The war among college-educated white people is swallowing all of us
On Liam Bright's paper "White Psychodrama"
Why should we analyze the white psychodramatic culture war?
I’ve suspected for some time that I’m watching on the sidelines while white people mostly fight with each other about race and gender while using people of color as props to bolster their arguments.
I’ve let myself be used this way even though I knew what was going on because that was the easiest way to fit in with a bunch of progressive white women. But, this wore on me, and I knew that playing up my victimhood was a tool for social capital accrual in groups of women, as it has come to be in the age of critical social justice obsessed with race and gender-based oppression.
I’m examining this dynamic through an eye-opening argument made by British philosopher Liam Kofi Bright in his paper “White Psychodrama”.
To be sure, I’m not saying that racist policies or people don’t exist, and I’ve always been committed to creating a more just world. The way we’re doing it, however, will not lead to lasting material change or equality and is primarily a result of the self-indulgent ways in which progressive, college-educated white people tend to deal with the guilt of being white. And of course, many people of color have helped push white people in one direction or another by “cashing in”, as Bright states. Sound harsh? Well, neither this nor my writing is meant to coddle the reader.
Bright rightly sees the culture war, fought among white people as the central actors, as a distraction from working toward material change, which is the redistribution of resources such that the white-black wealth gap may narrow, and opportunity is truly equal.1 In this validating argument, the psychodrama is about managing the psychological effects of rank inequality and a person’s inability to affect it rather than a push for working toward meaningful material change, which Bright names as the central cause of this particular war between two groups of white people, both tending to be college-educated.
On guilt, shame, and remorse
Guilt isn’t a useful emotion, but it is closely related to remorse, which is the first step in asking for someone’s forgiveness for wronging them. Guilt, in my extensive experience, involves wallowing in how bad you feel about yourself either driven by others’ cultural impositions (as in the case of Hindu guilt) or driven by your knowledge of having acted improperly. Guilt and remorse are also closely related to shame, which has been cast as a villain in internet therapy culture. Shame, however, is also useful for keeping people’s social behavior from becoming harmful to the collective. Shame can also be taken too far in making a person feel perpetually inferior, but we’ve now gone too far in the other direction by declaring shame to be a negative imposition of others onto oneself (for another post). Guilt, shame, and remorse all color deeply the culture wars over race.
Bright uses the term “white psychodrama” to denote the psychosocial process that results from the political commitments of progressives being clearly at odds with the reality of a deeply unequal society.2 It is clear to Bright that overt racism has receded enough to say that progress is tangible over the last fifty years. But, he is clear that the old de jure racist structures have left a “material pattern of inequality” that has yet to be corrected, which we confront daily. Ironically, the same white people who decry white guilt as self-indulgent are wallowing in it themselves.
It’s clear from the tone and content of the war that leftists don’t think much can be done to alleviate these material inequalities, which makes them pessimistic. I used to be like this, and though I consider myself a social democrat today, I’m no longer pessimistic about the possibility of progress. The inability of white people to change material conditions (and, indeed, their commitments to keeping their place on the socioeconomic ladder) leads to overwhelming guilt and shame about being white. Race, however, despite being a social construct, has been reified and made immutable through modern identity leftism, so they cannot also cast off the burden and guilt of that whiteness. From this guilt and shame, we get white psychodrama that sweeps everyone else up, but its primary actors are all white and drive the plot, with the type of PoC supporting characters that would be considered tokens in any other context. But, this PoC supporting cast is essential for legitimizing the two factions acting in this drama, whom Bright calls, aptly, “repenters” and “repressers”. Notably, both ignore economics in analyses of material inequality.
The cast
Repenters
As one can probably guess, repenters are concerned with the public disavowal of views that have been rightly cast out of polite society, but this is taken several steps further by also wanting to cleanse language and culture of any potentially offensive concepts. (Unironically, this is also how I’ve observed Hindu nationalists behave - it is not uncommon for the local Indian governments to censor media and people who are accused of harmful or offensive speech, however nebulous the standard). Repenters want to alleviate their guilt by signaling a commitment to justice through their tastes and consumption habits. They fight over largely symbolic ground with the repressers, which largely amounts to disagreement over etiquette, right speech, and right thoughts.
