Dear Caitlyn Clark: White Guilt Is Useless and Toxic, Like All Those Stupid Electric Cars

I don’t understand Caitlyn Clark, the super popular WNBA star who just apologized for being super popular while white. I can’t really imagine how the world looks through her eyes — not because she’s a woman, nor because of her politics, insofar as we can discern them. I can’t understand Caitlyn Clark because she’s interested in sports.

My childhood experiences taught me that sports equals despair. First of all, I was a New York Mets fan in the 1970s, when the team went from the World Series to last place, where it languished year after year. I’d eagerly watch the games, collect the players’ cards, even had my room painted in the team colors of blue and orange. A Tom Seaver poster hung over my bed. The team’s annual slog to the basement eventually just depressed me.

But my own sports performance was really what heaped the dirt on the coffin.

My dad forced to play Little League for five years because he was an umpire and wanted me to be “normal.” (My mother used to scream at me for sitting inside reading encyclopedias and watching PBS documentaries on sunny days: “Go play outside like a normal kid!”) I was so talentless and near-sighted that in five years of at-bats I never got a hit. My own frustrated teammates would even heckle me. “Don’t swing!” they’d yell from the dugout, because I was so short that if I just stood there I’d get a walk every time.

But I kept on swinging, and striking out. In my very last game, I did score a run: I got hit by pitch with the bases loaded. But I was hurt so badly that I couldn’t even take a base. So I hobbled off the field and out of the world of sports for life.

Angela’s Ashtray

So I’m about as qualified to write about women’s basketball as Mike Tyson is to opine on the current crisis in Syria. (Though if Joe Rogan brought Tyson on his podcast to talk about that, I would listen with rapt attention.)

I’m probably not really suited to write about White Guilt either, since I’ve never experienced it. Not once, in all my life. Maybe that’s because I grew up hearing from my parents how dirt poor they were during the Depression. My mother was one of 11 children, only five of whom lived past the age of three. Despite having tuberculosis, her alcoholic father drove a taxicab to eke out a living for the survivors. (Sorry, passengers!) Her life story was pretty much Angela’s Ashes, but set in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.

I doubt many Americans of any color today are as deprived as my parents were, so the idea that I’m the heir to some vast raft of “privileges,” and ought to flagellate myself over it, just makes me snicker.

A Head Game for People of Pallor

You know who else laughs at White Guilt? Black people and Latinos. You see, they know on some level that White Guilt isn’t really about the well-being or human dignity of non-white people at all.

I can prove that striking assertion: The George Floyd phenomenon was a year-long Mardi Gras parade of virtue-signaling, performative, and pharisaical White Guilt on a national scale. Huge corporations transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to Marxist grifters like Black Lives Matter, whose leaders promptly spent it on mansions and Cadillacs. (I’m glad they didn’t spend it on actual Marxist politics, come to think of it.)

Politicians in crime-ridden cities — where non-whites are the vast majority of the victims — slashed police budgets, sprang felons from prison, and cheered as pasty-faced Ivy Leaguers from Antifa joined urban hoodlums to loot entire neighborhoods. (Remember Tim Walz’s wife oohing and ahhing over the smell of burning tires in Minneapolis?)

The wife of Tim Walz liked the smell of Minneapolis burning so much, that she opened the windows so she could enjoy it. pic.twitter.com/tIvs1BoHix

— Honest Opinion (@1Honest0pinion) August 6, 2024

Wherever racial politics has turned the public against the police, crime rates have spiked as cops became more timid, and more black people died. It’s called the Ferguson Effect, and you can read a detailed study of it here.

Any Regrets, Antifa?

Do the white leftists who fought to defund the police, called riots “mostly peaceful,” and made a counterfeit Christ out of career criminal George Floyd feel guilty about all the real damage they did to honest, hard-working black people in crime-ridden cities?

Not a bit. If anything, they have happy, soft-focus memories of all that virtue they got to signal. Just as they feel fabulous about themselves driving electric cars, whose batteries rely on cobalt mined by hand by six-year-old kids in Congo. They’re “saving the climate,” one dead child laborer at a time.

White Guilt is about white people and their feelings about themselves, and about other white people whom they either envy and want to imitate, or despise and want to disavow. I’ve joked here before that White Guilt is a powerful sunblock: the whitest product on the market, which will bleach your skin till you’re practically an albino.

Do Black and Brown Guilt Even Exist?

Think about it: Do any black people experience Black Guilt — for instance, when they learn about the long history of slavery inside Africa? Do Latinos feel guilty about the sins of their ancestors — all those Aztec human sacrifices or Conquistador atrocities? Do Arab Muslims feel shame about all the countries their forebears conquered and forced to convert?

It doesn’t happen. Racial self-hatred, like watercress sandwiches and badminton, is a phenomenon of white elites alone. People who are desperate to join those elites, or pretend to themselves that they’re in them, cultivate White Guilt and prance around with it like a peacock’s glittering tail.

Conversely, among grubby blue-collar types like my family, people who’ve had rough lives are unlikely to manufacture fake noblesse oblige for others not much worse off than themselves. (Imagine J.D. Vance’s Rust Belt neighbors scourging themselves for their privilege in between trips to food banks and the unemployment office.)

Working-class white people aren’t vicious tribalists, but they don’t despise themselves or their ancestors. That makes them much more like black people, Latinos, and every other human group on earth. So if you’re a class-obsessed social-climbing white person and want to make it perfectly clear to everyone that you’re not some white-trash MAGA neanderthal, strutting around with shiny White Guilt feathers protruding from your tail is a surefire way to signal that.

Black people are savvy enough to despise the elitists and social climbers who use black people’s problems as little tokens in an intra-white status game, and that’s why so many of them voted for Donald Trump. And God bless Trump for remaking the GOP as the party of the working class of every color. He has done more for racial healing in America than all the sanctuary city-dwellers of Martha’s Vineyard combined.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.