McDermott’s position is original in the sense that it points at the spatial aspect of interactional racism.
White identity has different shapes depending on the location: in the US, being white in Atlanta is a racial
identity (white as opposed to black), while it is an ethnic identity in Boston (Irish, Italian, WASP, etc.). This
has important consequences for the framing of interactions (McDermott 2006); it helps understand why
racial interactions are both warmer and more conflicting in the South. Following the example of
McDermott, our study will focus on the interactional dimension of racism, and more precisely on the
embarrassment that arises from discussions on racial matters – white guilt.
From the condemnation of racism to the notion of white guilt
The notion of white guilt originates in a speech delivered by Martin Luther King in the 1950s. King
declared: “By setting free the black man, we’ll also set the white man free from his prejudices, from his
subconscious guilt for his wrongdoing” (quoted in Swim and Miller 1999). The idea of guilt spreads through
debates held by American intellectuals. In the 1970s, it is analyzed by a sociologist, Poskocil (1977), who
reports several studies suggesting that African Americans consider white liberals as “more racist” than other
white people. Following a Goffmanian approach, Poskocil explains that interracial interactions put whites in
an uncomfortable position; they always feel suspected of racism and feel they must constantly “convince
black people (and [their] own guilty mind)” that they are not. In the 1990s, the concept of white guilt may
have taken on a conservative connotation in the US. For instance Shelby Steele, an African American writer
affiliated to a conservative think tank, denounced the guilt experienced by progressive and well-intentioned
white people as a perpetuation of a victimizing ideology. According to Steele (2006), programs supposed to
encourage racial integration (busing, affirmative action) are grounded in the guilt whites feel towards
African Americans, instead of a concern for fair and efficient public policies. Within the scope of social
psychology, Swim and Miller (1999) and Iyer et al. (2003) empirically demonstrated that for whites, race
related guilt found its correlation in their support for affirmative action policies. This controversy did not
prevent a sociologist such as Dalton Conley to use the concept of white guilt to describe his mother in his
6
Convention