Jackson Free Press

While doing some research earlier this year, I had the dubious opportunity to read pretty much every major southern segregationist speech ever delivered. What surprised me about them was that I didn't see much explicit hate there—or pride, either. What I mostly saw was self-pity. It was pretty pathetic.

Take former Gov. Ross Barnett's September 1962 pro-segregation speech, for example. He doesn't have anything particularly negative to say about black folks as a group, but what he has to say about southern whites no doubt brought tears to some poor idiot's eyes. He assured his audience that the well-fed and well-paid all-white state Legislature, though oppressed into a state of "crisis" by "an ambitious federal government employing naked and arbitrary power," would "never submit to the moral degradation, to the shame and the ruin which have faced all others who have lacked the courage to defend their beliefs."

It's hard to read that without smiling when you remember how Barnett, like every other southern segregationist governor, politely stepped out of the way as soon as the federal government started talking about putting him in handcuffs.

The remarkable "courage" on his part included ordering the arrest of 300 Freedom Riders a year earlier.

But that is the way the very southern tradition of white self-pity defines a crisis: In Ross Barnett's world, the intimidation, disenfranchisement and outright lynching of black voters, and those who try to register them, isn't a crisis; federal encroachment on state sovereignty is.

We see this pattern play out in much of what passes for racial discourse among many white Mississippians. White callousness isn't a crisis; white "guilt" is. Actual racism isn't a crisis; "reverse" racism is.

There may be no greater example of this than the words of Judge Robert Zimmerman, the father of Trayvon Martin's killer, who wrote recently that he "thought racism was a thing of the past"—until he encountered the black Civil Rights Movement, where the "real racists" are. In Judge Zimmerman's world, chasing down, cornering and killing a black teenager for walking around in a white neighborhood doesn't create a crisis; putting his killer on trial does.

Rep. Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey, a great Republican congresswoman and civil-rights advocate, no doubt spoke from a place of well-informed disgust when she wrote that self-pity is "the most destructive emotion there is."

Fenwick went on to say, "How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self."

It's a powerful metaphor. The squirrel keeps scratching—frantically, pathetically—but it never gets out.

Self-pity enables every other negative human trait and poisons every attempt we make to be decent human beings. White self-pity has done more to destroy the South than any war or natural disaster. And it seems to go on forever—a contagious, incurable and permanent disease of the human soul.

Institutional racism is held together by inertia, but white supremacism, the ideology that supports it, is held together by self-pity. It was self-pity that provided the true ideological foundation behind Nazi Germany, whose leader, Adolf Hitler, was not ashamed to write a memoir called "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle").

When the Bible speaks of hell, the only emotion it identifies there is self-pity. When the wicked are banished into the outer darkness, in the words of the 112th Psalm, all they really want to do is keep wailing and gnashing their teeth.

I'm coming to believe that rational argument is powerless against the horrific toxic power of this white self-pity. Shame and ridicule, though effective at silencing it, only drives it deeper within us. I believe the only force capable of destroying it, completely and forever, is love. But, "Love without truth," as former Jackson Free Press columnist Natalie Collier once put it, "is weak."

Maybe our first step in confronting white self-pity should be to stop taking it seriously—to stop treating it as if it were dignified, and start treating it as the self-destructive, other-destructive spiritual disease that it is.

Tom Head, Ph.D., has written or co-written 24 nonfiction books, is a civil liberties writer for About.com and is a grassroots progressive activist.