“Guilty for Being White”
Like everyone, I see images and clips of the nation-wide protests against racial injustice via the news and social media. The scenes and images are sometimes disturbing, sometimes inspiring. The discussions are often heated.
I’ve heard people say things like – “I’m tired of people making me feel guilty for being White!”
I’m a middle-class, middle-aged, White man living in the suburbs of Seattle.
Are people trying to make me feel guilty? Am I being treated as if I were guilty?
What would that really look like?
According to a 2018 DOJ report, police were over twice as likely to use force or threaten to use force when engaging with people of color. This data isn’t about the police pursuing known criminals or even suspects of a crime, this happens when police initiate contact with people for any reason.
African Americans make up only 13.4% of the population, yet, according to FBI data, in 2018 nearly 27.4% of total arrests in the United States were Black Americans (and this number jumps up to 35% for minors). Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be arrested than White Americans.
| Race/Ethnicity | General Population | Arrests |
| White | 64% | 54% |
| Black | 13.4% | 27% |
| Hispanic/Latino | 18.3% | 18.8% |
| Indigenous | 1.5% | 2.3% |
There are over 1 million arrests for drug possession each year. Not drug dealers, not drug manufacturers or kingpins, people carrying drugs for their personal use. In 2018, 40% of drug arrests were for marijuana, an offense so innocuous that it’s no longer a crime in 33 states.
Despite the fact that Whites and Blacks use and sell drugs at approximately the same rate (Whites a little more, actually), Black Americans – still only 13.4% of the population – make up 35% of arrests, 55% of prosecutions, and 74% of imprisonment for drug possession.
Let’s say we’re at a Bruno Mars concert. It’s a small venue so there are only 2,000 people in the place. The crowd is a near-perfect representation of the American population – of the 2,000 attendees, there are 1,280 White folks and 268 Black folks.
An estimated 10% of the US population uses illicit drugs (across race and ethnicity), so 130 of the White people at our concert are smoking pot, as are 27 of the Black people. The show takes place in one of the states where pot isn’t legal so the police come into the venue looking for drugs.
The police do what they do and arrest 20 people for possession – 13 White pot smokers and 7 Black pot smokers.
Of these, the DA chooses to prosecute 4 Whites and 4 Blacks.
In the end, half of them are sent to prison – 1 White man and 3 Black men.
Over six times as many White people were actually smoking pot at the concert, but three times as many Black people ended up in jail for the “crime.” In a justice system with no racial bias, we’d expect 14 of the White pot smokers to meet the same fate as the 3 Blacks. Instead, only 1 White stoner went to prison.
I made up the Bruno Mars concert, but this scenario is a direct representation of the actual arrest, prosecution, and incarceration data for drug possession in the United States. There is no escaping the racial bias revealed by the statistics of American law enforcement.
In 2018 the imprisonment rate for Black men (for all crimes) was 5.8 times that of White men, this after the incarceration of African Americans in the U.S. dropped 28% from 2008 to 2018. Whites make up 64% of the U.S. population, yet they account for only 39% of the incarcerated population, while Blacks Americans make up only 13.4% of the general population and 40% of those incarcerated.
| Race/Ethnicity | General Population | Arrests | Incarceration |
| White | 64% | 54% | 39% |
| Black | 13.4% | 27% | 40% |
| Hispanic/Latino | 18.3% | 18.8% | 19% |
| Indigenous | 1.5% | 2.3% | 1% |
You might think that if someone is in jail, it’s because they’re guilty, but 74% of people held in U.S. jails are not convicted of any crime.
Incarceration means a loss of freedom, of the right to vote, of the presence of family and friends. Even after a sentence is served it can mean a loss of voting rights, job opportunities, freedom of movement, and reputation for the rest of one’s life.
How does this happen? Do we really think Black Americans are guiltier than White Americans?
It turns out that if we’re White, then yes, we probably do.
A 2013 Gallup poll showed that only 25% of White Americans believed that the U.S Justice system was racially biased. Given the gross disparity in arrests, prosecutions, and convictions between Whites and Blacks in America, if we don’t think the Justice System is biased, then we must think Black Americans are guilty.
