{"id":2869,"date":"2014-05-30T08:07:54","date_gmt":"2014-05-30T13:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=2869"},"modified":"2014-06-03T11:27:14","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T16:27:14","slug":"beyond-white-male-guilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2014\/05\/30\/beyond-white-male-guilt\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond White Male Guilt"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Elliot Rodger in the news and the discussions around violence and misogyny, we’ve been getting questions–especially from genuinely concerted and disconcerted white men–about how to acknowledge gender inequality and violence without feeling terrible for being men. These are\u00a0a variation on the questions about white guilt that I often field in the context of teaching about white privilege. \u00a0Fortunately, there’s a great clip from a response to a question by Tim Wise posted a while back on Soc Images <\/a>that links the two (racism and sexism) directly for white men.<\/p>\n

According to Wise, problems of racism, sexism, and violence aren’t best addressed just by feeling guilty. Far better is to\u00a0take responsibility in the search for collective solutions. In the clip, Wise uses the problem of pollution to make the point and, more to the point, suggests that anger rather than guilt is the appropriate emotional anchor. Here’s a portion of the transcript:<\/p>\n

“No. You should feel angry. And you should feel committed to doing something to address that legacy. It\u2019s like, for instance, with pollution, right? We think about the issue of pollution. Now none of us in this room, to my knowledge, are individually responsible for having belched any toxic waste into the air, or injecting toxic waste into the soil, or done any of the things\u2026 we didn\u2019t put lead paint into the housing, you know?<\/em><\/p>\n

Individually we\u2019re innocent of that. But someone did that stuff, and we\u2019re living with the legacy of it right now, or in this case might be dying with the legacy of it, getting ill, right?.<\/em><\/p>\n

So it isn\u2019t about feeling guilty about what someone did, even if you were the direct heir of the chemical company that did the pollution, but it is about saying, all of us in the society have to take responsibility for what we find in front of us. There\u2019s a big difference between guilt and responsibility.”<\/em><\/p>\n

What is great about these “Wise words” is\u00a0how they help us\u00a0realized\u00a0that we don’t need to\u00a0feel shamed by our privilege or hopeless about the immensity of trying to address or even overcome it. They help us figure out how and where to engage. Sociology proper isn’t always the best on this action side. But I’d also add–and would guess that Wise would be among the first to acknowledge–that this action and engagement necessarily starts from a clear understanding of historical roots and social complexities of privilege, and this is where sociological research and analysis has a real role to play.<\/p>\n