Oppressor Guilt

In My Humble Opinion
1

(This is a repurposed blog post) *

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One of the reasons white suburbanites in the segregated suburbs get a rush of fear when they see a handful of black people in their neighborhood is guilt. “They must hate us, they must be bent on revenge and inclined to do violence, because I sure would be if the things we’ve done to them had been done to me”.

Oppressor guilt of this sort is of very dubious benefit to the oppressed. Yes, it’s possible that such guilt motivates people to try to be more fair, to set aside their prejudices, some of the time, but what I’ve observed is that the fear of retaliation gets expressed as a doubling down of oppressive reactionary tactics. The white suburbanites vote for “law and order” politicians and ask for police protection, and the police doing the protecting then do the things that gave rise to Black Lives Matter, stopping people for the infraction of Driving While Black and interacting with them as active threats to the community.

It should not come as a major surprise that right-wing conservative politicians ride the wave of these kinds of fears, identifying an out-group as the Culprits who are to blame for things not being the way they should be. Jews, the natives, Catholics, immigrants, the insane, gay people, atheists, someone who is already a marginalized people who can be pointed to as the epitome of what’s wrong with today’s society, some group that we can blame. This kind of appeal resonates with fearful oppressors whose oppressor guilt makes them fantasize a horrible day of vengeance that they need to be protected from. If those scary people can be branded a menace, we can hate them with justification and feel less guilty as we trod them down.

But it’s not just the conservatives, surprisingly enough. The left is also really really fond of the idea of having a culprit to blame. They use a different model, of course: rather than identifying a powerless outgroup, they target the most privileged and powerful. Rich white heterosexual able-bodied men. Now, faced with the choice of designating already-marginalized members of an out-group as the perpetrators or instead designating the rich straight white guys, it seems compellingly clear that the conservative folks are doing a much more horrible moral wrong in their choice of a social scapegoat.

But that’s almost so obvious that it’s not interesting. What’s more interesting, I think, is a closer exam of the left’s designation of Culprits. Let’s go there. Instead of preaching to the proverbial choir about the evil wrongness of the conservative right in blaming powerless out-groups for the ills of society, I’ll perhaps be able to challenge you a bit, are you game?

You know the drill: those privileged straight cis white guys are the culprits because they are the oppressors; oppression benefits them, right? They have power, so if they wanted things to be any different, things would be different, and they aren’t, so it’s totally their fault that things are unfair and unequal, yes? And since they won’t change things without pressure, we just have to light the fires and then hold their damn feet to the fire, ain’t that so? They bloody well are the culprits, then, aren’t they?

Join me in this thought experiment. Pretend I have magical wish-granting powers and I offer you this choice: you can either be the alpha oppressor yourself and have hegemony and power over all the other peoples, with all the benefits and luxuries that that entails, or you can live in a world that is totally without oppression, a world of equality and voluntary cooperation. (And no oppressor guilt anywhere to be found).

I could point out that if you choose to be the oppressor, you lose the moral high ground, even if you’re only making that choice in a hypothetical scenario. Because then you’re essentially saying that your real objection to oppression is that someone who isn’t you gets to be the oppressor, and you want to hold that position. But for the second time, that’s almost so obvious that it’s not interesting. You didn’t choose that anyway, did you?

Let’s look at your choice. You’re saying you see more benefit to living as equals, that it would be more to your personal advantage to live in a world that didn’t have oppression in it. I am in complete and utter agreement with you.

Well, unless you think rich white cis able-bodied guys are biologically different in their brains or something, you just realized that they don’t benefit from oppression. Let me say that again for emphasis: rich white privileged cisgender English-speaking able-bodied male folks, the folks with the greatest possible number of privileges imaginable in our social system, do not benefit from oppression. Oh, they benefit from being in their social location and not a far more marginalized social location, sure, no doubt about that, but they are not better off than they would be if they lived in a world that didn’t have oppresion. You said the latter was preferable to you. Extend that to them, the awareness that it would be preferable to them, too.

It is important to understand that our social system works a lot like a Parker Brothers© Monopoly™ game: the winner of the game isn’t winning the game because of being a horrible selfish person, but because the rules of the game reward being a selfish person who bankrupts all the other players on the board, and even if everyone tried to play nice and be less competitive while playing Monopoly, the game still rewards the most competitive person who acts in that fashion. It’s the rules of the game. Not the personality characteristics of the players, but the rules of the game.

