On the Grand Crusade to Bury White Guilt

Many Such Cases For Colonialism Part Three

This is the third and final part of a three part critique of The Case For Colonialism

Should African Americans be Thankful for Slavery?

Before addressing the above question, I think it adds important context to summarize the lead up to that discussion. Towards the end of the text, we get to see Gilley truly let loose - wilding out, riffing, and feasting on a smorgasbord of diverse cultural grievances. Claiming that American university campuses have become centres of Maoist thought reform? Check. Dunking on “dime-a-dozen South Asian radicals” who study “postcolonial queer theory” and specialize in “anterior counterpublics”? Check. Indignant pearl-clutching on free speech and admonishments to “please think of the children!”¹? Hard check on that one. Let’s try to unpack all this: one of the central threads of the book is the idea that the accountability mechanisms and capacity for self-correction that are unique endowments of the Western liberal tradition provide a sort of moral absolution for colonialism’s excesses. Sure, bad things occurred under colonialism, Gilley concedes, but the only reason we even recognize them as bad is because of our robust traditions of self-criticism and moral progress. But he fails to grant his intellectual opponents the latitude for self-criticism that he ironically claims is the great virtue of Western civilization. He’s never clear on why the contemporaneous documenting of colonial crimes was a virtue of the Western tradition, but modern citation of this as evidence against colonialism is somehow a betrayal of that tradition.

The decline of the west doomerism in this section is unrelenting, and while he’s tried his damndest to keep it together as Dr. Gilley, man of science, he can’t fully contain the cross-burning id of Mr. Brucey:

[T]he debate on the ethics of European colonialism is nothing less than a debate on the ethics of the West itself. Since colonialism was evil, on this account, the West is evil. The only remaining work to be done is to liquidate Western countries through mass immigration, reparations, and the erasure of white culture. That the resulting polities are unlikely to be liberal, wealthy, or stable is merely comeuppance for colonial crimes. Authentically decolonized societies will replace the unbearable trauma once known as Western civilization. The thought leaders in the academy coming up with these political manifestos need not fear for their own lives, since they will be long gone. And they have stopped breeding (to fight climate change), so they have no concerns about the well-being of their progeny either. (p. 182)

Through this meandering rendition of classic Bircherist standards, we’re led towards a conversation that’s been bubbling beneath the surface throughout the book: how to bury white guilt for slavery once and for all.

Did you know that slaves in the British Empire had it better than freemen in Africa? Or that slaves in the United States were healthier than most people in Europe at the time? When you start to think about it, slavery was actually pretty altruistic!

Within a flourishing capitalist system, the value put on slaves meant that slave owners had every interest in keeping them healthy. That is why black slaves in the United States were healthier than most people in Europe, and indeed healthier than poor whites in the United States itself … It is also why U.S. slave population expanded more rapidly than elsewhere through natural increase … Just as a beneficent act may have evil consequences, an evil act may have beneficial consequences. And when there is no feasible pathway to those beneficial consequences other than through the initial act of evil, we might think again about the nature of the evil itself. Would the alternative act of virtue, consigning the slaves that the Europeans came across in Africa to a short and benighted life in the jungle, have been so virtuous after all? (pp. 267-268)

While this argument had my curiosity; it now has my attention. According to Gilley’s moral compass, then, Free Willy is best understood as a tragedy, with the eponymous whale sadly escaping from comfortable and virtuous captivity to a benighted life in the ocean. This radical transvaluation also reveals industrial livestock to be just about the most humane means of caring for animals, as livestock are better fed and better insulated from the harsh elements of nature than their wild compatriots. A through line that must be examined here is Gilley’s whig view of history - otherwise known as the metanarrative of progress - in which everything that’s ever happened can be considered good, because it’s all contributed in some way to a present that is the best of all possible worlds. The problem with whig history is that it’s not really history at all, but rather an idealized articulation of the present in which history becomes merely a teleological prologue. While Gilley admits that slaves “suffered a great evil in their capture and removal”, he hastens to add that “[a]bsent plantation slavery, there would have been no pathway to the massive human betterment for black Africans that awaited them in America” (pp. 268-269). No contingencies, no alternative courses, and most importantly no regrets. Without slavery we would never have gotten FX’s Atlanta, so in the end wasn’t it all kind of worth it?

