THE FITZGERALD GRIFFIN FOUNDATION E-PACKAGE
December 7, 2007
What Wallowing in White Guilt Is Good for
A classic column by Sam Francis
It must have been a tough decision for the editors
of the WASHINGTON POST last week whether to lead on page
one with the return of baseball to the District of
Columbia or the story about the demonstration in
Annapolis to acknowledge white guilt for slavery. As it
turned out, the editors went with baseball, but the
slavery-guilt wallow was at least the lead of the Metro
section. Nothing quite beats white guilt, I guess, unless
it's baseball.
In fact, the Annapolis guilt wallow beat just about
anything most white people could imagine. Calling itself
"A Slavery Reconciliation Walk of Penitence and
Forgiveness," the event attracted a whopping 24
participants, 11 of them children, according to the
WASHINGTON TIMES account. Actually, all of them were
children, but leave that aside.
The wallowers, the white ones anyway, draped
themselves in chains and placards acknowledging their
guilt for slavery, and wore T-shirts with the words "So
Sorry" and armbands labeled "penitent." Black
participants wore armbands with the word "forgiver." This
tells you what sort of "reconciliation" the wallowers had
in mind.
If it doesn't, white wallower Carol Palmer, a
38-year-old child in tears over her guilt, made it clear.
"I am a descendant of a slave owner," she blubbered, "and
I thought this would be a way of acknowledging the
injustice and for others to see that I am truly sorry for
the actions of my forefathers." Miss Palmer "was confined
in a yoke with three other white persons," the TIMES
reported.
The guiltfest was sponsored by an organization
calling itself the "Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation and
Lifeline Expedition," after the late black writer who
cranked out the book ROOTS back in the 1970s, a work
purporting to explore the author's racial heritage in
Africa and early America but which was later shown to
have been mostly fabrication. The "expedition" that
showed up in Annapolis last week "has held similar events
in several European cities," the TIMES says.
"Today we are here to show that we in Annapolis have
the will to take persistent steps toward applying
chemotherapy to that cancer, racism," proclaimed Leonard
Blackshear, the group's president. Apparently he has
nothing better to do than traipse around the world
flagellating himself and whoever else will submit to it,
and from the sympathy the POST exuded, maybe it's worth
it.
"The march comes during a troubled period for race
relations in Anne Arundel County," the POST fretted. "A
series of racially tinged incidents over the past few
years has raised concerns among government officials and
community leaders." Those "concerns" range from white
opposition to a new black college in the county to the
distribution of alleged "neo-Nazi" flyers at a local high
school. Nobody seems to worry about the possibility of
"racially tinged" incidents involving black "racism"
against whites. That, you see, is not what
"reconciliation" is about.
"Reconciliation" recalls the similar initiative
peddled by President Bill Clinton some years ago, when he
too traipsed around the country (and even to Africa) to
wallow in white guilt. Such wallows have become a regular
institution for whites these days, and they always reveal
the same underlying pattern of assumptions.
Assumption One is that only whites have anything to
feel guilty about. The eagerness of black African chiefs
to sell their own men, women, and children into bondage
to whoever could fork up enough beads and bullets is
never mentioned.
Assumption Two is that only the =evil= that whites
are said to have committed is important. The fact that it
was whites who outlawed and suppressed the slave trade is
also forgotten, as is the fact that slavery endures in
Africa to this day -- on a massive scale.
And Assumption Three is that slavery was and is
totally evil -- despite the fact that almost all
civilizations have practiced it, that major philosophers
and religious figures have defended it, and that, in the
absence of slavery, most Africans (and indeed many Middle
Easterners and Europeans, whose ancestors often
experienced slavery under one empire of the past or
another) would still be living in savagery.
The guilt wallow was right about one thing. Whites
did indeed practice slavery, whether as Greeks, Romans,
Americans, Englishmen, or other Europeans. You don't have
to approve of slavery to see that they did so because
they shared a deep and unshakeable faith in their own
race and civilization, a faith that created and sustained
their will to conquer the world.
The real reason we have to put up with the kind of
guilt wallow that slopped around in Annapolis last week
is that whites today have lost that faith in themselves.
Wallowing in guilt and phony "reconciliation" that barely
masks an anti-white agenda is a good way to make sure
they never recover it again.
[This column was originally published by Creators
Syndicate on October 5, 2004.]
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Copyright (c) 2007 by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation,
P.O. Box 270, Vienna, VA 22183. All rights reserved.
Political pundit Samuel Francis was an author and
syndicated columnist. A former deputy editorial-page
editor for THE WASHINGTON TIMES, he received the
Distinguished Writing Award for Editorial Writing from
the American Society of Newspaper Editors in both 1989
and 1990.
SHOTS FIRED: SAM FRANCIS ON AMERICA'S CULTURE WAR, a
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has been published by FGF Books, the publishing imprint
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http://www.shotsfired.us/index.shtml
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