white guilt

White guilt is a belief that white people bear a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other racial groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples. In certain regions of the Western world, it can be called white settler guilt, white colonial guilt, and other variations, which refer to the guilt more pointedly in relation to European settlement and colonization. The concept of white guilt has examples both historically and currently in the United States, Australia and to a lesser extent in Canada, South Africa, France and the United Kingdom. The feeling of white guilt has been described by psychologists such as Lisa B. Spanierman and Mary J. Heppner as one of the psychosocial consequences of racism for white individuals along with empathy for victims of racism and fear of non-white people. History Early usage The phrase "white guilt" was first levelled as an accusation, as when James Baldwin wrote that "No curtain under heaven is heavier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide" in his essay "The White Man's Guilt", first published in 1965. Martin Luther King similarly maintained that racism was a collective national shame, rather than a personal one, saying in 1965 that "Racial injustice is still the Negro's burden and America's shame." Or, as he put it in 1968, "Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the guilt."