Why do we think that?
A thorough answer to that question is too complex for me to attempt, but one reason that Americans believe in Black criminality is because we have been told to do so.
Although minority representation in media has improved in recent years, it is no secret that media portrayals of African Americans, and Black men in particular, have created and reinforced negative stereotypes for decades.
One hundred years ago, the film “Birth of a Nation” depicted Black men as crazed, violent rapists ruthlessly pursuing innocent White women and the Ku Klux Klan as saviors and defenders of justice. It was a nation-wide blockbuster. Depending on your age and family history, your great-grandparents, grand-parents, or even parents may have been among the millions that flocked to see this film.
Since then, when present at all, the vast majority of roles in film and television have portrayed African Americans using only a few extreme stereotypes and Black men in particular as violent criminals.
It should be no surprise that news coverage also skews toward these stereotypes. Images of Black Americans as jobless drug abusers flooded the news in the 1980’s and fueled the War On Drugs and the disproportionate prosecution of people of color that continues today.
A number of studies from 1998 through 2002 confirmed the severe racial bias in news reporting. A Los Angeles study found that in television news stories about crime, 37% of suspects were black, even though Blacks made up only 21% of those arrested. Racial disparities in reporting nationwide were greatest when the victim’s race was taken into account. Whites represented only 13% of homicide victims in actual crime reports, but 43% of homicide victims in local news. And perhaps most revealing, although only 10% of victims in crime reports were Whites victimized by Blacks, these crimes made up 42% of televised cases. [The referenced studies are cited on page 23 of this report.]
We already know that Black Americans were being disproportionately targeted, arrested, and prosecuted. On top of that, news reporting inflated those already skewed numbers by 200-400%. This is the news that our police officers watched every day as they grew up. This is the news that we all grew up with. The movies we all watched. The stories we were all told.
This is part of what people mean when they talk about systemic racism. It isn’t about individual people engaging in overt racial discrimination (although that also happens far too often). Systemic racism occurs when everyone has been repeatedly exposed to racially biased mythology, imagery, and information to such a degree that we accept these racially skewed perspectives as reality.
[Some worry that discussing racial discrimination casts Black Americans as “victims” of systemic racism, just another racial stereotype. The impacts of systemic racism are real and deeply damaging, but individuals who suffer under oppression are not helpless victims. We are all human beings who respond to the cultural influences of human society with a vast array of behaviors. Calling out systemic racism and oppression does not characterize Black Americans in any particular way, as a group or individually. It shines a light on the very real racial injustice present in our society.]
Should I feel guilty for being White?
I don’t believe that anyone can “make me feel” any emotion – particularly guilt. Guilt is a natural adaptive response to doing someone harm or doing something we regret. It is not a response to being accused of something we didn’t do. If we feel guilty, it is probably because we believe that we’ve behaved poorly.
If society as a whole continually treated me as if I were guilty of something, if decades worth of images in the movies, TV, and news continually portrayed people that looked like me primarily as criminals, if the police stopped me on the street and frisked me because of what I looked like, if folks from my neighborhood were arrested and thrown in jail six times as often as other people – if that were what my forefathers and I actually experienced, day in and day out, year after year, for centuries – then maybe I would internalize something akin to guilt. I might begin to believe that, simply by being born into my family, by looking the way I looked, I somehow deserved the suspicion, abuse, and punishment that I continually received. But that’s not guilt. That is something much darker and more insidious than guilt. That is something no one should ever feel.
If you, or I, or someone we know, feels guilty when confronted with these difficult facts, we aren’t feeling that way because we are White, but because of our own inaction in the face of blatant injustice.
Let’s turn that feeling into motivation. Let’s do something. Maybe we can start by learning what it means to be anti-racist.
A note on data – I am neither a statistician nor an expert on any of the subjects that I discuss herein. I have provided links to sources (government statistics when I could find them) for the data I cite. I encourage everyone to continue to research these topics.