Self-loathing on the campaign trail, 2016

My last post dealt with fear. This post, by con­trast, will deal with loath­ing.

Self-loath­ing, to be ex­act.

As soon as it be­came clear Trump was go­ing to win the elec­tion last Tues­day night, a wave of des­pair swept over lib­er­als and pro­gress­ives alike. Even left­ists who’d up to then feigned in­dif­fer­ence to the res­ult now joined in the out­pour­ing of emo­tion that fol­lowed Clin­ton’s de­feat. Gen­er­ally this took the form of an­ger, an­guish, or grief. Usu­ally it was some mix­ture there­of. One re­ac­tion was par­tic­u­larly use­less, however: guilt.

White guilt, to be ex­act.

Nu­mer­ous think­pieces and ed­it­or­i­als ap­peared over the course of the fol­low­ing days. Rep­res­ent­at­ive titles in­clude “Dear White Wo­men: We Fucked Up” in The Huff­ing­ton Post, and “I am Ashamed to be Part of the Demo­graph­ic that Elec­ted Trump” from Af­fin­ity Magazine. Sarah Ruiz-Gross­man wrote in the former: “I am ashamed of my coun­try and ashamed of white people. But more than any­one else, I am ashamed of white wo­men.” Cas­sie Baker soun­ded off in the lat­ter: “I can­not even be­gin to con­vey how em­bar­rassed and ashamed I am that this is what it has come to.” Pub­lic an­nounce­ments of this sort had already be­gun to pour in on so­cial me­dia the night be­fore. Laurie Penny, a fre­quent con­trib­ut­or to The Guard­i­an and New In­quiry, con­fessed on Twit­ter: “I have had white lib­er­al guilt be­fore. Today is the first time I’ve ac­tu­ally been truly hor­ri­fied and ashamed to be white.” An­oth­er au­thor, who has writ­ten for Marx­ist pub­lic­a­tions like Sal­vage and So­cial­ist Work­er in the past, echoed Penny’s sen­ti­ment on Face­book: “Not sure if I’ve ever felt as ashamed to be a white Amer­ic­an man as I do today.”

Hon­estly, though I’ve been known to be a bit cyn­ic­al, I won­der what such state­ments ac­tu­ally aim to ac­com­plish. Of­ten they seem like vir­tue-sig­nal­ing rituals of atone­ment, meant to con­vey to oth­ers what a good ally someone is. Either that or as­suage their guilty con­science. And the same goes with the safety pins act­iv­ists have star­ted to wear, as in the af­ter­math of the Brexit vote this sum­mer. Ruby Ha­mad put it bluntly in an ed­it­or­i­al pub­lished by The Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald: “Safety pins are mean­ing­less acts of solid­ar­ity made to as­suage white guilt.” “Make no mis­take, that’s what the safety pins are for,” Chris­toph­er Keelty wrote with equal blunt­ness in a blog entry for The Huff­ing­ton Post, “help­ing white people feel bet­ter.” Chris­toph­er Lasch dia­gnosed long ago the nar­ciss­ism that mo­tiv­ates many in­di­vidu­als com­mit­ted to act­iv­ist causes: “Polit­ic­al move­ments ex­er­cise a fatal at­trac­tion for those who seek to drown the sense of per­son­al fail­ure in col­lect­ive ac­tion.”

The most egre­gious in­stance I wit­nessed came in a com­ment thread just hours after Hil­lary con­ceded the race. “Keep hav­ing the urge to apo­lo­gize to all the people of col­or and Muslims who I en­counter,” he re­vealed. He then re­solved to him­self (and every­one else who was read­ing): “Go­ing to talk to my Muslim im­mig­rant cowork­er to­mor­row. Just want her to know that we value and re­spect her as part of the com­munity, be­cause I can’t even guess what she’s feel­ing right now.”

Ima­gine be­ing this poor wo­man sit­ting in the break­room, drink­ing a cof­fee, en­joy­ing your Bo­ston creme — a beacon of light in a world gone to shit. Sud­denly, the of­fice soft­boi slides in next to you and clasps your hand.

“Fatima,” he says, “YOU’RE WEL­COME in Amer­ica.”

Grin­ning to him­self, he gets up and re­turns to his desk, to tweet about his not at all ran­dom, en­tirely pre­med­it­ated act of kind­ness.

One could equally ima­gine a scen­ario in which Muslims and un­doc­u­mented im­mig­rants are be­ing her­ded onto trucks by Trump storm­troop­ers. Vali­ant white al­lies run to­ward them, trip­ping over each oth­er to shout “I’m sorry for my priv­ilege!!” louder than the rest, as the doors shut and the con­voy drives away.

