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What a silly column by an unserious writer.

He pretends to be serious but fails to analyze the most obvious and significant point: “Liberal guilt” is subject to ridicule when it is excessive and/or mis-directed and/or absurdly histrionic.

Sure, it is morally appropriate (and important) to feel guilt or shame when you do something wrong - more important still to do anything within your power to correct or make amends for your mis-behavior.

However, no one living now or in recent generations bore ANY responsiblity for slavery, and no one living now or in recent generations suffered any enslavement (speaking of the USA, since of course there are some Arab/Muslim areas in Africa and the Middle East that HAVE had slavery very recently).

Conservatives get sick of “liberal guilt” because it is a crude bludgeon used to try to force contemporary and future society to bear responsibility for long-ago historical injustices that WE did not commit and are not responsible for. MY family on both sides only came to the USA in recent decades from extremely modest, simple circumstances in countries that had nothing to do with American slavery. Even if I were responsible for my ancestors, and I am NOT, they had nothing to do with it.

Also, the idea of voting for OBAMA as some kind of expiation of liberal guilt, a man who does not descend from anyone who was enslaved in America, who in fact is a child of privelege whose upbringing was quite pampered compared to my own, is absurd. Obama’s life has in every way been quite comfortable and priveleged. Voting for him solely because his genetic father (the reckless philandering sperm donor who abandoned him by age 2) happened to be from Kenya, as a way to salve the guilty conscience of American liberals about American history, is absurdity piled upon absurdity.

Look, if someone thinks he has the best ideas and is the best potential president, those are reasons to vote for him..... but to vote on the basis of his skin color (either for or against) is absurd and foolish.

Worse than that, his absent father is at least in part of Arab descent, thus is most likely descended from folks whose relatives enslaved the ancestors of American blacks, who weren't from Kenya but mostly from the West African coast.

So then what does he do not only about his own white guilt (via his mother, whose ancestors actually did own slaves) but his father's Arab guilt?

This could get pretty complicated. I vote we ditch the whole thing, except for people who actually were slaves or slaveholders.