racism—that brings out a need for redemption in the eyes of black people.

Such redemption is achieved by apologizing to (including kneeling before) blacks to ask their forgiveness for the racism of white ancestors. More significantly, it has required the implementation of various government programs, such as a “war on poverty,” preferential treatment (affirmative action), diversity, and many other forms of welfare. In return, redemptive actions do not expect or require anything from blacks, particularly hard work and earning one’s own way. That would be racist. Besides, the guilty white gets no moral authority from an accomplished self-made black person.

The formula, says Steele, is simple: “lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism” (p. 62).

A further cause and consequence of the guilt and need for redemption is what Steele calls a “white blindness” to black people that does not see blacks as individual human beings, but as a class or group of victims who de facto are also still inferiors.

The blindness, of course, existed under slavery where owners viewed their slaves as fundamentally inferior, giving them only a subsistence living; no freedom, no responsibility. Under segregation, blacks had control over their lives, responsibility, and in some cases thriving free-market communities, but their freedom was severely restricted outside their segregated areas. And they were still marked as inferior.

Today, since the 1960s, the psychological effect of guilty white Progressives has been to expect no responsibility or competence from black people, only entitlement and grievance—a mutual codependence, it would seem. The result has been the near-total collapse of slum neighborhoods into poverty, illiteracy, drugs, crime and gang warfare, fatherless homes, and unwed mothers. But “good intention” is what gives moral authority to the guilty white. That is all that matters because “they’ve tried hard.” (Implied premise: to help those who allegedly cannot help themselves and who are therefore inferior.)

The invisibility caused by white blindness, continues Steele, is what also causes rage in blacks that has given us the militant black power movements of the Black Panthers in the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter, both of which organizations are Marxist, segregationist, terrorist, anti-semitic and racist against whites. Rage was present under slavery and segregation but it was only acted out in recent times because of a perceived weakness of the oppressors—the moral vacuum felt by the guilty white (and the permission granted by Marxist premises, I might add).

This is what Steele means when he says “blacks and whites together destroyed the promise of the civil rights era.”

Underlying white guilt, as Steele correctly points out, is Marx’s notion of social or economic determinism. We were born with the sin of racism, so the determinist argument goes, and can do nothing about it. This drives the guilty white in their frantic efforts to assuage guilt by adopting additional notions and behaviors of political correctness, virtue signaling, and identity politics.

Identity politics is collectivism. Its psychology, as I have written before, is dependence.

But racism in America, according to Steele, effectively ended by the mid to late 1960s, achieved largely by the moral authority of Martin Luther King’s peaceful protests and emphasis on seeing black people as individuals, not as a class or group.

Not denying that a minority of people or incidents are still racist, Steele means by this that both then and now, as opposed to the 1950s, he can go to any restaurant or stay in any hotel he can afford, and find a bathroom, which he could not easily do in the years of segregation.

King’s assassination in 1968 was a turning point that brought out not just the rage of black power, but also the guilt of white Progressives. Why? The moral authority used and felt in the marches and protests for desegregation disappeared with integration. Rather than rejecting their underlying Marxist premises and taking up King’s individualism, white Progressives saw their new moral compass in the  march for redemption from “systemic racism.”

What seems transparent (or puzzling) to anyone not suffering such a psychology or holding the Marxist premises is that white Progressives suffer a “structural, systemic, or unconscious guilt” that knocks out and defeats any respect they may have ever held for our country’s founding principles of individualism.

Hence, today’s spectacle of groveling cowardice and conformity combined with blatant intimidation, threats, and violence.

Genes vs. Environment: Anyone for Free Will?

Do genes cause behavior? If they do, one would expect to see evidence of criminality, genius, schizophrenia, homosexuality, and evangelical Christianity in infants. All of these behaviors, plus many others, have been said to be inborn.

To expect an infant to exhibit these traits is absurd. To say that an infant has inherited the potential to become a criminal, or evangelical Christian, says nothing. We are all born with that potential, plus countless other potentialities.