Curiously, Gilley makes no mention of the massive human betterment of white Americans that resulted from slavery. While it’s easy to ridicule the pseudohistorical court ideology of the 1619 Project, the early colonial economy wasn’t profitable without slaves, and since southern plantations were the burgeoning economic engine providing the impetus to everything America would later become, it’s amusing to hear slavery characterized as a kind of humanitarian favour lavished by Europeans onto Africans, rather than the other way around. True to Hegelian form, American slaves, via labour and servitude, created the conditions (capital accumulation, rising prosperity and education, cultural refinement, etc.) that made possible not only their own emancipation, but also that of their masters, themselves victims of the innate contradictions and false consciousness™ of the lord-bondsman dialectic. Therefore, the argument that since black Americans are better off today than Africans they ought to be grateful for slavery is not only dubious on moral grounds, but on philosophical grounds as well; non-black Americans ought to be equally if not more grateful to the slaves for their decisive role in the universal self-recognition of American spirit. Put another way, black subjugation - against which all others are measured - uniquely occupies a space in the American consciousness inseparable from the nation's understanding of itself.

Gilley argues that the 'moral awakening against slavery took place in the West, not in Africa and certainly not in the Islamic world’ (p. 270), which is a fair point; we can’t simultaneously criticize the West for both spreading slavery and abolishing it. But his complete ignorance of historical-materialist dynamics leads him to characterize slavery’s abrogation as further evidence of the West’s unique capacity for introspection, when in reality capitalism had simply transcended it as a relation of production; slavery had served its purpose and become a hindrance to further socio-economic development. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain could produce sufficient quantities of cheap cotton in India without the embarrassing hypocrisy of using slave labour, leaving the Southern aristocracy as the only true beneficiaries of the system. “The West” didn’t collectively decide that slavery was morally wrong; rather, it had always been wrong, but its end came when it no longer served any but the most narrow and decadent set of interests. To paraphrase Lenin, the South sold industrialists the cotton to make the ropes from which to hang slavery; they fed the growth of a more dynamic and efficient class that eventually buried them. The idea of crediting abolition to a Western ‘moral awakening’ is the epitome of my idiosyncratic conception of false consciousness™; namely, the idealist articulation of material phenomena.

If you haven’t heard this next one, then you’ve not been listening to enough edgy Gen X comedy podcasts: the West isn’t really to blame for slavery, as “African slaves had already been radically denied their freedom by their African enslavers” (p. 274). To be sure, I think that most people are by now aware that slavery pre-dated the early modern era, and that Europeans purchased already enslaved people. That a tenured academic is hawking this bizarre, sophomoric cope is embarrassing. It’s the equivalent of saying “excuse me sir, but I only watch child pornography. I don’t produce it - that would immoral.” The obvious philosophical contradiction here being that Gilley claims that the West is innately more civilized than Africa, and yet is somehow less morally culpable for slavery because Europe merely participated in rather than invented the practice. A more logical appraisal, however, would point to the exact opposite being true; coercive labour relations at least make sense as a feature of premodern, illiterate societies. Why the supposedly advanced Europeans should get a pass for imitating ancient labour practices isn’t at all clear to me.

Now, you might think that since Africa has been inhabited from the dawn of humanity onwards, natives might have found ways to accomodate themselves to living there, and perhaps even built meaningful lives worth cherishing. Not so, according to Gilley:

The “oppression” they faced on the trans-Atlantic crossing and in the U.S. was less than what they faced in Africa, even as freemen. Imagine if in 1619 the Portuguese had erected a little wooden stand on the beaches of what became Angola with a sign that read: “Seeking volunteers for passage to America. Life as a slave on plantation. Possibility of manumission or emancipation. Inquire within.” Over the next few centuries leading to the ban on slave imports in 1808, the wooden stand remained, later staffed by British and then American slavers. Are we to believe that less than six people per day from all of Africa (roughly 388,000 people up to 1808) would have signed up? (p. 274)

The argument here - as far as I can tell - is that an African’s native culture, religion, and language, not to mention their family, friends, extended kin and everything else they’ve ever known their entire lives would be traded at the drop of a hat for a guaranteed daily meal and a life of hard labour and grinding poverty in a faraway place among total strangers. If Gilley’s thought experiment were valid, then why don’t more Africans travel to the U.S. as tourists and murder someone? Isn’t it better to be a captive in the U.S. with a guaranteed meal than be a free African? Furthermore, if it were even a remote possibility to recruit “volunteer slaves”, it seems fairly likely that contemporary European slave traders would have explored it as a possibility. That’s essentially what indentured servitude was, and even that much more attenuated form of subjugation disappeared after a few generations, in part because even temporary slavery was seen as too exploitative. Gilley defends his proposition by arguing that Africans sold their children into slavery all the time, and even on occasion offered themselves as slaves if they couldn’t pay debts, but here he either confuses or deliberately fails to distinguish between chattel slavery and debt peonage; the former reduces humans to machines, while the latter was far more complex, much less draconian and rarely seen as a life sentence.