I will not at this point elaborate on why and how we have ended up playing a social game in which competing to marginalize other people while concentrating advantage into our own hands happens to be the objective, but we have.
This is a blog about being genderqueer. The relevance of all this is that oppressor guilt is not our friend; straight cisgender people are not our enemy, nor should our communication with them be geared towards shaming them and holding them personally responsible for our situation. Most of them don’t understand what we have to go through, except to the extent that we explain it and they choose to listen. Even then they may not get it. And it may threaten them, threaten their existing ways of understanding sexuality and gender and so on. They’re going to ask dense and annoying questions. Often. Their fears will drive them to distort what we’ve said and twist its implications into ridiculous interpretations. It’s going to continue to piss us off.

But honestly, I don’t think they dreamed all this up one day in the primordial paleolithic Boys’ Bathroom and then imposed it on us. They don’t have to put up with what we have to put up with (and I myself don’t have to put up with some of the stuff that many of you do, to be honest), but although the suffering of marginalized people is worse, I think we need to move beyond the simplistic temptation of designating a culprit. Ignorance is enough of an enemy.

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  • AHunter3 blogs weekly on the subject of being genderqueer, gender politics issues in general, and his ongoing attempts to get his book published. These blog posts tend to be anywhere from 500 to 2500 words in length and are written in the style of a regular column in a periodical.
    The reposting of these blog posts has been cleared with the moderators in advance.
2

Yes they do. There is a finite amount of power, money and status in society. Being in a privileged position makes it easier to obtain power, money and status. White men are vastly overrepresnted in most areas involving power, money and status. That doesn’t mean all white men are high socioeconomic status, but something like 31% of Americans are white men but 65% of elected offices. Keep in mind, this is the most diverse we’ve been. In history it was likely closer to 90-99% of powerful positions held by white men.

Not having to compete against women, non-whites, people with different beliefs, etc makes it easier to rise to the top. That is why when you see the proto-fascist alt right movement it is almost all white men. They are trying to defend their position at the top of the socioeconomic totem pole. MAGA is just a dog whistle to return America to an age when white men were the unquestioned rulers of everything and blacks, latinos, immigrants, women, muslims, atheists, gays, etc. all knew their place and didn’t try to obtain power, status or influence.

3

Also, missed the edit window.

Populism exists on both sides and both sides want to blame some out group for injustice. I agree the left likes to take what they feel is the embodiment of the power structure in the west (rich white men with tradcon values) and blame them for what is wrong.

But in states or cities where those people are not in charge, there are still problems. California is a one party state. They still have shitty overpriced healthcare, gun violence, income inequality, poverty, etc. You may be able to look at Mississippi and say ‘white tradcon men are holding back progress’ but in a place like California white tradcon men aren’t very powerful and that state still has a ton of problems. On the city level in places like LA or San Francisco, white tradcon men are almost totally powerless. Those cities still have serious problems. NYC has some of the worst income inequality of anywhere in the US, and white tradcon men are pretty impotent there to set government policy.

Also tribalism is a problem for humanity as a whole. Sexism, racism, religious intolerance and homophobia are worse in the middle east than they are in the US. On the left there is a desire to only care about injustice when injustice can be used as an opportunity to knock against the white power structure. But when muslim women in Iraq are oppressing people, the desire to fight injustice isn’t there on the left because it isn’t rich white men oppressing people, it is poor muslim women. Sometimes the left gets more upset about mild sexism in the west than they do about more severe forms of sexism among ‘oppressed’ people like you’d find in the middle east or asia.

4

You make excellent arguments against the point that I was explicitly not making. Please go back and reread what you were responding to.

5

If everyone you encounter has trouble understanding what you try to write, then maybe–just maybe–you could conciser that you are really, really bad at writing.

6

Well, I am white, I live in the suburbs, and I feel neither guilt or fear when I see black people. Because they have no reason to seek revenge on me - I haven’t done anything to them. So I think your first premise is mistaken.

Here you are correct - I don’t benefit from oppression. I don’t mean in a hypothetical world - I mean right now. I don’t benefit from oppression.

I am not in my social location because of oppression, and people in a more marginalized social location aren’t usually there because of oppression.

No, it isn’t.

