The chattering classes are mad at Suella Braverman again. What’s she done this time? Brace yourselves: she said racial collective guilt is a bad idea. She said we should not demonise an entire race just because some members of that race did something bad. She said we should never engage in racial shaming. Is there no end to this woman’s nastiness?
I’m old enough to remember when comments like these would have been utterly uncontroversial. When they would have been treated as decent and progressive, in fact. Right-thinking people once railed against the ideology of collective racial punishment, against the ugly idea that the sins of the individual should be visited upon the ethnic group he or she hailed from.
No longer, it seems, judging from the audible intake of breath that greeted Ms Braverman’s insistence that racial shaming has no place in our society. It was at the National Conservatism conference in London that she uttered the incendiary words. White people, she said, should feel no guilt for the crimes committed by white people in the past.
‘White people do not exist in a special state of sin or collective guilt’, she said. ‘Nobody should be blamed for things that happened before they were born’. To my ears, this is as commonsensical as it gets. The idea that white Brits should feel culpable for a vile, cruel practice like slavery that was abolished more than 200 years ago is crazy. It had nothing to do with them.
Braverman’s words will infuriate the identitarian left, however. Because they do buy into the ideology of collective racial guilt. They do think people in the present should self-flagellate for the horrors of the past.
That’s why writers for the Guardian go on about ‘white debt’ – the need for whites to acknowledge and even apologise for British slavery. Why there is pressure on King Charles to say sorry for slavery, despite the fact that he’s never owned a slave. Why articles are published with headlines like ‘How to apologise for slavery’, advising white nations on the right way to repent for historic wrongs.
Under identity politics, white people are expected to beat themselves up for every bad thing done by white people. They’re told to ‘check their white privilege’, to repent for their original sin of racism.
‘White Christians’ must ‘repent of our own prejudices’, as the Archbishop of Canterbury said in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. As if every white – including the little old lady who worships in a CofE village church – bears some kind of collective responsibility for that terrible American crime.
And yet we’re expected to believe that Braverman, with her critique of collective racial guilt, is the bad person, while the modish left, with their belief that all white people should do penance for the wrongs of others, are the good people.
There’s a delicious irony here: the right-on activists who damn Braverman as a racist pox on British society behave in a far more racist way than she ever has. Braverman’s articulate stand against the fashionable rehabilitation of racial shaming is anti-racist in the real meaning of that phrase.
Here’s the twist in this tale. The reason some will be bristling at Braverman’s takedown of white guilt is because they like feeling guilty. Confessing their white privilege makes them feel good. In fact, racial self-loathing, bizarrely, has become a shortcut to the moral high ground for the well-connected.
This is the most important thing to understand about white guilt: it’s a moral boast disguised as racial remorse. In checking their privilege, in expressing regret for the crimes of their forefathers, in apologetically saying ‘As a white person’ before their every utterance, the white middle classes are really advertising their heightened moral sensibilities. They’re making a big, noisy display of their superior levels of racial and social awareness.
It looks like they’re saying, ‘Oh God, I’m white, how awful’, but really they’re saying: ‘I am a virtuous person. I am a special person. Behold my righteousness.’
In a sense, white shame is the new white pride. It’s the means through which well-educated white people demonstrate their social superiority to others, to the less racially aware, to the gammon and the chavs.
It provides them with the tingle of moral superiority in relation to black people, too. There’s a saviour complex to these nauseating theatrics of white guilt. Guilt-performing liberals fancy themselves as the therapists of the black community, arrogantly believing that their mawkish, self-serving displays of historic regret will help to fix those allegedly wounded people.
This is the dirty secret of white guilt. It recreates the unequal relationship between whites and blacks, only in this instance the whites are not oppressing black people but rather are delivering them from their sad, broken state by telling them how sorry they are for old white crimes. It is breathtakingly paternalistic.
Hence the discomfort with Braverman’s stinging aside against white guilt. White guilt is the soapbox from which the new elite signals its specialness and builds up its cultural power. They cannot believe an uppity woman like Suella might take it away from them.
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