Two final points suffice in summarizing the modern quest to bury white American guilt over slavery. The first concedes that slavery was indeed a crime, but reminds us to check the receipts, as white people already squared that account:

 [T]he Union armies had lost 360,000 soldiers to the cause of emancipation, essentially one soldier killed for every one of the 388,000 African slaves brought to the United States. If there was a blood debt to be paid by white America for the importation of African slaves, it was fully discharged by this eye-for-an-eye sacrifice in the Civil War. (p. 270)

While I can’t hide my intrigue at Gilley’s atavistic, Old Testament conception of justice in which the blood of Union soldiers who had nothing to do with slavery is considered fair compensation to black America, I must admit confusion here. He’d previously argued that slavery wasn’t that bad and if anything black Americans should be grateful, now he’s conceding that there was a debt to be paid, but that payment has already been dispensed- isn’t this a flagrant self-contradiction? It would behove his point to stick to a single narrative - either slavery was fine and there’s no legitimate grievance, or slavery was evil but has already been redressed - as this tendency to try and cover all bases smacks of a lack of conviction. He seems certain only that whites shouldn’t feel guilty for slavery, but is evidently undecided as to the rationale. Perhaps this chapter is meant to be a sort of Choose Your Own White Vindication Adventure, providing customized rhetorical firepower for each and every unique brand of slavery apologia.

Finally, he concludes by declaring:

America’s great sin was not slavery. It was to have called slavery its great sin. This characteristically American attempt to arrogate for the “City on a Hill” a holy degree of sinfulness, guilt, and contrition will not stand. Doing so dehistoricizes the historical norm of slavery. It imposes a moral calculus of oppressor/oppressed onto every white/black relationship … It has left the U.S. caught in a Sisyphean struggle against its history, unable to move on even as other former slave nations did so. Slavery was not a great sin, just an ordinary one. It was common enough and was naturally delegitimated as alternatives became available. (pp. 274-275)

I actually kind of agree with him here, to the extent that the exceptionalist impulse of the American psyche tends to speciously elevate its glories while overzealously condeming its crimes. But once more Gilley is caught in the same logical contradiction, as the contemporary critical evaluation of slavery that he despises is a quintessential example of moral progression within the tirelessly exalted tradition of Western self-criticism. The very same accountability mechanisms that Gilley approvingly cites as having ended slavery are also forcing the modern racial reckoning; feeble attempts to wheel out Cultural Marxism-themed explanations for this phenomenon would suggest that he’s probably on some level aware of this contradiction. This isn’t to say that race hustling doesn’t exist; it does, but it’s in no way unique in the canon of American con artistry, and is ironically among the hidden objects of this very book. Because there’s no substantive difference between selling a book that purports to cure readers of racism and selling another that provides the rhetorical firepower to absolve one of racism: both are strategies to assuage white guilt, and neither succeeds at much beyond resuscitating the outmoded taxonomies of race for new misguided generations to reify.

Collective guilt does have a duplicitous function, however, but - contra Gilley - I would argue that it is a feature of, rather than glitch in the liberal ideological hegemony. If something is everyone’s fault, it’s also kind of no one’s fault. Genuine culpability thus becomes obscured by a vague, formless and ultimately unactionable stigma that spares the true guilty parties from any redressment obligations. For example, the discussion around reparations almost always involves a scenario in which the liable party - usually a government that had little or nothing to do with slavery - proposes to compensate certain groups of individuals, some of whom’s claim to such compensation has been rendered tenuous, unprovable, or otherwise attenuated by the vicissitudes of time. The principle of collective white guilt for slavery and the need for collective black restitution thus makes the idea of reparations illogical, unrealistic and unlikely to yield anything resembling proper justice, which is precisely why the principle is so pervasive in liberal discourse. The alternative - going after the financial institutions, real estate firms, and insurance companies responsible for redlining, discriminatory and predatory financial practices within living memory - would be to challenge the logic of the market and the rights of capital, setting a potentially dangerous precedent. The question of reparations is therefore always framed as a collective responsibility, to borne by the public if at all.

There are reasons to be suspicious of white guilt, but they have nothing to do with slavery’s fundamental altruism or unacknowledged restitution. Rather, we should recognize that the emotional blackmail of collective guilt is the ultimate decoy of the elite. Whether we’re talking about race, immigration or the environment, liberal ideology will always articulate responsibility for the consequences of a system that narrowly benefits their interests to be the collective burden of all. The seemingly limitless capacity in liberal societies for further moral progress both correlates to and supplements the inability to realistically fathom a material reckoning that might conflict with the exorbitant prerogatives of capital. It's as though awareness and constant recapitulation of guilt is itself a kind of solution.

So while we should reject the emotional blackmail of collective guilt, this isn't the same as saying that there's no legitimate grievance. Guilt should be rejected on the grounds that it solves nothing, and both its strenuous disavowal and ritual invocation perpetuate the same desiccated illusion of difference.

1. “And what, you might ask, is the next generation of leaders in this country being taught in terms of how to engage with different viewpoints and to steward the institutions of a free society” (p. 146)