So I am just continuing the flamewar. This was addressed in my local(Triangle,NC) arts weekly (The Independent) by essayist Hal Crowther, who was attacking White Denial, but unfortunately began by endorsing a prime example of it:
The late, recently departed George Garrett, a white Southern writer of wide range and liberal sentiment, included this emphatic statement of principle in his memoir Whistling in the Dark: "I, too, must bear my burden of contemporary guilt like a student's obligatory backpack. But I flatly refuse to add to it one ounce, one feather's weight of historical guilt for anything. I am not guilty of or for the actions of anyone but myself."
Amen. Garrett, descendant of Confederate (and Union) veterans and the son of a Klan-busting Florida lawyer, wrote his disclaimer in reference to the Civil War. But in this year of Barack Obama when America's decency and honesty will be sorely tested, Garrett's rejection of historical guilt should be published and posted where every liberal—and especially every conservative—can see it and think about it.
I rebutted in a letter to the editor which won't get printed there because it is longer than 300 words (the fact that what I was rebutting was more like 2000 simply doesn't impress them). But I decided to publish my letter here because I was forced to make similar points in the unfortunate diary earlier today on the same subject.
The opening of Hal Crowther's "White Denial" simply contradicts the title:
claiming that you "owe no debt" because you didn't perpetrate any historical
acts of discrimination IS white denial. You don't NEED to have perpetrated a crime in order to benefit from it, and it is precisely out of that unearned benefit that you DO owe restitution to those suffering equally unearned harm from those past acts, whose consequences continue through today, and will continue to continue, through generations forward, if white people keep agreeing with Hal Crowther that they need only atone for the sins of their own generation. This is not a difficult concept to understand. Suppose, just
hypothetically, that a rich white planter has a white wife and a black concubine, and has a son by each,
and both sons spend their youth working to develop the plantation and make it productive. When he dies, ALL the property goes to the legitimate white son and the black half of the planter's progeny must make do with NO wealth and NO property, simply eking out subsistence as sharecroppers on land owned by OTHER people, DESPITE the fact that THEY ALSO WORKED to develop that land. Once another generation passes, the white grandchildren will say to the black ones, "Well, grandfather may have discriminatorily maldistributed the
wealth to just our side, but WE didn't, so we don't owe you any of it." This is simply ridiculous.
Here in Dixie, the usual white rebuttal to that is that much of the wealth was destroyed by the war and
that many white people never inherited anything from the planter class. Up north, white
ethnics especially will insist that their forebears arrived after the war was over and that they
therefore owe nothing. But the northern ethnic claim reflects ignorance of their own labor history:
white ethnic immigrants were usually able to improve their lot as laborers through unions that
practiced extreme ethnic solidarity. This was eventually outlawed but the children and
granchildren of the workers who perpetrated the discrimination are obviously beneficiaries of it.
Meanwhile, down here, white people may have been poor but at least they could
VOTE. Their public schools were better-funded. Even for the poorest white people, simply
being white was an advantage compared to be being black. These points should not need
belaboring, but by inviting white people to forget the sins of the past, Crowther forces
this. Perhaps the clearest example, however, of a disparity from which this
generation benefits without having perpetrated it, is the disparity in high school graduation
rates:
http://www.blackboysreport.org/...
Obviously, if white boys are graduating at a rate 40% higher than black ones (as they are in Michigan, Illinois, and New York; fortunatlely, here in NC, the disparity is only half that), the mere fact that so many young black men never made it into the pool of possible competitors for your job makes it easier for you to get a job.
You may claim that you worked hard to graduate, but you cannot claim
that the systemic failure of black boys here is due purely to their laziness:
WOULD you, at your level hard work, STILL have graduated if your parents had themselves
been victims of discrimination, had failed to graduate as a result, and had had to raise you in a ghetto?
Even for black boys whose parents did better than this, would the same amount
of hard work have gotten them similar results in the face of an institutional culture that
tolerates these dramatically wide levels of disparity?
Tragically, one side-effect of the upcoming election of Sen.Obama as President
is going to be a chorus of white racists alleging that Obama's success proves
that young black men who are willing to work hard can make it, that there is
nothing left for them to overcome except their own laziness. Now more than
ever, a clear reality-check is called for. Crowther's bios of John Hope
Franklin and Robert Williams did help to provide that, and I am grateful for
them, but opening with George Garrett's white denial was, I repeat,
self-contradictory.