Don’t get me wrong. Ac­cus­ing someone of be­ing “a self loath­ing X” is something I find ut­terly ab­hor­rent. Nine times out of ten, such ac­cus­a­tions are made by na­tion­al­ists look­ing to den­ig­rate oth­er mem­bers of their com­munity for not show­ing enough pride in it or loy­alty to it. The ver­sion I’m most fa­mil­i­ar with, of course, is that of “the self-loath­ing Jew” — i.e., any Son of Ab­ra­ham who doesn’t demon­strate suf­fi­cient love for Is­rael. It’s a phrase that ori­gin­ated with Theodor Less­ing’s 1930 book, Der Jüdische Selbsthaß, an ex­ten­ded po­lem­ic against as­sim­il­ated Jews who re­fused to join in the project of build­ing a Zion­ist home­land in Brit­ish Palestine.

Epi­thets have like­wise been dir­ec­ted to­ward Afric­an-Amer­ic­ans un­will­ing to ad­here to black na­tion­al­ism, dubbed “Uncle Toms” or “do­mest­ic Negroes” by their de­tract­ors. This is ba­sic­ally what is meant by alt-right white na­tion­al­ists when they refer to oth­er whites as “cucks” — men who like to see their wo­men get fucked — what used to be des­ig­nated by hate­ful terms like “nig­ger-lov­er” or Juden­fre­und. Hope­fully this ex­plains why I’d be the last per­son to ac­cuse someone of be­ing “a self loath­ing X.” Un­less, of course, that per­son is lit­er­ally say­ing he or she is ashamed to be Jew­ish, or black, or white. Be­sides be­ing self-in­dul­gent and ali­en­at­ing to normies, this only con­firms the worst sus­pi­cions of na­tion­al­ists.

Com­plaints about the un­fair bur­den of “white guilt” are nearly ubi­quit­ous on the European and Amer­ic­an far right, so I won’t both­er re­pris­ing them all here. In­stead, I’ll just provide a gen­er­al sketch. Suf­fice it to say, for the time be­ing, that it’s a re­sponse to sup­posed vili­fic­a­tion of white people in his­tory text­books and pop­u­lar me­dia, which hold them re­spons­ible for all the world’s past wrong­do­ings and present ills. Most of­ten this is seen as a ne­far­i­ous plot per­pet­rated by uni­versity pro­fess­ors and Hol­ly­wood moguls, nearly all of whom turn out to be Jew­ish.

This in­si­di­ous anti-European nar­rat­ive, so the story goes, is then un­wit­tingly im­bibed by un­sus­pect­ing whites, in­tern­al­ized as a kind of “eth­no­mas­ochism.” Guil­laume Faye, a French journ­al­ist as­so­ci­ated with the Nou­velle Droite, de­scribes this as “the mas­ochist­ic tend­ency to blame and de­value one’s eth­ni­city, one’s own people.” Ac­cord­ing to Charles Ly­ons, an­oth­er neor­e­ac­tion­ary writer from France, it’s a col­lect­ive psy­cho­path­o­logy pro­voked by a con­cer­ted pro­pa­ganda cam­paign to make whites feel guilty about how they have treated oth­er peoples. Europeans are in­trins­ic­ally ra­cist, as a kind of ori­gin­al sin for which they must feel guilty.

Para­noia not­with­stand­ing, this is a fairly con­veni­ent catchall ex­plan­a­tion. Fur­ther­more, it at­tains a scin­tilla of plaus­ib­il­ity from the fact that there doubt­less is a tenden­tious habit among aca­dem­ics to present European im­per­i­al­ism as a unique evil per­pet­rated on the world. His­tor­ies and coun­ter­his­tor­ies writ­ten in re­cent dec­ades have sought to un­der­mine the tri­umph­al­ist ac­counts of Whig his­tor­i­ans, who de­pict West­ern de­vel­op­ment since the Renais­sance as fol­low­ing a path of lin­ear pro­gress down to the present. In so do­ing, however, they’ve bent the stick a bit too far back in the oth­er dir­ec­tion, over­com­pens­a­ting. Ja­pan­ese and Ot­to­man im­per­i­al­ism ought to show that bru­tal chau­vin­ism in mod­ern times is not the ex­clus­ive pre­serve of “the West.”

Be­sides, there’s also a more sin­is­ter as­pect to all this. Re­turn­ing to Laurie Penny’s tweet men­tioned above, in which she stated she felt “truly hor­ri­fied and ashamed to be white,” the ex­change that took place af­ter­ward is in­struct­ive. An­oth­er Twit­ter user, “Hopp­ing Bunny,” in­no­cently in­quired: “You wouldn’t hap­pen to be Jew­ish, would you?” This is the back and forth that fol­lowed.

Laurie Penny: Half Jew­ish.
Hop­ping Bunny: Every. Single. Time.
Laurie Penny: Every single time what?
Hop­ping Bunny: Jews are not white. No need to feel guilty then. Please stop pos­ing as white.
Su­per Mo­ni­ac: Ser­i­ously, every time I come across some “white” per­son hat­ing on whites, they’re ac­tu­ally Jew­ish.

I guess that settles it, then.