What to Do With Your White Guilt

Author Hilary Giovale knows that moving through guilt into accountability creates necessary change鈥攆or yourself and others.

Whiteness has been the subject of much writing, teaching, and scholarship. Public discourse on the topic became widespread during the racial justice uprisings after George Floyd鈥檚 murder in the summer of 2020. But I find that we white people still tend to have amnesia about our own history of settler colonialism. Among ourselves, many consider it inappropriate, distasteful, or even rude to discuss such things.

But in the words of Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah in their 2019 book 鈥淲hite America could not perpetrate five hundred years of dehumanizing injustice without traumatizing itself.鈥�

On the night of December 31, 2015, I learned about my ancestors鈥� long-standing history on this land. The next day, January 1, 2016, the process of unraveling our family鈥檚 amnesia began. As I began sharing my ancestral discoveries with my white friends and family, I encountered blank stares and shrugging shoulders, accompanied by a quick change of subject to something more timely, relevant, or entertaining. I was often told reassuringly, 鈥淲ell, that was a long time ago. Everyone thought differently then. You shouldn鈥檛 feel guilty about that.鈥� Far from being placated, I wanted to scream. People literally could not hear what I was saying. I felt isolated in a process that was rewiring my core identity.

What I had discovered in my own family history posed a threat to the person I thought I was, and to the person I was taught to be. Looking back now, it felt like I was receiving an ancestral push toward truth and healing after many generations of silence. The process went far beyond a tidy phrase like 鈥渨hite guilt.鈥� Over time, I began distinguishing guilt from accountability. Staying stuck in guilt is not helpful. Moving into accountability catalyzes necessary change. I was rapidly becoming someone I did not recognize.

What was now glaringly obvious and 鈥渋n my face鈥� all the time was being actively ignored by well-meaning white people all around me. Overwhelmingly, I felt pressured to calm down, behave, and just stop talking about it. Why? Talking about the shadows of colonialism and enslavement contradicts the heroic American mythology that we learned as children. Within the Euro-American diaspora, our capacity to deal with our ancestral legacies is compromised. We are part of a culture that is more invested in maintaining a narrative of innocence and denial than in embracing truth and healing.

I imagine this work to confront our collective amnesia will continue for the rest of my life. I hope it will persist into future generations as well. Over the years, I came to see our amnesia as .

When our European ancestors carried to Turtle Island their diseases, poverty, disrupted communities and families, severed cultures, and violence, it did not expunge their own historical trauma. Establishing dominance over the unique civilizations that were already thriving on this continent did not make us whole again. Kidnapping African leaders, healers, holy people, Elders, mothers, fathers, and children to build us a wealth-accumulating economy did not bring us peace.

In her book , Euro-descended Elder Louise Dunlap shares how she perceives the suffering of our settler ancestors: 鈥�…a nightmarish, button-your-lips suffering that warped the mind, closing it to compassion for other humans and encouraging brutality against perceived enemies and the Earth itself. These ancestors struggled with a punishing legacy that still afflicts us.鈥�

Our ancestors鈥� punishing legacy went into the underbelly of our society. Today, it hides out behind a polite mask of denial. Almost everything in Eurocentric culture conspires to keep us asleep. Amnesia is the path of least resistance.

I am grateful that the ancestors have shown me the unpopular truth: Unleashing their tears and reviving their memory might just be the messy, raw, healing balm for the wounds our people sustained and perpetrated so long ago. If we muster the courage to traverse these shadows, who might we become on the other side of all that pain? Who are we underneath the denial, amnesia, grief, guilt, and shame?

Let鈥檚 find out.

This essay is excerpted with permission from by Hilary Giovale (Green Writers Press, 2024).

Hilary Giovale is a mother, writer, and community organizer who lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.聽 A ninth-generation American settler, she is descended from Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and Indigenous peoples of Ancient Europe.聽Hilary seeks to follow Indigenous and Black leadership in support of human rights, environmental justice, and equitable futures.聽 As an active reparationist, her work is guided by intuition, love, and relationships.聽She divests from whiteness and bridges divides with truth, healing, apology, and forgiveness.聽She is the author of聽Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair (Green Writers Press, 2024).聽 Learn more about her work at聽goodrelative.com.

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