Eric Kaufmann: White guilt, Canadian style
The guilt spiral, imported from the United States, is undermining national cohesion and purpose.
Shelby Steele and his son Eli are releasing a new documentary, White Guilt, that should be compulsory viewing for anyone interested in Canada’s cultural malaise.
Steele’s thesis, which originally grew out of the post-civil rights American context, has become increasingly relevant for understanding how English Canada went off the rails culturally, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating with the Great Awokening after 2015.
Shelby Steele is a black American who grew up in the segregated South and lived through the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. That era upended the American moral order, marking one of the country’s most profound cultural developments since the founding of the United States. Where black people once kowtowed to white people, the situation completely reversed itself after white people admitted that they had oppressed black people in the past.
As Steele observed in 1990:
‘The lines of moral power, like plates in the earth, had shifted. White guilt became so palpable you could see it on people. At the time what it looked like to my eyes was a remarkable loss of authority. And what whites lost in authority, blacks gained. You cannot feel guilty about anyone without giving away power to them.’
For Steele, the desire of white Americans for redemption drove them to adopt policies that signalled virtue, but were highly destructive for black Americans. Rather than treat black people as equals, and hold them to the same standards, guilty whites chose to infantilise them with special treatment. This devalued the real record of black resilience and achievement in favour of focusing on victimhood, which sapped agency.
Steele called this a form of ‘moral colonialism’, creating a dependency culture that trapped black people instead of developing their potential.
Guilt, writes Steele, can produce civilising policy change, but only if it is kept in check and motivated by a desire to help the outgroup rather than by a narcissistic fear for one’s own innocence. Unfortunately, once a guilt mindset has been unleashed, it is very difficult to prevent its exploitation.
The reasonable Civil Rights Act of 1964 was swiftly perverted by the black radicalism and rioting of the late 1960s, turning into a demand for reparations and racial preferences. Many whites acceded to these demands in order to secure the redemption they craved.
Likewise, American institutions sought to burnish their anti-racist credentials and legitimacy by giving in to demands for separate black dormitories and segregated graduation ceremonies. Steele dubbed this process ‘dissociation’. We now call it virtue-signalling.
These upheavals also pushed President Lyndon Johnson to empower a crusading civil rights bureaucracy alongside an activist Supreme Court, which Chris Caldwell argues created a second American Constitution that superseded the original of 1787.
These currents spread to Canada as modernising technology made it easier for ideas to spread across national borders, especially on a fairly culturally integrated continent like North America. Canada also became a haven for tens of thousands of American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War, many of whom spread their leftist ideas here. Canada’s Indigenous ‘Red Power’ movement copied the tactics and rhetoric of its ‘Black Power’ counterparts in the U.S.