Columbus in 1992, as Mr. Koning and others see him, is the symbol of American failure, of racial guilt and environmental devastation.
Perhaps it's a kind of racial guilt, a subconscious desire to appease and mollify their anger.
Ole Miss is not the national repository of racial guilt," Dr. Khayat said, "and we are not the last bastion of the Confederacy.
But if you make it a program based on collective racial guilt, that isn't going to fly.
Since these questions are not to be considered, it means that that white laborer is to be charged with collective racial guilt, the guilt consisting merely of the color of his skin.
He's also carrying around at least a couple of centuries worth of collective racial guilt on his shoulders.
Although this is in general a constituent feature of social realism, in the racial problem film it is a particularly potent device for a disavowal of racial guilt and responsibility.
Although modern scholars interpret the "blood on our children" () as "a specific group's oath of responsibility" some audiences have historically interpreted it as "an assumption of eternal, racial guilt".
I think he's feeling some obscure racial guilt.
Finally the strain becomes too much, and Fitzgerald provides an unexpected lesson in one of the dangers of racial guilt.