The Scrapbook picks on the New York Times quite a lot. Maybe too much. But it’s hard not to. We so often find fatuous and preposterous material that we simply cannot help passing it along to our readers. One such item appeared in the August 16 edition of the paper—or so we thought. Headlined “Shedding the Cloak of White Guilt,” it’s an advice column by Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond, hosts of a Times podcast called “Dear Sugars.”
The person asking for advice—the letter is signed “Whitey”—appears to be a college student who has taken the absurdities of social-justice progressivism so seriously that he or she has almost gone insane. “Dear Sugars,” the letter writer begins, “I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of color. I feel like there is no ‘me’ outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.”
Like a postmodern Martin Luther, Whitey has followed all the dictates of multiculturalism but found no peace. “I research proper etiquette, read writers of color, vote in a way that will not harm P.O.C. [people of color] (and other vulnerable people). I engage in conversations about privilege with other white people. I take courses that will further educate me. I donated to Black Lives Matter.” Yet unlike Luther’s, Whitey’s guilt remains.
The letter concludes with the confession that Whitey doesn’t talk openly about all this because “making this conversation about me would be again centering whiteness. Yet bottling it up makes me feel an existential anger that I have a hard time channeling since I don’t know my place. Instead of harnessing my privilege for greater good, I’m curled up in a ball of shame. How can I be more than my heritage?”
It’s all too much. “My literal existence hurts people”? “Curled up in a ball of shame”? We conclude, optimistically, that Whitey is a parodist and a prankster.
Strayed and Almond, the Times’s advice-givers, don’t take it that way. They reply with utmost gravity and at some length. “Shame and anger are powerful emotions, Whitey,” Almond begins. “And yet your central struggle is around identity. You write that you don’t know your place. In fact, your letter describes your place as a kind of prison cell of privilege. What you really feel is trapped within an identity that marks you, inescapably, as an oppressor.” Strayed was rather hard on Whitey, too: “You don’t have to relinquish your heritage to be an ally to people of color, Whitey. You have to relinquish your privilege.”
Almond is an accomplished journalist but also a touch of a poser—he “resigned” from his post as adjunct professor of creative writing at Boston College after the school invited Condoleezza Rice as its commencement speaker. Strayed is the author of Wild, a 2012 bestseller about the author’s self-discovery, and an outspoken feminist. Both are victims of a brilliant prank. Or at least we hope so.
