MTV later this month premieres White People, a documentary that, as the trailer informs, exposes “what white people have done in America.” Illegal alien Jose Antonio Vargas hosts the program. Some people miss their own irony.

Pale faces in America invented the Internet, the telephone, the airplane, and the computer. They took the maiden flight across the Atlantic and first stepped foot on the moon. Crackers developed vaccines for yellow fever and polio. They forged a nation united by neither ethnicity nor a religious sect but a commitment to freedom.

Whites also killed nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina church, dropped atomic bombs on unsuspecting yellow people, and believed on a cable channel for several years in the early 1980s that Eddy Grant and Joan Armatrading represented the sum of black music. One gleans the impression from the trailer that Mr. Vargas eliminates the positive and accentuates the negative — at least sins of the non-sonic variety — in the MTV documentary.

Most Caucasians feel neither pride nor shame in their race. This healthy deracination remains particularly true of ones who reside in white-majority nations such as the United States. Difference, not normality, provokes curiosity, questions, and obsessions.

So, Napoleon, the Corsican, compensates by trying to conquer Europe for France, Hitler, born in Austria, seeks to become the uber German, and Stalin, a Georgian, infuses Lenin’s Communism with a hyper-Russian nationalism. Columbia gunman Dylann Roof, seeing red by seeing so many blacks, suffered from the same shameful affliction: pride.

White Shame appears as a flipside to White Pride. Both maladies define some people by the actions of other people. Rather than seeing individuals, race pride or race shame obsesses over groups. In other words, both sides of the shame/pride coin apply the same discriminatory tenets they decry in the other.

For underachieving whites, skin color plays as the pseudo-accomplishment to hang their hat on. For underachieving nonwhites, skin color explains their failures in a flattering racial conspiracy theory that blames outsiders for individual struggles.

The individual, whose rights increasingly fall to the desires of groups regarding gun ownership, speech, and enterprise, fares poorly in discussions of race. No sane person credits an individual for the accomplishments of their ancestors but racial ideologues imagine whites as stained in the sins of their forebears. Surely this outlook works as a modern parallel to the religious heresy applying the Mark of Cain to Africans (a straightforward interpretation of Deuteronomy 24:16 works better here).

It’s anti-intellectual, and so seems the documentary mired in these obsessions. After a graphic notes that “many white people feel uncomfortable talking about race” — one wonders why — the white people in White People announce: “I don’t want to offend people,” “I feel like you guys are attacking me now,” “Give me a hug,” and “You kind of get this feeling that things belong to you.” They shed tears. They dispense hugs.  

The language and tone reflects the therapeutic culture’s hostile takeover of the culture. We go for the gut or tug at the heart. Stimulating the mental circuitry strikes as a non sequitur to a generation trained to emote rather than think. The Thought Police put themselves out of business and created a more ominously Orwellian control apparatus: the Feelings Police.

Once the Feelings Police permanently mute the “Star-Spangled Banner” after discovering that a slaveholder wrote the lyrics, they might consider a Morris Albert-penned verse as a national anthem more reflective of the ruling ethos. Sure, he’s Brazilian, and Francis Scott Key American, but we’re a multicultural society now — and Albert more prophetically sensed the pulse of modern America with his #6 1975 hit than did Key in his bellicose rhapsodizing.

White People, featuring crying white kids and their scolding nonwhite peers, aims to create a generation of Rachel Dolezals, albeit less effectively than Buckwild, The Hills, or Jersey Shore. One needn’t feel proud that one’s ancestors created a country that unleashed such creativity, ingenuity, and wealth. Why should we feel shame? 

Presumably the opportunity represented by America so enticed the documentarian to leave the Philippines and live in this country that he broke the law rather than delay entry through obedience to immigration protocols. His life contradicts his art.