It's Our Fault, Too

Are white US citizens guilty for any enduring racism in their institutions? Many would say: no! Especially in the case of those who fought against racial injustice and for civil rights over the years.

Yet many Black activists do tend to attribute guilt indiscriminately to whites as a whole. What happens if we listen to their accusations? In political philosophy and public debate the concept of guilt is unpopular. Nietzsche and the aspiration to the secularization of politics make us suspicious towards this notion. We prefer to talk about responsibility and look at the future rather than the past. However, my research on the claims of African Americans in the US context, and before that on the typology of guilt offered by Karl Jaspers in his attempt to bring his fellow Germans to reflect upon WWII and the Holocaust, have brought me to reassess the political value of guilt, and the value of listening to the claims of those who have been marginalized or victimized. 

What happens if instead of rushing to personally exempt ourselves from guilt, we try to take these claims seriously and look critically at the structures of power that caused them? Perhaps we would notice institutional configurations and practices that systematically favored us, even when we were convinced that our successes were simply the product of our own talent and hard work. Perhaps we would see the place where we were born, our citizenship, the color of our skin, maybe our family background, as something that was quite instrumental in our achievements. Is it our fault? 

Again, instinctively we would think not. Either we really think that we deserve everything we have, or perhaps we admit to ourselves that we are lucky, but not guilty. The fate of others, who do seem to fare worse than us, is a matter of misfortune rather than injustice. But how do those others see their fate compared to ours? Can we blame them if they think they are victims of injustice rather than misfortune? My intuition, in the wake of a political theorist I hold dear, Judith Shklar, is that leaving ground to the thought that something is the product of injustice rather than misfortune opens the space of political action, and of work against injustice. Looking at injustice as also our fault, as something we need to redress, something we have to fight against, is a fundamental instrument for shared social, political, and economic progress. 

This rejection of injustice, and taking seriously the accusations of guilt moved by those who always find themselves on the losing side of the social and political game, has important implications at the political level, domestically, but especially internationally. It is a civic and political responsibility for all of us to understand how the world has come to its current shape: how did the process of decolonization take place? By which criteria the European colonial powers drew the borders of the countries they colonized? Which promises have remained unfulfilled? And we can ascertain some kind of guilt in the decolonization process, what steps should be to redress eventual wrongs? Do specific colonial powers owe reparations to their former colonies? Should there be focused investments in particular areas? Should a favorable immigration scheme be implemented?

Jaspers’s typology of guilt again comes to our rescue. He distinguishes three types of guilt: legal guilt, the kind adjudicated in tribunals, which indeed cannot but be personal and attributed according to the rule of law, political guilt, which falls onto every citizen for the actions of their state, moral guilt, which calls on everyone to actively fight against injustice, and metaphysical guilt, which calls us to do so even at the cost of our own lives. These expanding circles of guilt draw a normative horizon that is impossible to fulfill completely, but also a path towards justice that is worth pursuing.