Joy Degruy Leary

I’m going to follow my usual procedure in being self-referential, which in this case will probably come across as being obnoxiously narcissistic.

So, I’m not Black, I’m white, but I am an American; my people (the Anglo-Irish) have been here for a long time, but the Africans have been here for at least as long, basically, you know, and as they like to say in my birth month, “Black history is American history”…. I say, “my people” to refer in a literal way to the Irish or the Anglo-Irish, (my family was all Catholic but not entirely Celtic, some of the people in the family hadn’t kissed the Blarney Stone before they got married by the little people in the forest glen), but…. I don’t know. I was in the library in Shrewsbury (NJ) the other day and I heard an aging ethnic say, Italy is my favorite country—although I’m not Italian; I’m Irish-French…. And I smiled and thought, A woman really bucking her education and the values of her birth family, to go all the way back to the medieval chapel to say her prayers, and not to think of her own people, the Irish-French Americans…. Lol.

Right?

I don’t know; I don’t want to make it sound like I was so fucking advanced or whatever, but in my life even before I knew what a book written by a Black person looked like, (or what a non-flaming white supremacist movie looked like), I had this uneducated and instinctual feeling of white guilt, at least from the time I stopped believing in King Arthur’s wars on the forest people, and wanting to get married. (I had mixed feelings about Wagner.) Now, a lot of people think that the solution to white guilt is to outlaw it, you know. “You feel white guilt! Fucking worthless gayness going on here—worthlessness! I hope it isn’t contagious!” Now, especially an uninformed, sort of frozen-in-fear guilt that does nothing except make you suffer isn’t good, but the reaction that Herr Redneck has is kinda funny. I mean, people on other planets—races, countries, political opinions, right—they’re just…. Off, you know. Damn Cuban commies, they should feel ASHAMED for shooting JFK and ending my childhood, man! That shit’s not right!

But you should not have feelings that might change my life in some way, you know. So you stay over there, way the hell over there, on your planet, you fucking fag Jew, and just…. Be normal.

Freedom! It means…. Shaddup!

But I had an insight into white guilt, and what it is in a broader sense. It’s a form of survivor guilt. When someone else suffers and you don’t—they die in a plane crash or something, and you walk away fine—sometimes that in itself creates suffering, in the form of guilt. That’s what white guilt is. Why don’t people harass ME the way they harass those people? How come EYE get away with things and get given opportunities and other people get followed with suspicion and resentment? White people even get to complain more, you know. White people complain, in everyday life, they can try to make it funny. Black people do it, the eyes narrow, like, Is that bigger still getting juiced up about Slavery the little, the little—…. And why? You know.

Now, as with a lot of things, so in social psychology and white/survivor guilt; there’s a good and a bad tendency, an angelic and a demonic form. Just hurting yourself solves no one’s problem. Dumping on some white person you already don’t like solves no one’s problem (although it might fulfill a desire you have to be a hypocrite). Imagining that you caused slavery, or can fix racism, all by yourself, like an Uber-mensch or Superman, is delusional and weird. You might not ever fully get over the inherited flawed education you received, even if that education was excellent in certain particular facets. You have to be able to separate out the personal from the collective, and be more healthily humble and less personalizing.

But I mean also, usually we talk about survivor guilt in reference to freak accidents. Plane just happened to crash…. Slave trade just happened to last 426 years. Whoops! Sorry negroes, we may have lost your entire race’s paycheck after giving you grueling overtime and having various little workers’ comp incidents, but, ah…. What the hell you getting angry for, man! What’s wrong with you?

I mean, SHAME, is one thing. Where you’re like, I can’t be good, no matter what. I Must Be Punished!!! That’s demonic. But I mean, if you can be less unjust in a sphere of life, and you don’t even investigate if something’s going on, you know—carve a little time out of sitcoms and sports and (gasp!) overtime, you know…. Or your reaction is, How dare the little unter-mensch have an attitude with me in this book that he writes about the history of his people since 1444, you know…. Yeah, I don’t know.

“I feel like I have done something wrong, and I don’t know why.”

…. Of course, I write all this as an Anglo; if I were Black I would have a different set of experiences and insights, and she does talk about Black social dysfunction, (it is social psychology, basically), and how Black people can support each other instead of standing in each other’s way. But obviously I’ve never experienced those same racially encoded experiences, but I just don’t want to pretend that it’s some causeless thing that the negroes should just handle on their own, while I continue to try to stymie them if I can get away with it, and do it while looking good.

…. N. B. Just one little note: I know how much of this might sound, (I mean, I Cannot fathom the nonsense about Jack Kennedy, you know, you don’t get that from reading about him {although I don’t know how that came up; he’s not in the book}), but I still do not believe in persecuting old men, you know; old men are bad As old men; old women are irrelevant, period. And I know—I know, it doesn’t matter, the zoomers or whoever will still persecute me when I get to be an old man, right. But I say it because it’s also relevant for Black people: Black people need their history, need their elders, need more than just the last ad or whatever to drop, as Joy says. So freedom, real freedom, that’s not an ad, is a lot of things, a lot of good things necessary for a good life, but it’s not “cool”.… (mere)