September 27, 2023

“Cultural humility training” for therapists and counselors is making the rounds.  It purports to improve the skills of mental health providers by attempting to entrain a humbling self-critique regarding the biases and values that may be impeding therapeutic care.  That is a cover story for what cultural humility really is: a philosophy that imputes compulsory collective racist guilt to white culture.  The term “cultural humility” is a dog whistle for the assumption that white culture is incurably racist and white professionals carry collective racial guilt for their ongoing and incurable oppression of non-whites, with no possibility of forgiveness — only permanent, humiliating white self-denigration.

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The experience of guilt in human consciousness takes many forms.  The most spiritual is the emotion of genuine, individual guilt, which arises from awareness of having committed actual wrongdoing.  Admission of sincere guilt is the path to unqualified repentance, with heartfelt repentance offering restoration and renewal of the guilt-ridden conscience.  True repentance does not plead for forgiveness or demand acceptance.  The gift of humility is inseparable from the pride-killing nature of true remorse and repentance.  Importantly, though amends may be ongoing, the accounting of guilt and the effort of repentance are encapsulated in time and do not go on forever.

Another form of individual guilt is when a person feels guilty for circumstances beyond his control.  For example, a soldier feels guilty because he came home while his dearest buddy perished.  This is a real experience of guilt, but it arises from the mind’s need to claim powers it does not have.  If the guilt-ridden one can be helped to accept that he cannot control destinies, he can find more peace, and humility grows.

Now the experience of guilt turns down a dark alley into induction, which is inflicting awareness of guilt as a weapon of control.  An example is a spouse keeping alive the memory of long past betrayal, though the spouse who committed the wrongful deed is sincerely remorseful and humbled, and there is no reason to believe that the betrayal will be repeated.  Here begins the difference between the liberating experience of internal humility and the mental captivity of externally inflicted humiliation.  Ongoing guilt induction imprisons both the person who inflicts the guilt and the one who accepts the manipulation.

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Historians debate the role of biblical teachings regarding the Mark of Cain and its justification of slavery in American history.  However those passages were used as apologia for slavery, there is no doubt that a destructive aspect of religion is its power to compel belief in collective guilt solely on group identification rather than any individual wrongdoing by members.  Today, federal and state governments attempt to brainwash and compel anti-white prejudice and practices through fear of reprisal, exactly paralleling the religious dogma that justified slavery.  In the 1700s, that dogma acted upon rigidly moralistic, materially advantaged slave-owners to maintain the justification of oppression.  Today, the ascription of white guilt and white cultural oppression is an artifact of anti-moral society, where God-based moral precepts have been abandoned and psychological experts are de facto clergy with the power to preach human good and evil.  Politicized psychology functions as priestcraft, attempting to instill guilt in people who have done no racial wrongdoing and entraining assumed humility, which fortifies egoism and pride.

In the 20th century, as actual white racist oppression dwindled to a trickle, focus shifted from uplifting historically disadvantaged people to castigating imaginary white oppressors.  The diagnostic manual of white-guilting includes white privilege theory — that all European-Americans, regardless of poverty, disease, or trauma, are always privileged above non-whites — and white fragility theory — that being white is psychopathology that paralyzes whites from recognizing their bigotry.

White cultural humility training turns a corner into the presumption of incurability and hopelessness, where European-Americans are to be permanently humbled.  It is a framework of religion without forgiveness for whites, who must self-flagellate forever and parrot humility for the supposed sins of their culture.

The following quotes are from a popular training course in cultural humility, endorsed and disseminated by powerful state licensing boards.

Inequities in social relations reflect a society structured on White supremacy that serves as a foundation for the continued social and economic disparities existing between White people and people of color living in the same society. … The cultural humility framework recognizes the concepts of power, privilege and oppression and thus calls on counselors to be agents of change and promoters of social justice.

The course describes oppressors as white, male, and heterosexual and the oppressed by race, sex, sexual orientation, transgender identification, and disability.  The training is a scholarship-free zone.  References tend to favor political and government websites rather than peer-reviewed articles.