Ehrenstein is just not cynical enough about white motivations. First, I don’t know any whites under 55 who personally feel guilty for the status of blacks. ~Steve Sailer

On a conscious, individual level, Sailer is right.  No white person 55 or under does actually feel personally guilty for the status of blacks, because as far as all of these people are concerned it would be basically impossible for them to have anything about which they should feel personally guilty.  However, as part of the shared cultural assumptions that have been drilled into the heads of two generations of white American kids from the day they were old enough to understand the word slavery, a sense of corporate and historic white guilt for the status of blacks–in which contemporary whites are made to feel somehow complicit–is as pervasive as it is exaggerated.  Added to that was the generally offensive multiculti indoctrination, which falsely presupposed that the white kids were all thoroughly familiar with and committed to European and Christian civilisation and therefore had to be taught about all of the crimes and errors of that civilisation while simultaneously being told about, for instance, the glories and tolerance of the Islamic “Golden Age” (most of which was the product of fairly uncreative imitation and use of Greek texts translated by the conquered Christian populations of the Near East), the (non-existent) peaceful and environmentally-friendly Native Americans or the (non-existent) peaceful and harmonious world of the K!ung Bushmen that was, of course, only ruined because of their integration into a Western society.  Not only have these generations grown up without even the most meager grounding in the Biblical and classical traditions of their fathers (hence widespread Biblical illiteracy that is just now beginning to be seen as a problem by people other than cultural conservatives), but they have grown up believing that it is ethically necessary to resent and dislike their ancestors or the heroes of their ancestors because of their flaws and failures. 

They have been taught that it is imperative to be ashamed of their heritage and to actively deny that they even have anything that might be called a positive racial identity (ethnic white, mainly southern and eastern European, Americans are allowed to continue their own traditions, provided these are limited to amusing diversions of music, dance and food).  These generations do not approach Obama’s candidacy primarily with the sense that correct opinions about Obama matter for in-group status fights among whites (though they may also be worried about this), but they view approval and well-wishing of Obama as a moral imperative and as a kind of purgation of the sins they have supposedly inherited from their fathers.  Many of them actually feel guilty at some level, even though they themselves have never done anything, because they have been taught for their entire lives that they should feel guilty simply because they are white and are therefore beneficiaries of past exploitation or oppression.  The only positive affirmation of being white is an affirmation aimed at identifying whites as historic villains and inculcating in white people today the desire to repudiate that villainy by yielding to whatever policies or reparations are demanded as the way to make up for the past. 

The media, the political class and the masters of the educational system have all worked to advance this message, and this message sinks in.  Add to that the desires to avoid social and professional ostracism that follows from taking potentially controversial or unacceptable views on matters of race (such as the wild idea that something called race actually exists in any meaningful sense), and you have a significant psychological burden of guilt that most white people educated since maybe 1980 have been told that they are supposed to carry around with them.  Those of us who never bought this crap when they were telling it to us in school, or who rejected it later, look at all of this and cringe at how pathetic it is that people are so dominated by this brainwashing.  If there were not a pervasive sense of corporate guilt in which most white people have learned to share, the enforcement of social stigmas against those who say or believe “inappropriate” things would not be possible.  People know what to say and what not to say because they have been indoctrinated since they were children that making true observations about racial differences between people, except perhaps in jokes, is simply not done.  Correct opinions on race have only become a mechanism of white in-group status maintenance because inculcating white guilt was first a mechanism of elite social engineering.  The first may be in some sense as “cynical” as the last always was.  It has nothing to do with equality or justice, and everything to do with mobilising people against each other for the sake of acquiring power and prestige.  Nonetheless, the former would not have been possible if the latter had not happened first, and the fact that it was a cynical manipulation of the psychology of people doesn’t mean that this manipulation does not have extensive and long-lasting effects.