Does environment cause behavior? The trouble with this assertion is that there are always exceptions to the good and bad things environment does to children when they are growing up.

Some children reared in crime-ridden, slum neighborhoods become criminals while others do not, even if they are siblings in the same family. The same can be said for children reared in safe, wealthy suburbs. Others raised in religious families follow their parents and become evangelical Christians, while some rebel and become atheists.

The determinism of the genes/environment axis is a self-contradiction—determinists have to acknowledge that they are determined to believe in determinism. Yet they pretend to be making a logical choice to believe in determinism.

Something other than genes or environment must be operating to cause our behavior.

Here’s a novel idea. How about thought, that processor of genetic inheritance and environment that generates our motivation and directs behavior?

Thought, or more broadly, consciousness, makes errors and has to control itself in order not to make mistakes. Free will is cognitive self-regulation, which means we may choose to focus on the facts or evade them, allowing other factors, such as emotions, presuppositions, or political doctrine, to interfere with correct perception.*

Our guide to the correct perception of reality is the 2500-year-old science of thinking called logic. As the discipline and art that regulates internal thought processes, logic is the quintessential introspective science. The genes/environment axis, however, does not want to admit that logic is introspective, because then they would have to admit that consciousness controls behavior and that introspection is a valid method of science.

Psychologically, this means our personalities are self-created. The cause of behavior is the innumerable conclusions we have drawn—the myriad thoughts, logical or not, we have had—about our genetic inheritance and the environment in which we live, from the time we were able to process words right up to the present.

These innumerable conclusions and myriad thoughts accumulate and become the mental habits by which we live. As habits (or psycho-epistemologies), many have become so automated, buried in our subconscious with their origins largely forgotten, that they feel to us as if we were born that way, or that something external is making us act the way we do.

Lack of introspection, or more specifically, introspective skill, to examine our motivating premises—thoughts, evaluations, emotions—makes it hard to appreciate how much control we in fact have over our lives.

Habits can be good or bad, the good ones leading us to live a happy life, the bad ones not so happy. The examined life, to paraphrase Socrates, is worth living; the unexamined one leads to problems in living.

Mental habits are all learned.** We were not born knowing how to drive a car, for example, but in adulthood, adults can safely drive while carrying on a conversation and listening to music on the radio. All of our actions follow this pattern.

Certain habits, generated from core evaluations and other less fundamental but nevertheless significant evaluations, are usually acquired when very young, from toddlerhood on. We retain these early conclusions about ourselves (our sense of personal identity), the world, and other people and hold them as unquestioned absolutes.***

It is in toddlerhood that we begin to speak, which means we are beginning to think in concepts and words.

Young children do not usually form these important conclusions through explicit reasoning, but through a process of emotional generalization. At the risk of oversimplification, an emotion at this stage in life, if it could be put into words, might say something like, “That made me feel good about myself. I’ll do it again.” Or, “I didn’t like that and I’m not going to feel it again.”

Repeated many times over, the former, if based on a correct perception of reality, can lead to the development of self-esteem, the latter, which most likely includes errors, to repression and subsequent psychological problems.

If taught from an early age to look inward to identify our thoughts, evaluations, and emotions, and to correct errors we have made, we would grow up with healthy psychologies. Most of us, however, have not been taught much of anything about psychology, in childhood or adulthood.

Thus, when the genes/environment axis comes along, it makes perfect sense that our behavior is caused by something we have no control over.

The irony is that genes and environment do have an influence on us, in the sense that genes give us gender and skin color and environment can make life easy or difficult, but we are the ones who develop attitudes—conclusions, evaluations—about gender, skin color, and environment.

To help us correctly perceive and evaluate what genetics has given us and what goes on in our environment, teaching is crucial. Parents and the schools need to instruct children in the skill of applying logic to their own psychologies.

The unfortunate consequence of the genes/environment debate is that the axis devalues the environmental influence of an education in sound psychology. For that is what is required to help us use our free will to assess genetic inheritance and environment and thereby make better choices to live a happier life.