I am not in my social location because I bankrupted anyone, or because the rules rewarded me for being selfish. I am in my social location because I spent some time and effort learning to do things that other people are willing to pay me to do, I didn’t have children before I could support them, I managed to obey the laws, and because I show up for work every day on time and ready to put forth an effort to do what I am supposed to do. That’s how you get ahead. Does it work 100% of the time? Of course not, any more than it is 100% guaranteed that if you fuck up you will wind up at the bottom. But you play the odds, and almost by definition, you will win more often than not.

If we completely eliminate oppression, guess what? People who fuck up will still be at the bottom, and those who don’t will not be. Just like now.

Expecting people to act responsibly is not oppression.

You spoke about guilt that leads to fear. I don’t suffer from that. I also don’t suffer from guilt that leads to patronization, the notion that some minorities can’t be expected to live up to the same rules as the rest of us, and therefore are angry and need to be defended against, or wayward children who need special handling.

Regards,
Shodan

7

Practice makes perfect.

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I don’t know that that’s true. I know this isn’t GD, but cite? I think you’ve made up a Just-so story with no actual evidence. A meaningful number of suburbanites are afraid because they feel that they are going to be targeted by black people who want to exact revenge on white people for current and historical wrongs? This is fantasy.

There’s a lot here that doesn’t follow, because you’re assuming that I’m making a choice based solely on my personal advantage. I might make that choice because, while I recognize that I’m giving up an opportunity for power, it just feels more ‘just’ or something like that. The fact that I would prefer a world with no oppression does not mean that therefore I don’t currently benefit from oppression.

I agree with your thesis; we’re only going to work through this all together, not separately, and that “guilty” demographics are not necessarily made up of “guilty” people, but your argument/proof is not particularly compelling.

You will win more often than not? Cite? “My choices lead to a successful life, therefore it stands to reason that if you do what I did, you’ll likely end up where I ended up.” Turns out that that’s not how the world works.

9

I don’t have a cite in the form of a formal study or anything, but anecdotally speaking it’s been the content of a lot of conversations I’ve had with white residents of the suburbs where I live on Long Island. Consider it a hypothesis, if you wish: I’m positing it as an explanation, I think it has merit, and I might study it sociologically.

10

I’m sorry, but you are saying you talked to actual people who are afraid of black people in their neighborhood because the white people think the black people are there to target them for violence because of oppression?

And you believe them?

11

Just to throw this out, but many black people are afraid of other black people, and it has nothing to do with guilt, but because of socialization. Whether that be from what individuals have directly experienced or what they’ve been taught implicitly or explicitly by the world around them.

Also, I love how white suburbanites are always picked on. Like white urbanites are somehow immune to whatever it is we’re talking about. As if urban neighborhoods aren’t hella segregated. As if many white urbanites aren’t just suburban emigres.

White guilt is a real thing. So is liberal guilt. But that first sentence screams “I’m quite unfamiliar with racial discourse, but I’m going to pretend like I’m an expert so I have another subject to lecture about.” I would advise you to either take it out (it doesn’t contribute anything to your thesis anyway) or rework it considerably.

12

Yes. They think black people want revenge. They think slavery and subsequent racism is/was horrible and wrong, and they don’t consider themselves racist, but this is a de facto segregated neighborhood; there is an online neighborhood association and people have reported black people for existing and breathing the air (i.e., being in our neighborhood) and in the resultant online chatting this has often been the theme: “Of course they all hate white people, how could they not? Eek they’re here, I just saw a couple of them walk by, what business could they have here, what can we do, what do you think they will do?”

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I’m not sure what this means. You said oppressors are no better off being oppressors than they are in an equal society. That is false. If a small subset of the population holds the majority of the power, it is easier for people in that subset to rise in socioeconomic status which is finite.

14

I see. So you take racist drivel from a bunch of morons and try to pass it off as some sort of fact?

Strange.

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I think the argument that AHunter is making is that inequality harms everyone because it harms society. I was first introduced to this idea by the work done by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

I think the OP would greatly be improved if it provided examples, whether hypothetical or evidenced-based, that support this thesis. But AHunter seems to think it’s not his job to persuade the reader of anything and actually lay out an argument. This kind of intellectual laziness is unfortunate, since it robs AHunter3 the opportunity to actually teach something new (as opposed to merely lecturing). It also gives him a chance to snap at readers like you for not comprehending his prose.

