Americans—No Shame in Guilt

a Reason Why Whites Disdain Blacks

hearing their unconfession with  the editors

You don’t have to be a racist to support the racist structures in society (like the police, or banks doing redlining, or government departments supporting de jure fairness but de facto discrimination).   You may just be a social or class bigot.   Generally, white culture—as epitomized by a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) corporate executive or hedge fund manager living in Greenwich, Connecticut—has a very strict set of social norms and unspoken rules.   Anyone who does not indicate through their behavior that they understand and accept these rules is not considered worthy to be in the club (the golf club, the tennis club, the country club, the beach club).   If you are a black person or other person of color and understand and accept the rules, you can be in the club—which will conveniently serve the purpose of proving that the people in the club can’t possibly be racist.

What may be called the country club set or the plantation set looks to the structures of the larger society (good schools, good universities, well-heeled law firms, social connections from the club, a well-functioning judiciary, etc.) to be put to use to further their shared understood goals: success in accumulating power and money, and enhancement of their social standing and respectability at every turn.

There are limited numbers of students accepted to Harvard, Yale, Brown, and other Ivy League colleges every year.   The exclusivity helps reinforce the cachet of the schools as well as ensure the first level of filtering for the people who have the “right stuff” or who are willing to change in order to be blessed with acceptance by the upper-class plantation set.

The entrenched members of a society that has had generations to soften the rough exterior of their brutal past—to develop new more flattering historical perspectives—and who use their influence and power to suggest that some things should just not be discussed are now the rulers of the oligarchy that controls America.   They are not subject to the whims of the street-level cops, as they have money and friends in high places.   (Look at characters like Jeffery Epstein, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn, who’ve recently been in the news.)   The rich and powerful, who may commit crimes but have the connections to keep publicity to a minimum, are the real winners, as you never hear about them.   Examples of the success of this type of reputation management can be seen in many Ivy League colleges and their historical ties to the slave trade.

As pointed out in Shackled Legacy: Universities and the Slave Trade [*]:

Profits from slavery and related industries helped fund some of the most prestigious schools in the Northeast, including Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Yale.

“The story of the American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world,” says Craig Steven Wilder [*], a historian at MIT and the author of Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.

As just one example, “Yale inherited a small slave plantation in Rhode Island that it used to fund its first graduate programs and its first scholarships,” Wilder states.   “It aggressively sought out opportunities to benefit from the slave economies of New England and the broader Atlantic world.”

There is of course no shame in this criminality within the ethics or morals of our American upper-class culture—of our ruling elite.   There is no guilt for which this culture’s morality is capable of feeling shame—absolutely none, with no possible exception at all!   (In terms of guilt then, this class actually is literally shameless.)   There is only one thing that can bring them shame, and that is falling out of the upper class or being seen to fall out of it.

But there is one thing they are capable of feeling about guilt, and that is embarrassment—the diminishment of that precious respectability, of that reputation of theirs.

In the culture of these white Americans (and others too of course), therefore, guilt can bring out a form of what may be called victim-blaming.   When having to think about those whom they have victimized (and when their first resort, which generally will be denial, fails them), it is easy for them to blame, to look down on, to disdain, and to demean the victim.   And when it comes to the American white power-structure’s centuries-long history of horrifying victimization of blacks, this is a typical reaction.

So we have the two primary parties to the mayhem in our streets: the plantation set, or country club set, who are calling the shots, and the police ( The Disappointing Fact that There Aren’t Any Bad Cops to Blame in Any of the Murders by Police ).

The Police are seen as a necessary mechanism to keep order.   You might say they are the street-level enforcers of the “well-functioning judiciary”.   If there are not laws and punishments to be imposed on the lower classes—and that are implicitly used as a threat also for those who might “fall from grace”—it will be that much more difficult to enforce, through gentleman’s agreements, the unspoken rules of the plantation set.   A useful social purpose is served by the police departments across the country: they help to keep order by managing the ruffians (both petty and organized criminals, as well as anyone in a lower class) and keeping them away from the plantation set; that is their role.   ( More to come on this. )

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