White Guilt is irrational for individuals, but what about nations?

To be clear, guilt itself is often irrational. It serves a useful psychological function – reminding you of your mistakes and urging you to correct them. However, people tend to hold onto guilt for too long, indulging in it masochistically. Therefore, any subset of guilt, including White Guilt, can be irrational. This, however, is a trivial point.

More interesting is the discomfort and sometimes guilt people experience for the relatively easy lives they seem to be leading (relative to the global population). Although guilt itself may be irrational, the discomfort that this situation evokes is good. It correctly points to the lottery of birth, and your stellar winnings at the spin of the wheel. While countless suffer immeasurably, you have to pause and reflect whether you deserve that glass of Rosé; and more importantly, if you can do anything to alleviate their suffering. If this general guilt associated with privilege spurs you into action, I consider that a moral good.

If this guilt in some way extends to specific ways you think you benefited, such as by being white, that seems dumb. The argument goes: one should feel White Guilt because, although not personally responsible for oppressing others, one has benefitted from the actions of their ancestors. But what matters ultimately is the fact that you have a better life than most other people, not the entire causal chain that led to you having a better life. 

I’ll exemplify this with the conversation I had with my girlfriend, who is white. I grew up across a few big cities in India and she grew up in a suburb of Toronto. Despite our different environments, we both come from middle-class backgrounds and if we quantified our winnings in the birth lottery, we would likely both rank in the 95th percentile globally.

Given this, should she feel additional guilt for being white? Being white might have contributed to some of her happy moments. For instance, she’s had fewer negative experiences with immigration and visa processes than I have. Yet, I’ve likely had better luck in other ways, potentially offsetting her gains. Her positive experiences, influenced by race, didn’t necessarily result in an overall better life than mine. 

As a culture, we’re obsessed with sources of luck that are visible and widely shared amongst large groups of people - race, gender, sexual orientation etc. Sometimes, we talk about “pretty privilege”. But the list is a lot longer than that. For example, baseline happiness seems strongly heritable. When you hear heritable, you should hear luck. It’s worse. Luck extends far beyond genes.  Were you a victim of parental neglect? Luck (Ok. Not luck.) How about IQ ? Even if you falsely think IQ has nothing to do with genes, you certainly don't control your environment (during development)  to claim credit or blame for it. Now, before this becomes a diatribe against free will, I’ll stop. The point is: Even if we have free will , a significant portion of our well-being is determined by factors outside our control, and whether these factors happen to be race or something else, is immaterial. 

It’s particularly irrational then to feel White Guilt, in addition to the responsibility one should feel for leading a happy life, even if you descended from people who committed significant atrocities.. Consider an extreme example: In 1919, General Dyer ordered the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, killing 380 unarmed civilians. Suppose his great-granddaughter lives today with a mildly debilitating auto-immune disease. Her life, objectively harder than mine, isn't psychologically continuous with her great-grandfather's actions. It would be absurd to suggest she should feel White Guilt, and I should not feel “I don’t have an auto-immune disease” guilt.

Admittedly, things are more complex at the collective level. Indians argue that Britain has yet to apologize for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. If Britain were just the sum of its individual citizens, then no individual need feel guilt about the past. But this is not how countries view each other. The United States, for example, is not just the collective name for its residents; it’s an identity transcending any single individual’s lifespan. If my grandfather defrauded someone, it’s nonsensical to hold me culpable. But if the United States were to renege on a security pact with another nation, it would and should have implications for decades, even if the people responsible for the infraction were long dead. This is because the infraction tells you something about the norms and institutions of America that allowed it to happen and that are likely to persist. In other words, nation states are continuous over time in a way two individuals across generations are not. 

Having said that, I still think wealthy nation states should use most of their foreign aid to help the countries and people that need it the most, not necessarily the countries that were specifically harmed by their historical nations. More on that another time.