Yet again, his writing reveals a certain blindness. He constantly implores us to see him as a special somebody who defies all generalization, and yet he has absolutely no qualms about giving a singular mindset to “white suburbanites in the segregated suburbs.” He will no doubt return here and say in his usual good-natured way that I’ve made an apt observation. But will he keep employing this device to suit his rhetorical purposes? My Magic 8-Ball says, “It is certain.”

16

Wait, what? Why are you putting words in your audience’s mouth, figuratively speaking? Not only do you presume to know they’d choose living in a equal society, but you presume they would do so to benefit themselves personally. It is only because of this contrivance that you are then able to argue that white cis males are not better off in a world that favors them. At the same time, you fail to actually show how a more equal society would be more rewarding for them. So we’re supposed to just accept that pampered kings will be happier living as hardscrabble peasants, with no supporting arguments? No nothing? If being pampered keeps you from loosing teeth from pellagra and watching your children become skeletons come famine time, you’ve got some ‘splaining to do if we’re supposed to not see the pampered kings as better off.

Your opening paragraph is another example of this. White surbanities think black people are bent on revenge? Surely that’s open to debate, just a bit. Why should we accept this notion versus the more straightforward idea that insular people often associate black folks with poverty and crime, and fear them because of that?

You have your mind made up about what other people believe. There’s nothing abnormal about this; we all do this to some extent. But if I’m reading an essay and every other paragraph is treating as fact things that are decidedly not fact, my conclusion will be that it is weak.

17

I can understand that argument. People who do not fall into the small elite group have a lot of human capital that cannot be utilized in an oppressive society. According to the UN, letting women enter the workforce is one of the best ways for a nation to escape poverty.

In a more unequal society, someone like Barack Obama would’ve been lucky to end up as a porter or a low wage worker. His human capital never would’ve been utilized by society. Marie Curie never would’ve made her discoveries. The Nazis kicking the Jews out of Germany led to many ending up in the US, where their contributions helped build the nuclear bomb.

On the other hand, Japanese society is very unequal. Very nativist, racist and sexist, yet they are still a developed nation with a working scientific infrastructure. Women only make up 10% of researchers in Japan and due to racial tensions, Japan wouldn’t allow immigration from a wide range of cultures like we do in America. In America, a lot of entrepreneurs, academics and researchers are foreign born. I don’t think that would ever fly in Japan. When I was in college, at least half my professors were foreign born. I don’t know if that kind of system would work in modern Japan.

Despite Japan’s more sexist and nativist attitudes, they still per capita are pretty productive and contribute to science, technology and development.

So I can see the argument you’re making, but modern Japan shows that you can still have a racist, sexist, nativist culture that still is highly productive.

18

I offered a choice in the original post: which would you prefer, to be an apex oppressor or to live in a society that had no oppressors / oppressed relationship at all?

Well, color me purple and call me Barney. Yes, I made those assumptions. Are you saying you would honestly prefer to be the successful oppressor? Or that you think you know of someone who would? Seriously???

And/or are you saying you don’t make choices on the basis of what outcome is to your personal benefit? In the latter case, on what conceivable basis do you ever make any choice whatsoever, do you flip coins or something?? :confused:

19

The racist drivel from the bunch of morons is, in fact, a fact. Empirical data, no less, regardless of the informality of the data-gathering process and the lack of attention to getting a representative sample and so forth. It may or may not accurately reflect their actual thinking, but that’s a potential flaw with any research modality that attempts to assess people’s opinion.

20

Let me try this a different way.

Suppose I say to you, “Wesley, you would benefit from having a syphilitic monkey on your back yanking your hair and flogging you with a dead trout”.

I assume you would reply, “WTF?! Like hell I would!” or something to that effect.

I could then tell you, “That less privileged person over there has nine monkeys on his back, all of them yanking his hair and pounding on him with dead fishies. It’s a zero-sum system, all those monkeys have to go on somebody’s back, and it is your privilege to only have one while that other guy has nine. Hence, lo and behold, you benefit from having a syphilitic monkey on your back”.

The logical error is that the appropriate comparison is not between you and the guy with the nine monkeys, it’s between you with a monkey on your back versus you without a monkey on your back.

And the appropriate comparison when someone says “so-and-so benefits from oppression” is not between them and someone who is far less privileged, but between them as they exist in an oppressive system and them as they would exist in a system without oppression. To “benefit” from “xxx” — from anything — is to be better off with it than without it, and “it”, in this case, is oppression.