White Masochism is not Innocence
and why their guilt will never set you free.
As you read this in a world still tethered to whiteness, understand what you are witnessing. The spectacle of white guilt is not awakening. It is control. It is a ritual of power, dressed in the softness of shame. Your oppressors will cry. They will speak of justice. But what they want is relief. Relief from the truth of their own actions. They do not want reparations. They want absolution.1
Guilt, in their hands, is not passive. It is a weapon camouflaged as self-punishment—white masochism.2 They will enjoy their discomfort and ask you to bear witness. They will nurture their wounds and expect you to tend them. Their guilt will not free you. It will chain you. It is a demand: See me, forgive me, love me.
Do not fall into this trap. The colonizer no longer comes with guns and chains. They come with open arms and crocodile tears. Over and over again, they will seduce you with their tears as if they’re made of honey.
This is the structure of affective colonialism. The masochist does not want freedom. They want the theatre of suffering, a moral stage where they can feel righteous without losing a thing. They will call themselves allies. They will ask you to be their caretaker, confessor, and priest. They seek absolution as they pocket the benefits of their oppression. This is not solidarity. It is labor—emotional labor—and it will suffocate you if you let it.3
Fanon knew.4 He knew that the Whites needed the Blacks to recognize their guilt. To validate their sorrow. This recognition is a trap. It binds the oppressed to the emotions of the oppressor. It asks for forgiveness where the wound still bleeds. It asks for closeness where distance is survival. Liberal whiteness does not bring liberation. They work in conjunction with the Klan. It builds barriers to keep true rupture at bay. It replaces real change with symbols, gestures and performances.
Be wary of liberal whites who chant Eat the Rich but mean someone else. Never themselves. Their guilt becomes virtue. Becomes identity. Becomes content. They do not want to lose. They only want to feel as if they’ve lost, while keeping what they’ve taken. Their pain is not a rupture. It is a shield. It is pleasure.
This is the logic of the sacrificial lamb, the one beheaded only to be worshipped as a symbol. Here, even the rich or the grotesque few become fetish objects, absorbed into the collective guilt so the system can continue unscathed. The spectacle of sacrifice serves not to dismantle the system but to renew it. It offers catharsis without rupture. Punishment as performance. This is the evangelical obsession with guilt and punishment, rooted in the need for blood, not justice. They crave the image of loss, the theatrics of suffering, because it cleanses without consequence.
Understand this: white masochism is not harmless. The demand will command you to play a role in their fantasy. You become the fetish object.5 To soothe. To witness. To stay. You may even enjoy it for a while, so long as there remains a budget for the house slave. But one day, when that position is no longer open for you, when you’re replaced. When you must step back, they will recoil, not from injustice, but from your absence. Their guilt, when left alone, will rot into resentment. Their need for you to participate will be weaponized.
Remember this. Reject the cycle. The time for holding white emotions is over. What comes next must be loss. Not symbolic. Not shared. The loss of comfort. Of certainty. Of power never earned. No more fragile allies. No more cries for infantile love.6
Liberation is not therapy. It will not ask for your forgiveness. It will demand your strength.
Strength is the refusal to be positioned by their need, to step outside their circle of guilt and comfort. Refusal is not hatred, distance, or avoidance. It is the opening to a life not organized around white recognition. It is the space where you can begin to shape your thoughts and actions without their approval or gaze.
This is not about being unseen but not being defined by them. It is the freedom to pursue what moves you and what compels you without explaining or tending to their fragility. In this place, you can build what they cannot contain, what does not need their permission to exist.
Absolution in this psychic economy is not about justice but escape. It is the desire to be freed from guilt without undergoing loss. It seeks a symbolic cleansing, an emotional transaction where guilt is confessed and forgiven, allowing them to continue enjoying their position without structural change. This is a false resolution. A closure that protects while pretending to absolve. In demanding absolution, one avoids responsibility. The ritual of guilt becomes a way to sustain the system, not dismantle it.