* This is Ayn Rand’s theory of free will as volitional consciousness.
** All habits, at root, are mental. I use “mental” here to emphasize their psychological origin.
*** The concept of core evaluations was identified by psychologist Edith Packer and presented in her lecture “Understanding the Subconscious” in 1984. Lectures on Psychology, chapter 1.

“Children Don’t Have Disorders; They Live in a Disordered World”

The title of this post comes from psychiatrist and attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD) critic Peter Breggin. It’s a variation of Maria Montessori’s line to “control the environment, not the child.” For Montessori, children develop healthy psychologies—become “normalized,” to use her term—by being left free to pursue their own interests and choose their own educational work, provided the surroundings of the classroom are made safe and stimulating. Drugs are a cruel and totally unwarranted control of the child.

Most children who exhibit the well-known ADHD symptoms are simply failing to handle the boredom, confusion*, or authoritarianism, or all three, of school, home, and other environments in which they live and play. They are not diseased kids, possessing neurological or biochemical imbalances, who require addicting, cocaine-like stimulants to cow them into submission. They are youngsters trying to learn, and have fun in the process, but their world is complex and often the opposite of fun, especially school. What they desperately need is to be left free as much as possible to pursue their own interests and, when they request it, one or several adults to be their friends, to pay attention to them, to listen to their pleasures and worries, and to be their coach and confidant. What they most decidedly do not need are William Glasser’s seven deadly habits (p. 13): criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and bribing. All of these habits, of course, are staples of their world—and ours, but many children do not know how to cope with them. What they also most definitely do not need is to be made to feel stoned or spaced out.

Labeling children with ADHD stigmatizes them as inadequate and, as a result, induces unearned guilt, because the adults who recommend the drugs are actually blaming them for their behavior even though the theory behind the whole psychotropic drug mantra is materialism and determinism. A child who acts up in class, or who does not pay attention, according to the adults, must be controlled. Something, so the adults say, is wrong with the child, not with the adults’ methods of relating to the child. The message is clear. Donna Bryant Goertz says that medication today is the new spanking.

The evidence for a physiological basis of ADHD behavior does not exist. The experimental studies do not uphold the belief. This is especially confirmed when the ADHD researchers themselves admit that the children improve during summer vacation and when taught in smaller, more attention-focused classes. Indeed, when looking at the psychiatric professions’ nine symptoms of inattention and the nine symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity, I can say that I have often exhibited everyone of them—today, when I was a child, and in all the years in between. I also know too many highly successful people, and have heard of many others, who, if the medicines had been available when they were children, would have been drugged to the hilt and probably had their futures destroyed.

The criteria to look at concerning ADHD are Glasser’s (p. 256)**: if your child can watch and understand television, play video games, and use a computer, do better for some teachers than for others, do better in one subject than another that requires the same level of reading and understanding, and has good friends he or she enjoys being with, then it is highly unlikely that there is anything wrong with your child. Glasser (click educational, last clip on the page) piercingly and humorously puts the issue in perspective when he says that the worst attention deficit disorders in the world are husbands and wives, because many of them so often do not listen to each other!

As I have said in these pages before, the solution to helping so-called problem children is to let them go fish. “Many are just plain bored of sitting at a desk in a classroom and are sick of having adults lord their size and power over them.” Going fishing, though literally possible at the Sudbury Valley School, is metaphor for getting adults off their backs and more generally for removing confusion and authoritarianism from their lives.



*I say “confusion” because some parents today who have rejected the authoritarianism of their parents and grandparents have nevertheless failed to provide structure and consistency for their children. Similar behavior can result. Some schools can also provide this confusion.

**I’ve simplified these criteria. See pp. 255-59 in Choice Theory for a fuller understanding of Glasser’s analysis of the so-called learning disabilities. Glasser calls psychotropic medicines “brain drugs,” refusing to grant them the honorific “medicines,” and refers to their side effects as effects. There’s nothing secondary or “side,” he says, about the effects of brain drugs.