Most multiculturalists, I think, are trying in their own way to make the world a better place. Those who are motivated by guilt, however, try to get others to do good by getting them to feel guilty. They tell you they are racists themselves and then try to get you to say bad things about yourself. (Guilt can be described as a relationship between the part of you that is telling you what to do and the part of you that is being told; it’s guilt when the message is filled with “shoulds” and condemnation.)
Those who are motivated by anger try to get you to do good by getting you angry. At worst, they put you in humiliating positions; at best, they confront you with terrible things that happened to innocent people. Those who are motivated by a feeling of superiority try to do good by getting you to feel superior to your old, benighted, unaware self and, eventually, superior to other, benighted, unaware folks.
My own motives have a mix of these elements, even if they are not the motivations I endorse. Sometimes I feel guilty about how well off I am, but I’m pretty good at converting those feelings into a sense of being a lucky so-and-so. Injustice, especially based on certain political categories, angers me. I hope I don’t inspire anger by humiliating people but by reminding them of injustices. I am susceptible to feeling superior to people who are unaware of their own privileges, but I’m pretty good at converting feelings of superiority to feelings of humility. A quote from George Eliot is never far from my mind: “A man likes to assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and sermonizing on it.”
I try to concentrate on the way my interest in social justice makes me feel good about myself. I don’t mean that it makes me feel like I am a good person, like I am doing good in world, although I acknowledge that comes up in me more than occasionally, and it’s not a motivation that I think has much of a downside, except that it’s often difficult to determine how to do good, and it’s clear to me that it is often the case that the best good can be done by doing nothing.
I mean it makes me feel good about myself because it makes me feel whole. I think the politics of power and marginalization play out in each of us. Everyone is dominated by a hegemony of interests that ignore, exclude, or condemn other aspects of the self. If I can accept myself, I have found, then I can accept others. And if I can accept others, then I can accept myself. This is obvious when it comes to disability—the avoidance of the wheelchair is not the avoidance of the person in it, but the avoidance of the thought of me in it, the avoidance of my own physical incapacities and fear of helplessness. I don’t think all or even most homophobia is a reaction to the homophobe’s internal homosexual urges; but I do think it’s a reaction to the homophobe’s internal confusion about sex and rigidity about gender roles. So perhaps selfishly I want to be embraced, and I find that this is facilitated by the extent to which I can make embracing a way of life.
A nice moment with my dad: He was driving me somewhere when I was 13. At a stoplight, an elderly black man hobbled past the windshield, ragged clothes, ragged beard, beaten down, exuding ill health. I had just learned a cool quote, so I tried it out on my dad as we both followed the poor old man with our eyes. I said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Dad said, “Just say, ‘There go I.’”
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
I really like your definition of guilt – you have a knack for taking complex (to me, anyway) psychological concepts and summarizing them in pithy statements. Also, I have often thought of that story from your childhood when working with difficult patients or simply encountering people in the world who I find myself wanting to marginalize rather than relate to.
I blush. Thanks.