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The strategies of Whiteness re-education have not, so far, set college campuses on fire with reconciliation. But this should not surprise anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of human psychology—since this re-education binds a bagload of guilt on the backs of White students, without providing any convenient cross for them to drop it at.
The language of Whiteness is, more often than not, explicitly religious. "There is some burden we must bear by being white Americans," Jane Lazarre writes, describing the original sin of Whiteness. "I have been born into color." But beyond this flawed identity, there is hope for Whites who are willing to admit their participation in the original sin. Whiteness is "a burden which can be redemptive, not oppressive"—but only if white Americans are willing to be born again.
This rebirth is "into a consciousness of color. ... Being born means ... the development of knowledge over time." The new birth Lazarre suggests is a birth into a new way of thinking, and it has the power to change her very identity; she is no longer White, but something else. She concludes the story of her rebirth:
In all racialized situations, that is to say all situations in which Black people and white people who are not on close, personal terms find themselves together, I am always comforted by this thought: I am no longer white. However I may appear to others, I am a person of color now. ... Some color with no precise name.
What race scholars offer to well-intentioned whites is the equivalent of a religious conversion: Move from one identity to another. Shuck off the old man, put on the new. Admit that you wronged all non-Whites by your very existence. Society will be changed by White admission of guilt, and by White acceptance of a new central story around which Whites can build new lives.
But practically speaking, this admission of White guilt is made nearly impossible—because no atonement can ever be made for the sin of Whiteness. Unitarian theologian and race scholar Thandeka, psychoanalyzing Bill McCartney (from a distance), explicitly rejects the Christian theology of atonement for guilt by using McCartney as a paradigmatic Christian:
Writes McCartney: "We've stood against a lot of other social evils, but we have not stood against racism and called it what it is: sin! ... We should drop to our knees before Almighty God in repentance." McCartney, by transforming his feelings of shame into a recognition of white guilt for the sin of white racism, has turned both white racism and his own white racial identity into an affair that can be handled only by God and his Son. ... What remains is a man with a white racial self-identity desensitized to his own unresolved feelings from the painful awareness of his complicity in racist acts. Such a man emerges from this process with an arrogant Christian self-assurance.
Nor is there much prospect of forgiveness from those who have been wronged. Unlike the Christian confession, made before God in assurance of forgiveness, the confession of complicity in Whiteness is a horizontal one, made before nonwhites—and if you're White, nonwhites (at least the ones encountered during freshmen orientations) are furious at you. The widely used college orientation film Skin Deep is, in the words of Alan Kors, a
1996 film funded by the Ford Foundation [that] records an encounter at a retreat between college students from around the country. ... We meet white, Hispanic, black, and Asian-American students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of California at Berkeley, and Texas A&M. ... When white students initially suggest that they personally did not do terrible things, the students of color fire back with both barrels. A first reply goes immediately to the heart of the matter: "One thing that you must definitely understand is that we're discussing how this country was founded, and because you are a white male, people are going to hate you." ... The Chicana, Judy, lets them know that "I will not stop being angry, and I will not be less angry or frustrated to accommodate anybody. You whites have to understand because we have been oppressed for 2,000 years. And if you take offense, so?"
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