Repressers
Repressers are in agreement that we want to build a just but colorblind society with equality of opportunity instead of outcome. Colorblindness, depending on the context, can either be a call to equality regardless of race (as in the Civil Rights movement) or a call to ignore race as a factor entirely in the assessment of material inequalities. Repressers think Repenters overemphasize race as a causal factor in their political commitments and conclusions. They desire, to an extent, to entirely avoid the guilt and shame of being white that they see Repressers as forcing upon them.
The role of the PoC intelligentsia
As a college education is required to enter the professional intelligentsia, both factions look for erudite people of color to bolster their arguments. The PoC intellectual here is making the best of the situation by adapting to the tastes of the upper-middle-class white person. The current tastes of the white intelligentsia tend to reflect those of Repenters, who heavily populate the culture-creating institutions of media, education, and non-profits. This is perhaps because the Repenter narrative allows for at least the public airing of guilt before resolving it with a commitment to policing language and behavior, the largely symbolic terrains on which the culture war is being fought. Symbolic change is their primary commitment because material change is impossible. This is, crucially, a matter of tastes and signaling to one’s group one’s virtue (something women seem to love doing in my experience).
The Repenters’ tastes therefore have given rise to a cottage industry for guilt management (e.g. DiAngelo, Kendi). Much of what I hear among my progressive acquaintances involves casual dismissal of oneself as “just a white woman” before confidently stating an opinion that alleviates their guilt and side steps discussion of their economic roles in perpetuating the systems they decry. This same tendency was behind the insistence in 2016 and 2020 that redistribution of wealth wouldn’t solve racism.
The Repressers likewise have their own PoC to bolster their views. I admit that I also have looked to PoC in these two camps to understand whether I was remotely on the right track, later realizing how silly it was to subsume my logic to that of people who have an economic incentive to reach a certain conclusion to please their audience. To a large degree, people serving the two narratives are doing so because there are so few avenues for PoC to succeed among the professional-managerial class or intelligentsia, and you have to play their game. I did the same thing, which I admitted at the outset. I have no ill will toward the PoC who legitimize the Repenter narrative. As Bright put it, people have to eat.
Where to go from here?
Where does that leave those of us who find both of these narratives lacking? We necessarily must pursue a path of non-alignment, recognizing both groups as presenting a false choice, which ultimately works to bolster the very material conditions that caused the inequality in the first place. For a true material change, affluent white people would have to sacrifice something: zoning laws, economic segregation of schools, low taxes, and subsidization of homeownership. I suspect, for example, that white Repenters support reparations precisely because they intuit the vanishing chances of implementation. Supporting a maximalist position unlikely to materialize is a great strategy for avoiding the sacrifice of one’s comfort.
I have checked out the news and anything on social media, and I’m damn proud of myself for doing so. Some would accuse me of being “uninformed” (just this week) because they think the news is a source of real information instead of an unending stream of mentally harmful content intended to elicit the most negative emotions. However, I don’t accept this critique and must insist that people can be both committed to justice and live mentally healthy lives disconnected from their phones. For example, did previous fighters for justice glue themselves to every single newspaper and happening about town before they went about their purposes? They had better things to do and were forced to because constant news consumption was a twenty-first-century phenomenon. We’re so tied up in how we live today that we forget how recently this way of life came about.
Bright advises people like me to find avenues through which we can positively affect society without getting caught up in the white psychodrama. I’ve done precisely this over the past three years, and I’ve never been more satisfied with my life. You might criticize this by saying I’m just retreating to my privilege. But, people like me who climbed from the working class did so because we wanted to improve our material conditions to improve our psychological conditions, and I will not apologize for living a happy life because it almost killed me to get here.
I have zero obligation to follow these wars, but I am obliged to comment on them because not enough people of color are publicly opting out, and those who are can be dismissed easily as conservative shills. I will not be thus dismissed, because regardless of what friends and acquaintances think about my new worldview, I remain committed to creating a materially equal society. It is the actors in the psychodrama who ignore class-based analysis at the peril of undermining their own goals, and that is precisely the point of the drama - self-exoneration without sacrifice.
It must be noted that a commitment to “equity”, which to me means the erasure of standards to make outcomes equal, is not identical to the result which I interpret Bright as calling for. I do not think he is making a point about the erosion of objective standards in his paper. But I see the push for equality of outcomes as not only a kind of racist paternalism but also an element of the psychodrama.
Economically because that is the one aspect that leads one to measure the racially disparate impact of policies.