Martin Luther saw this clearly in his critique of the Catholic Church’s indulgence system. The sale of indulgences allowed the wealthy and powerful to purchase forgiveness for sins, without altering their actions or surrendering privilege. Luther denounced this as spiritual corruption, where absolution becomes a commodity, a way for individuals to buy out of judgment while maintaining dominance. Luther argued that true repentance required inner transformation, not transactional relief. This anticipates how liberal guilt functions today: not as a call to dismantle structures, but as a means of preserving them through emotional appeasement.
“Those who believe that through letters of pardon they are made sure of their own salvation, will be eternally damned along with their teachers.” — Luther, M. (1517). The Ninety-Five Theses.
White masochism is when white people, particularly those of the liberal kind, express guilt or shame about racism, not to change anything real, but to feel better about themselves. It looks like self-punishment, but it actually keeps them at the center of attention. Their discomfort becomes something they expect others, often people of color, to respond to, care for, or forgive. Instead of confronting their power or giving anything up, they pretend to be hurt to feel morally superior. It becomes a way to control the emotional space and avoid real change by making others manage their feelings.
Yancy, G., & Butler, J. (2015). Black bodies, white gazes: The continuing significance of race in America (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.
Black feminists have long articulated the structural imposition of care work on the racialized, particularly racialized women. Audre Lorde, in The Uses of Anger (1981), describes how racialized women are expected to soothe, educate, and absorb the discomfort of white interlocutors, all while being silenced and misrecognized. This extraction of emotional labor functions as a technology of power: it recenters the white subjects’ moral self-image while displacing the burden of racial reckoning onto the racialized other. Within this structure, what is framed as dialogue or allyship is often a demand for care, one that is unreciprocated and unsustainable.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. (Original essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” presented 1981).
Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008), exposed how colonial power operates not only through physical domination but also through emotional and symbolic entanglement. He observed that white colonial subjects often sought recognition of their guilt from Black subjects, not to redress harm but to restore their own moral coherence. This demand for recognition functions as a trap: it binds the colonized into a relational dynamic where they are asked to tend to the psychic wounds of the colonizer. Fanon warns that such gestures do not dismantle colonial structures; they reinscribe them through affect. What appears as reconciliation is often just the reassertion of control through intimacy, through guilt, through the performance of pain.
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952)
The fetish is an object that stands in for a lost or unattainable thing. A substitute for the impossible fullness of desire. It is invested with power, made to hold together a fragile psychic structure. Here, the racialized becomes this fetish object, not seen as fully human, but as a function, a placeholder, to stabilize the white subject’s guilt, desire, and power.
The fetish object is both desired and controlled. It is to soothe their guilt, reflect their virtue, and absorb their projections. They do not want you as you are but as a mirror, a symbol that sustains their fantasy. The fetish object is tolerated so long as it serves a function; once it refuses, it becomes a threat. This is also why the model minority position, or the house slave position, the eunuch will always reach a dead end.
Freud, S. (1927). Fetishism. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 21, pp. 149–157). London: Hogarth Press.
Infantile love refers to a form of love rooted in dependency, neediness, and the demand for unconditional affirmation. It seeks security over truth and comfort over confrontation. Freud distinguishes this from mature love, which involves recognizing the Other’s autonomy and accepting loss, ambivalence, and difference.
With regards to white fragility, cry for infantile love is a demand to be soothed, accepted and forgiven without having to confron thte realities of history and power. It is the desire to be loved despite not because of truth. White liberalism, demands a maternal presence, someone to care, to understand to hold. But this love is not recipricol. it is regressive. a return to a pre-political space where accountability is suspended. Think of the Mammy trope, a racilaied, gendered structure of affective servitude. The archetype of the Black woman as caretake, the nurturer, one who soothe, raise, and love the white child, at the expense of her own subjectivity.
Rejecting cries for infantile love means withholding that emotional labor, refusing to play the part for the white subject’s fragile identity. It means demanding maturation, to confront loss and to engage without gurantees of being loved.
Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vo l. 14, pp. 67–102). London: Hogarth Press.