It's not meaningful to talk about personal responsibility or guilt when it comes to dealing with issues of systemic racism. The idea is that we ought to sympathize with the struggle of oppressed groups and turn that into a push to reform the system; not out of white guilt, but out of moral conviction. Yes. Interpersonal racism is treated as an unforgivable sin and a taboo, while systemic racism lies basically untouched. "SJWs" on the internet love to shame individual people, but they never manage to do more than talk about fixing systemic racism because nobody has the courage or sheer ability to organize and engage in direct political action IRL anymore. It's all displaced rage arising from feelings of political impotence.So how guilty should some random 16-year-old white person feel about slavery, considering he had precisely nothing to do with it?
Can our white, Western culture be both hypersensitive about racial issues and racist at the same time?