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Creating A Gentrified Guilt Complex
In 2006 author Shelby Steele published, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Steele described white guilt as the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one’s race is associated with racism.
Therefore, whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, and poverty. The authority whites lose transfers to the “victims” of historical racism and becomes the victim’s source of power in society.
Steele went further: Anger is not inevitable for the oppressed; it is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning some kind of spoils. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice. Injustices create only the potential for anger, but weakness in the oppressor calls out anger, even when there is no injustice. In both the best and the worst sense of the word, black rage is always a kind of opportunism.
Last month, in Kentucky, Black Lives Matter Louisville, created a social justice rating system to grade establishments in the NuLu Business District. Grade A = Ally, meaning the establishment supported black liberation and met the…