White Guilt Quotes

“I do not believe guilt is inherited, but responsibility is, and there is nobody alive today whose existence has not been shaped by colonialist, racist forces. That is a legacy we all live with, and we should all deal with the consequences. If you have benefitted, then soaking yourself in remorse and guilt does not help anyone. What you can do, though, is ask constantly how you have felt those benefits. At whose expense were they gained?”
― Alice Procter, The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums... and Why We Need to Talk About It

“Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Un conto ancora aperto

“History has been stolen from us and replaced with guilt inducing lies.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Un conto ancora aperto

“The idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group — there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“I am not White. I am therefore immune to infection from the White Guilt pandemic that is currently afflicting the North American and West European nations.”
― A.E. Samaan

“I took a job teaching private-school white teenagers how to edit video. They used their newly developed skills to make documentaries about poor brown people in other countries. It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.”
― Sherman Alexie, War Dances

“Tears that are driven by white guilt are self-indulgent. When we are mired in guilt, we are narcissistic and ineffective; guilt functions as an excuse for inaction. Further, because we so seldom have authentic and sustained cross-racial relationships, our tears do not feel like solidarity to people of color we have not previously supported.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“White people usually get really excited when a person of color likes them at all.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Guilt, in principle, is simply not among the things baby humans can inherit. However, white settler colonial guilt is a horse of a different color.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“I call this brand of racial paranoia white settler colonial guilt. Its rise in recent years may superficially resemble karma or poetic justice to those with leftist sensibilities. But anyone concerned with the well-being of society should recognize that it is merely yet another mechanism by which human individuality is suppressed and group preconceptions are reinforced.”
― Timothy H. Ives, Stones of Contention

“Do you as Germans feel any guilt for what the Germans did?’ he will ask them.
They will go off into groups and have heated discussions among themselves, and then come back to him with their thoughts.
‘Yes, we are Germans, and Germans perpetrated this,’ some students once told him, echoing what others have said. ‘And, though it wasn’t just Germans, it is the older Germans who were here who should feel guilt. We were not here. We ourselves did not do this. But we do feel that, as the younger generation, we should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. And for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“What I also realized, somewhere along the way, is that guilt is like fuel. It's useless and dangerous sitting alone by itself. Put into action, and it is power.”
― Diana Helmuth, The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft

“It’s not about feeling guilty, it’s about feeling human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets