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White students who admit their complicity in Whiteness are offered no option but to live forever in a state of ongoing abject repentance, with guilt as an ever-present roommate. So, for example, Leny Mendoza Strobel, a professor of multicultural studies, excoriates the naivete of the suburban church she formerly attended:
The people of my church were good-hearted, well-meaning Christians who considered themselves open to encountering other cultures and ethnicities. They taught English classes to Hispanic immigrants, befriended newly arrived immigrants from El Salvador or Guatemala, and went on a mission trip to India to build water wells for a village. But in all of this, it did not occur to them—nor were they willing to consider—that such activities could also be complicit in Ethnic domination, a reinforcement of Whiteness as the standard to which others must adhere.
There's no way out.
White privilege is not a myth. The university where I teach has a strong contingent of talented black teachers and writers, but this high percentage of black faculty doesn't reflect the reality of life in Williamsburg, Virginia. When I walk to my office I see white and black students and teachers, but only black janitors and black groundsmen; when I eat at the Williamsburg Inn, I see white and black guests, but only black housekeepers, black waitstaff, black porters.
How should we understand such persisting inequality? In One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, Scott Malcolmson writes that white European settlers encountering those of different colors were presented with three options. They could deny the difference, identifying themselves not as light or dark-skinned but simply as human; they could accept skin color as interesting but essentially unimportant; or they could grab onto skin color as a way of identifying themselves as more valuable, more powerful, and more human than anyone else. They chose the third option.
This reaction wasn't a "race problem." It was, rather, just one more manifestation of the impulse Thomas Merton describes so eloquently in New Seeds of Contemplation:
People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. ... They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men. ... I have what you have not. I am what you are not. I have taken what you have failed to take and I have seized what you could never get.
Thus Christians in particular have to tread very carefully in rejecting Whiteness studies. We must somehow refuse the false guilt of Whiteness while admitting the real guilt of selfishness—and it is far too easy, as we argue against White guilt, to find ourselves suddenly insisting that the status quo is basically fine, and that all America needs is for God-fearing people to vote right, work hard, make money, and pay less of it out in taxes.
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