Woke culture is an expression of white guilt

The argument

On this view, wokeness is best understood as an awareness of privilege and inequality with a particular emotional source: if it is motivated by anything, proponents argue, it is white guilt. Whatever the intent behind it, the expression of white guilt among the left is held to play a part in forming the progressive coalition, giving people who are not themselves the subjects of a given injustice a reason to treat its correction as their own concern. The mechanism supporters describe runs through acknowledgement. The expression of guilt works as an admission that historical injustices occurred and that white people have benefited from them, a recognition of advantage rather than a claim to have earned it. Proponents accept that this leaves the motivation open to question: the goals of woke white liberals may be pure while the reasons for supporting the culture are less authentic than they appear, driven by discomfort as much as by principle. But on this account impure motives can still do useful work. Guilt functions as a corrective to the years of inherited wealth and privilege whose benefits white people have reaped, because it converts an abstract fact about the past into an obligation felt in the present. That conversion is why supporters treat the guilt as valuable rather than embarrassing. Through this admission of culpability, they argue, the privileged can begin to correct the inequities plaguing society, since remedies require someone willing to accept responsibility for enacting them. Without such a claiming of responsibility, nothing will change: inequality persists by default, and an awareness that stops short of implicating the aware leaves the advantage untouched. Woke culture, on this reading, is an expression of white guilt in precisely the sense that makes it an awareness of privilege and inequality rather than a pose.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There is nothing inherently privileged about being white. White people still suffer from poverty, poor health, and lack of access to opportunity. Most of the perceived racial inequities are more easily explained by wealth and geography, rather than purely racial dimensions. As Toby Young suggests, we have "confused class privilege with racial privilege." Considering that many white people still live in disadvantaged contexts, it is deluded to carry "white guilt." We would be better served to address wealth disparities and health disparities, rather than racial ones. Therefore, we would be providing solutions to every population, rather than just minorities.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Many white people do not inherit wealth or have any significant privilege in society. [Rejecting P2] White people today were not directly responsible for any of the mistakes of the past, so to feel guilt is irrational.