Larry O’Connar references two excellent articles as he comments on “our” collective guilt:
SPIKED-ONLINE was mentioned and here is an excerpt… great article:
…There’s a new sin. Forget gluttony. Forget sloth. The great moral error today is whiteness. To be white is to be fallen. Whiteness has become a kind of original sin, an inherited moral defect one must atone for throughout one’s life. In the wake of the brutal execution of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, this almost religious treatment of whiteness as an existential flaw has gone uber-mainstream.
Listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yesterday he called on ‘white Christians’ to ‘repent of our own prejudices’. Repent, ye sinners! Or if you prefer your leaders to be secular, how about the high priestess of middle-class decency, Nigella Lawson, who instructs her fellow white people to ‘acknowledge [that] systematic racism exists’ and that we are ‘complicit in it’. That brutal killing in Minneapolis – it’s your doing, white people.
Or read Time, the most mainstream magazine in existence. ‘White people’, says one of its contributors, ‘have inherited this house of white supremacy, built by their forebears and willed to them’. Inherited. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. The Time writer says white racism is a spectrum, stretching from those white people who tell a black woman ‘how pretty our hair looks when we wear it straight’ to ‘the more extreme end of the spectrum… cops literally suffocating black people like George Floyd as they beg for their lives’.
Whiteness-as-sin is everywhere. ‘White America, if you want to know who’s responsible for racism, look in the mirror’, cries the Chicago Tribune. ‘White people, you are the problem’, it continues, in case you didn’t get its message that this sinful race, these fallen people, are the scourge of our time.
‘I’m talking about white people’, said James Corden in his monologue on The Late Late Show on Monday. ‘This is our problem to solve’, he said of the murder of Floyd and the problem of racism. White people, all of you, you did this. This is how mainstream the pathologisation of whiteness has become: it is now beamed into suburban living rooms across the US by famously inoffensive TV hosts. A white man telling white people about the sins of white complicity – this is, at the very least, an extremely odd state of affairs.
Let’s be clear about what is happening here: this is an effort to establish racial collective guilt for the murderous suffocation of George Floyd. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that collective guilt on the basis of racial origin is always a wicked ideology to pursue. Whether it’s Jews being held collectively guilty of the alleged excesses of ‘rich Jews’ or blacks being collectively punished for the offences of individual black people, such racial extrapolation always leads to prejudice and suffering. There is a twisted irony in the fact that so many commentators and activists who pose as anti-racist are promoting the ideology of collective racial guilt in response to the killing of George Floyd….
And THE FEDERALIST makes note of the disconnect as well as a natural extension of the MSM thinking:
…It is always good to remind people not to be racist—though it is doubtful just how much reminding is needed between the legacy media, television, and movies all constantly promoting that message.
What’s sad is that so many good, utterly non-racist Americans feel if they don’t go through the “approved” steps they’ll be roped together with actual white supremacists.
Not to be left out, businesses from coffee chains to game developers also feel they must denounce what we have always known to be evil, namely, the unwarranted taking of another human life.
It would be ridiculous and unjust to blame a 20-year-old Russian for the heinous atrocities committed by Joseph Stalin more than 70 years ago. It would still be unjust to blame a 90-year-old woman who lived in the Soviet Union while Stalin was alive for the millions who died under his tyrannical rule.
[….]
A Natural Extension of the 1619 Project
The 1619 Project isn’t about making you feel contempt and anger for those who brought the first black slaves from Africa to Virginia four centuries ago. It’s about making all Caucasians and all Westerners feel as if they piloted the slave ships themselves. Its main thesis—and heinous lie—is that America is an irredeemably vile nation, conceived in sin.
In a disturbing example of the confluence of the 1619 Project and modern corporate guilt-tripping, Ben & Jerry’s issued a statement that reads like an updated version of the radical Port Huron manifesto—only it’s angrier and more incendiary. What does an ice cream company have to do with any of this? You’re not allowed to ask. Sit down and take your medicine.
Then, to prove their outrage bona fides, they go for the gold and tag 1619 for the finisher: “What happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis is the fruit borne of toxic seeds planted on the shores of our country in Jamestown in 1619, when the first enslaved men and women arrived on this continent.”
The statement closes by calling on “white America” to “collectively acknowledge its privilege” and “take responsibility for its past.”
Of the host of problems with the screed published by Ben & Jerry’s is that even if it were legitimate for Americans to “take responsibility” for all of the nation’s past sins, not only is it functionally impossible to do so, but radical leftists aren’t interested. That’s not the point. The point is to keep the anger machine firing on all cylinders. That’s the only way they get the permanent revolution they’re after.
Unlike the sin that man commits to his fellow man, for the authors of the 1619 Project, there is no hope for forgiveness, no chance for reconciliation, no way to atone.
If, as the 1619 advocates claim, the seeds are toxic and the tree is poisonous, then the only thing left to do is burn it all down. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the lead 1619 essay, recently told CBS News, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” While all Americans are indeed created equal, Pulitzer Prizes are clearly not….