Blame-shifting is where you are accused of doing something wrong and you immediately shift the blame on to someone else. Children do it: “Tommy did it too!” Wife beaters do it: “You made me do it.” And so do racist white Americans: “The Arabs traded slaves too.” This post looks at how it is used to defend white racism.

Some things white people say when faced with a case of white racism:

Blacks are racist too. You are the racist one. I was beaten up/robbed/called names by blacks. Blacks have a high crime rate. Blacks carry knives. Blacks are to blame for their own troubles. Blacks like to “blame whitey”. Black parents do not care about education.

And so on. The argument is moved from what whites do to what other people do, mainly blacks. It is just what whites accuse blacks of doing when they say that blacks like to “blame whitey”.

At one level it is just a cheap attempt to change the subject, to draw attention away from what whites do. But at a deeper level it is also a moral argument – directed not at you but at themselves.

White Americans know they live in an unequal society where whites benefit and blacks get screwed. They feel guilt about that at some level because they believe in equality and believe that racism is wrong. Since they want to believe they are good people they either fight against that inequality – or make up excuses. Making up excuses is way easier.

If they can blame blacks for their troubles, then they have no reason to feel guilty at all. Then they can still see themselves as good people. Case closed!

Otherwise, if that does not work, they try to make blacks or Arabs or whoever seem just as bad if not worse. It becomes the everyone-does-it argument. Whites, then, turn out not to be so bad after all – and again there is little reason to change.

The following are everyone-does-it arguments, which do not so much shift the blame as spread it to others, which is almost as good:

It has always been done this way. Blacks have it better in America than in Africa. All human societies are racist. The Arabs traded slaves too.

These are moral arguments but they are at the level of everyone-beats-his-wife or I-only-beat-my-wife-on-Tuesdays-and-Thursdays. As if that makes it all right. Pat Buchanan loves this kind of argument. Did the nuns teach him it in Catholic school?

So in the end we know all about what is wrong with blacks, because that makes white people feel better about themselves, but very little is said about what is wrong with white people and the white racism built into society. Where is the CNN special on that? Still waiting.

Blacks are not perfect, as everyone knows, but given the imbalance of power in American society, it is noticing the mote in your brother’s eye and not considering the beam in your own.

See also: