WHITE GUILT AND THE WESTERN PAST
WHY IS AMERICA SO DELICATE WITH THE ENEMY?
BY SHELBY STEELE
The Wall Street Journal, 2006-05-02
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II. For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
WHY THIS NEW MINIMALISM IN WAR? It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world’s population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West–like Germany after the Nazi defeat–lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes–here racism and imperialism–lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group’s former sinfulness. So when America–the greatest embodiment of Western power–goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past–two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy–and the resulting white guilt–introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation’s legitimacy. Europe’s halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.
Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America’s act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work–something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty–war as the Great Society.
This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won’t ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It’s just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems — even the tyrannies they live under — were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war–and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be “good,” in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today’s international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort–only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.
Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.
AMERICA AND THE BROADER WEST are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded. Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can’t do it.
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem–win a war, fix immigration–they lose legitimacy.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a “unilateralist cowboy”? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.
Possibly white guilt’s worst effect is that it does not permit whites–and nonwhites–to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life–absorbed as new history–so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
* * * * *
LIFE AND DEATH:
WESTERN GUILT BLINDS US TO THE NATURE OF ISLAMIC EXTREMISM
by SHELBY STEELE
The Wall Street Journal, 2006-08-27
The simple back-and-forth of war can create the illusion that both sides have a legitimate point to make even when this is not so, and it is clear that Hezbollah’s cause has greatly benefited from war’s “equalizing” effect. This Shiite militia seems to have known that merely fighting Israel would gain legitimacy for its cause. A cease-fire would make it a “partner” in peace. The Goliath Israeli military would make it a David whose passion proved the truth of its cause. But amid all the drama of this war there has been very little talk of exactly what Hezbollah’s cause is.
And, of course, it is not just Hezbollah’s cause. There is Hamas, one more in a family of politicized terrorist groups spread across the Muslim world. Beyond these more conventional groups there is the free-floating and world-wide terrorism of groups like al Qaeda. In Europe, there are cells of self-invented middle-class terrorists living modern lives by day and plotting attacks on modernity by night. And around these cells there is often a nourishing atmosphere of fellow traveling. Then there are the radical nation-states in league with terrorism, Iran and Syria most prominent among them. From nations on the verge of nuclear weapons to isolated individuals–take the recent Seattle shootings–Islamic militancy grounded in hatred of Israel and America has become the Muslim world’s most animating idea. Why?
I don’t believe it is because of the reasons usually cited–Israeli and American “outrages.” No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there will never be a satisfying answer for this. Yet every Israeli land-for-peace gesture has been met with a return volley of suicide bombers and rockets. Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood. And Hezbollah launched the current war from territory Israel had relinquished six years earlier.
If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her. And now much of the West is in a similar position, living in a state of ever-heightening security against the constant threat of violence from Islamic extremists. So here, from the Muslim world, comes an unappeasable hatred that seems to exist for its own sake, a hatred with very little actual reference to those it claims to hate. Even the fighting of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly self-referential, fighting not for territory or treasure but for the fighting itself. Standing today in the rubble of Lebanon, having not taken a single inch of Israeli territory, Hezbollah claims a galvanizing victory.
ALL THIS FOLLOWS the familiar pattern of a very old vice: anti-Semitism. The anti-Semite is always drawn to the hatred of Jews by his own unacknowledged inadequacy. As Sartre says in his great essay on the subject, the anti-Semite “is a man who is afraid. Not of Jews of course, but of himself.” By hating Jews, he asserts that his own group represents the kind of human being that God truly wants. His group is God’s archetype, the only authentic humanity, already complete and superior. No striving or self-reflection is necessary. If Jews are superior in some ways, it is only out of their alienated striving, their exile from God’s grace. For the anti-Semite, hating and fighting Jews is both self-affirmation and a way of doing God’s work. So the anti-Semite comes to a chilling place: He easily joins himself to evil in order to serve God. Fighting and even killing Jews brings the world closer to God’s intended human hierarchy. For Nazis, the “final solution” was an act of self-realization and a fulfillment of God’s will. At the center of today’s militant Islamic identity there is a passion to annihilate rather than contain Israel. And today this identity applies the anti-Semitic model of hatred to a vastly larger group–the infidel. If the infidel is not yet the object of that pristine hatred reserved for Jews, he is not far behind. Bombings in London, Madrid and Mumbai; riots in Paris; murders in Amsterdam; and of course 9/11–all these follow the formula of anti-Semitism: murder of a hated enemy as self-realization and service to God.
Hatred and murder are self-realization because they impart grandeur to Islamic extremists–the sense of being God’s chosen warrior in God’s great cause. Hatred delivers the extremist to a greatness that compensates for his ineffectuality in the world. Jews and infidels are irrelevant except that they offer occasion to hate and, thus, to experience grandiosity. This is why Hezbollah–Party of God–can take no territory and still claim to have won. The grandiosity is in the hating and fighting, not the victory.
And death–both homicide and suicide–is the extremist’s great obsession because its finality makes the grandiosity “real.” If I am not afraid to kill and die, then I am larger than life. Certainly I am larger than the puny Westerners who are reduced to decadence by their love of life. So my hatred and my disregard of death, my knowledge that life is trivial, deliver me to a human grandeur beyond the reach of the West. After the Madrid bombings a spokesman for al Qaeda left a message: “You love life, and we love death.” The horror is that greatness is tied to death rather than to achievement in life.
The West is stymied by this extremism because it is used to enemies that want to live. In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty. But Osama bin Laden fights only to achieve a death that will enshrine him as a figure of awe. The gift he wants to leave his people is not freedom or even justice; it is consolation.
White guilt in the West–especially in Europe and on the American left–confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness. But Islamic extremists don’t hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism–not their continuance–forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.
BUT THE INTERNATIONAL LEFT is in its own contest with American exceptionalism. It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power. And this works in today’s world because the oppression script is so familiar and because American power cringes when labeled with sins of the white Western past. Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression. And Israel can never use its military fire power without being labeled an oppressor–which brings legitimacy to the enemies she fights. Israel roars; much of Europe supports Hezbollah. Over and over, white guilt turns the disparity in development between Israel and her neighbors into a case of Western bigotry. This despite the fact that Islamic extremism is the most explicit and dangerous expression of human bigotry since the Nazi era. Israel’s historical contradiction, her torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap her in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be white aggression.
But white guilt’s most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history. Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex. America has done a good thing in launching democracy as a new ideal in this region. Here is the possibility–if still quite remote–for the Islamic world to seek power through contribution rather than through menace.
* * * * *
THE IDENTITY CARD
By SHELBY STEELE
Time Magazine, 2007-11-30
The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. I heard this over and over again, never in a snide or gossipy way, always matter-of-factly. Apparently this was the way we Americans had to introduce Obama to each other. For some reason, knowledge of his racial pedigree had to precede even the mention of his politics–as if the pedigree inevitably explained the politics.
Of course, I am rather sensitive to all this because I, too, was born to a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb this fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until I was old enough to notice the world’s fascination–if not obsession–with it. To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore, as half and half. This is the dumb mathematics of thinking by race–dumb because race is used here as a kind of bullying truth that pushes aside the actual human experience.
Racist societies make race into a hard fate. So people who are the progeny of two races become curiosities not because they are particularly interesting, but because they are so unexpected. This must be an old and tiresome vulnerability in Barack Obama’s life (as it is in mine), and all the more so because he has chosen a public life. One senses that his first book, Dreams from My Father, was meant to diffuse some of this vulnerability. In it he does not merely own up to his interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly explores it. And his brave self-disclosure succeeds because we no longer live in an America that wants to make mixed-race people into pariahs. That was once done to keep firm the racial boundaries of American apartheid–the mulatto’s tragic exile standing as a cautionary tale meant to keep people “with their own kind.” But today’s mixed-race person is “fresh,” a word that trails Obama like a nickname.
There is the unspoken hope that his mixed-race freshness carries a broader political originality. And, in fact, he does embody something that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference. Here is the radicalism, innate to his pedigree, which automatically casts him as the perfect antidote to America’s exhausted racial politics. This is the radicalism by which Martin Luther King Jr. put Americans in touch–if only briefly–with their human universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of this idealism. As such, he is a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation and identity politics–any form of collective chauvinism.
Thus, the cultural and historical implications of Obama’s candidacy are clearly greater than its public policy implications. While Obama the man labors in the same political vineyard as his competitors, mapping out policy positions on everything from war to health care, his candidacy itself asks the American democracy to complete itself, to achieve that almost perfect transparency in which color is indeed no veil over character–where a black, like a white, can put himself forward as the individual he truly is. This is the high possibility that the Obama campaign points to quite apart from its policy goals.
The Struggle to Belong
And yet the issue of race, so nicely contained and deactivated in the Barack Obama political persona, is still very much alive within the man himself. Today’s black identity has been nearly a life-long preoccupation for Obama. By the surface facts of his life–mixed-race background, childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia–it would be easy to assume that he might be indifferent to the whole business of race and identity. Many Americans want to believe that there are people on whom race sits very lightly, people whose very hybridism suggests the possibility of transcending race.
But Barack Obama is not such a person. His books show a man nothing less than driven by a determination to be black, as if blackness were more a specific achievement than a birthright. This drive puts Obama at odds with his own political persona. Much of the excitement that surrounds him comes from the perception that he is only lightly tethered to race. Yet the very arc of his life–from Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago–has been shaped by an often conscious resolve to “belong” irrefutably to the black identity.
What sort of alienation drives this resolve? When, at the age of 2, Barack Obama was abandoned by his African father, he lost both a father and accessibility to a black identity–not necessarily a politicized identity but that much simpler and more profound feeling of unselfconsciously belonging to a people. Here was a kid, accountable in the world as a black, being raised by whites–mother, grandmother, and grandfather. Nothing in the world wrong with this. In fact, the fine young man that Obama became has to be credited in large part to the devotion of his extraordinary mother–a woman who, in Indonesia, got her young son up at 4 five days a week to run him through English lessons before his Indonesian school day even began. And yet absences, like father and race, can quite irrationally open up deep–almost insatiable–longings.
So after college Barack Obama spent three years as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. I spent my first three years after college in the late ’60s working in Great Society programs in East St. Louis, Ill. These were encounters with deep, seemingly intractable, black poverty. And I am sure that Obama, like me, was motivated by a genuine desire to do something good. But on another level these were also very likely quests for racial authenticity–for a resolution of that peculiar alienation that trails mixed-race people, that absence of a simple racial solidarity that is the easy birthright of others. When Obama is about to leave Chicago for Harvard Law School, he wonders: “Was that all that had brought me to Chicago, I wondered–the desire for such simple acceptance?”
So, yes, Obama’s interracial background puts him at cross purposes. It gives him a racelessness that is politically appealing to whites, but it also draws him toward precisely the kind of self-conscious black identity that alienates whites. For nearly two decades Barack Obama has attended a black church on the South Side of Chicago that his own mother could never have felt comfortable in. It subscribes to a “Black Value System” in which “black” was always the operative word–”black family,” “black community,” “black freedom,” etc. But it was not a black value system that accounted for Obama’s success in life; it was the values of his white Midwestern mother. Could he stand up in his own church and say this?
People do well because they are loved and because much is asked of them–not because they are black or white. Their own sense of responsibility is always their greatest asset. Whatever consolations blackness may offer, it is not an agent. It does nothing. And there is indeed a “fresh” politics to be made from these simple truths. Who better to do this than Barack Obama? Here, within his own actual experience, is his chance to deliver the “freshness” that so many Americans look for in him.
Caught in the Middle
But Obama is not likely to take this path. He is a man bound by forces outside himself and by a practice that is central to the minority experience in America: masking. As the word itself makes clear, the mask is not an authentic representation of one’s true self; rather it is a presentation of the self that angles for advantage. Today we blacks have two great masks that we wear for advantage in the American mainstream: bargaining and challenging.
Bargainers make a deal with white Americans that gives whites the benefit of the doubt: I will not rub America’s history of racism in your face, if you will not hold my race against me. Especially in our era of political correctness, whites are inevitably grateful for this bargain that spares them the shame of America’s racist past. They respond to bargainers with gratitude, warmth, and even affection. This “gratitude factor” can bring the black bargainer great popularity. Oprah Winfrey is the most visible bargainer in America today.
Challengers never give whites the benefit of the doubt. They assume whites are racist until they prove otherwise. And whites are never taken off the hook until they (institutions more than individuals) give some form of racial preference to the challenger. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are today’s best known challengers. Of course, most blacks can and do go both ways, but generally we tend to lean one way or another.
Barack Obama is a plausible presidential candidate today because he is a natural born bargainer. Obama–like Oprah–is an opportunity for whites to think well of themselves, to give themselves one of the most self-flattering feelings a modern white can have: that they are not racist. He is the first to apply the bargainer’s charms to presidential politics. Sharpton and Jackson were implausible presidential candidates because they suffered the charmlessness of challengers. Even given white guilt, no one wants to elect a scold.
But the great problem for Obama is that today’s black identity is grounded in challenging. This is the circumstance that makes him a bound man. If he tries to win the black vote by taking on a posture of challenging, he risks losing the vote of whites who like him precisely because he does not challenge. And if his natural bargaining wins white votes, he risks losing black votes to Hillary Clinton. Why? Because Hillary Clinton always identifies with black challengers like Al Sharpton. This makes her “blacker” than Barack Obama.
There is only one way out of this bind for this still young politician. He has to drop all masks, all obsessions with identity, all his fears of being called a sell-out, and very carefully come to reveal what he truly believes as an individual. This is what America really expects from Barack Obama.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1689619,00.html
* * * * *
SHELBY STEELE BIBLIOGRAPHY
“I think many of my books have been critical of White America.”
Shelby Steele holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah, an M.A. in sociology from Southern Illinois University, and a B.A. in political science from Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. He was appointed a Hoover fellow in 1994.
Steele received the National Book Critic’s Circle Award in 1990 in the general nonfiction category for his book The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. He also has written extensively for major publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He also is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine., and his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Newsweek, and the Washington Post, among many other publications.
For his work on the PBS television documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst, he was recognized with both an Emmy Award and a Writers Guild Award. In 2004 President George W. Bush, citing Steele’s “learned examinations of race relations and cultural issues,” honored him with the National Humanities Medal. He lives in California.
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0060578629
Format: Hardcover, 192pp
Pub. Date: May 2, 2006
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
In 1955 the murderers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly because they were white. Forty years later, O. J. Simpson, whom many thought would be charged with murder by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. Clearly, a sea change had taken place in American culture, but how had it happened? In this important new work, distinguished race relations scholar Shelby Steele argues that the age of white supremacy has given way to an age of white guilt — and neither has been good for African Americans.
As the civil rights victories of the 1960s dealt a blow to racial discrimination, American institutions started acknowledging their injustices, and white Americans — who held the power in those institutions — began to lose their moral authority. Since then, our governments and universities, eager to reclaim legitimacy and avoid charges of racism, have made a show of taking responsibility for the problems of black Americans. In doing so, Steele asserts, they have only further exploited blacks, viewing them always as victims, never as equals. This phenomenon, which he calls white guilt, is a way for whites to keep up appearances, to feel righteous, and to acquire an easy moral authority — all without addressing the real underlying problems of African Americans. Steele argues that calls for diversity and programs of affirmative action serve only to stigmatize minorities, portraying them not as capable individuals but as people defined by their membership in a group for which exceptions must be made.
Through his articulate analysis and engrossing recollections of the last half-century of American race relations, Steele calls for a new culture of personal responsibility, a commitment to principles that can fill the moral void created by white guilt. White leaders must stop using minorities as a means to establish their moral authority — and black leaders must stop indulging them. As White Guilt eloquently concludes, the alternative is a dangerous ethical relativism that extends beyond race relations into all parts of American life.
Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0060931043
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Pub. Date: October 1999
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Edition Description: 1ST
From the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our Character comes a new essay collection that tells the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today. In A Dream Deferred Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States—the first one being segregation—emerged from the civil rights era when the country was overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame.
According to Steele,1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming goal the expiation of America guilt rather than the careful development of true equality between the races. This “culture of preference” betrayed America’s best principles in order to give whites and America institutions an iconography of racial virtue they could use against the stigma of racial shame. In four densely argued essays, Steele takes on the familiar questions of affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group preferences, victimization—and what he deems to be the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression. A Dream Deferred is an honest, courageous look at the perplexing dilemma of race and democracy in the United States—and what we might do to resolve it.
The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 006097415X
Format: Paperback, 175pp
Pub. Date: September 1991
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
In this controversial essay collection, award-winning writer Shelby Steele illuminates the origins of the current conflict in race relations—the increase in anger, mistrust, and even violence between black and whites. With candor and persuasive argument, he shows us how both black and white Americans have become trapped into seeing color before character, and how social policies designed to lessen racial inequities have instead increased them.
The Content of Our Character is neither “liberal” nor “conservative,” but an honest, courageous look at America’s most enduring and wrenching social dilemma.
* * * * *
THE AGE OF WHITE GUILT
AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE BLACK INDIVIDUAL
By SHELBY STEELE
Harper’s Magazine, 1999-11-30
One day back in the late fifties, when I was ten or eleven years old, there was a moment when I experienced myself as an individual–as a separate consciousness–for the first time. I was walking home from the YMCA, which meant that I was passing out of the white Chicago suburb where the Y was located and crossing Halsted Street back into Phoenix, the tiny black suburb where I grew up. It was a languid summer afternoon, thick with the industrial-scented humidity of south Chicago that I can still smell and feel on my skin, though I sit today only blocks from the cool Pacific and more than forty years removed.
Into Phoenix no more than a block and I was struck by a thought that seemed beyond me. I have tried for years to remember it, but all my effort only pushes it further away. I do remember that it came to me with the completeness of an aphorism, as if the subconscious had already done the labor of crafting it into a fine phrase. What scared me a little at the time was its implication of a separate self with independent thoughts–a distinct self that might distill experience into all sorts of ideas for which I would then be responsible. That feeling of responsibility was my first real experience of myself as an individual–as someone who would have to navigate a separate and unpredictable consciousness through a world I already knew to be often unfair and always tense.
Of course I already knew that I was black, or “Negro,” as we said back then. No secret there. The world had made this fact quite clear by imposing on my life all the elaborate circumscriptions of Chicago-style segregation. Although my mother was white, the logic of segregation meant that I was born in the hospital’s black maternity ward. I grew up in a black neighborhood and walked to a segregated black school as white children in the same district walked to a white school. Kindness in whites always came as a mild surprise and was accepted with a gratitude that I later understood to be a bit humiliating. And there were many racist rejections for which I was only partly consoled by the knowledge that racism is impersonal.
Back then I thought of being black as a fate, as a condition I shared with people as various as Duke Ellington and the odd-job man who plowed the neighborhood gardens with a mule and signed his name with an X. And it is worth noting here that never in my life have I met a true Uncle Tom, a black who identifies with white racism as a truth. The Negro world of that era believed that whites used our race against our individuality and, thus, our humanity. There was no embrace of a Negro identity, because that would have weakened the argument for our humanity. “Negroness” or “blackness” would have collaborated with the racist lie that we were different and, thus, would have been true Uncle Tomism. To the contrary, there was an embrace of the individual and assimilation.
My little experience of myself as an individual confirmed the message of the civil-rights movement itself, in which a favorite picket sign read, simply, “I am a man.” The idea of the individual resonated with Negro freedom–a freedom not for the group but for the individuals who made up the group. And assimilation was not a self-hating mimicry of things white but a mastery by Negro individuals of the modern and cosmopolitan world, a mastery that showed us to be natural members of that world. So my experience of myself as an individual made me one with the group.
Not long ago C-SPAN carried a Harvard debate on affirmative action between conservative reformer Ward Connerly and liberal law professor Christopher Edley. During the Q and A a black undergraduate rose from a snickering clump of black students to challenge Mr. Connerly, who had argued that the time for racial preferences was past. Once standing, this young man smiled unctuously, as if victory were so assured that he must already offer consolation. But his own pose seemed to distract him, and soon he was sinking into incoherence. There was impatience in the room, but it was suppressed. Black students play a role in campus debates like this and they are indulged.
The campus forum of racial confrontation is a ritual that has changed since the sixties in only one way. Whereas blacks and whites confronted one another back then, now black liberals and black conservatives do the confronting while whites look on–relieved, I’m sure–from the bleachers. I used to feel empathy for students like this young man, because they reminded me of myself at that age. Now I see them as figures of pathos. More than thirty years have passed since I did that sort of challenging, and even then it was a waste of time. Today it is perseveration to the point of tragedy.
Here is a brief litany of obvious truths that have been resisted in the public discourse of black America over the last thirty years: a group is no stronger than its individuals; when individuals transform themselves they transform the group; the freer the individual, the stronger the group; social responsibility begins in individual responsibility. Add to this an indisputable fact that has also been unmentionable: that American greatness has a lot to do with a culturally ingrained individualism, with the respect and freedom historically granted individuals to pursue their happiness–this despite many egregious lapses and an outright commitment to the oppression of black individuals for centuries. And there is one last obvious but unassimilated fact: ethnic groups that have asked a lot from their individuals have done exceptionally well in America even while enduring discrimination.
Now consider what this Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in the year 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly points to far less racism and far more freedom and opportunity for blacks, the young man must find a way, against all the mounting facts, to argue that black Americans simply cannot compete without preferences. If his own forebears seized freedom in a long and arduous struggle for civil rights, he must argue that his own generation is unable to compete on paper-and-pencil standardized tests.
It doesn’t help that he locates the cause of black weakness in things like “structural racism” and “uneven playing fields,” because there has been so little correlation between the remedies for such problems and actual black improvement. Blacks from families that make $100,1300 a year or more perform worse on the SAT than whites from families that make $10,000 a year or less. After decades of racial preferences blacks remain the lowest performing student group in American higher education. And once they are out of college and in professions, their own children also underperform in relation to their white and Asian peers. Thus, this young man must also nurture the idea of a black psychological woundedness that is baroque in its capacity to stifle black aspiration. And all his faith, his proud belief, must be in the truth of this woundedness and the injustice that caused it, because this is his only avenue to racial pride. He is a figure of pathos because his faith in racial victimization is his only release from racial shame.
Right after the sixties’ civil-rights victories came what I believe to be the greatest miscalculation in black American history. Others had oppressed us, but this was to be the first “fall” to come by our own hand. We allowed ourselves to see a greater power in America’s liability for our oppression than we saw in ourselves. Thus, we were faithless with ourselves just when we had given ourselves reason to have such faith. We couldn’t have made a worse mistake. We have not been the same since.
To go after America’s liability we had to locate real transformative power outside ourselves. Worse, we had to see our fate as contingent on America’s paying off that liability. We have been a contingent people ever since, arguing our weakness and white racism in order to ignite the engine of white liability. And this has mired us in a protest-group identity that mistrusts individualism because free individuals might jeopardize the group’s effort to activate this liability.
Today I would be encouraged to squeeze my little childhood experience of individuality into a narrow group framework that would not endanger the group’s bid for white intervention. I would be urged to embrace a pattern of reform that represses our best hope for advancement–our individuals–simply to keep whites “on the hook.”
Mr. Connerly was outnumbered and outgunned at that Harvard debate. The consensus finally was that preferences would be necessary for a while longer. Whites would remain “on the hook.” The black student prevailed, but it was a victory against himself. In all that his identity required him to believe, there was no place for him.
In 1961, when I was fifteen years old, my imagination was taken over for some months by the movie Paris Blues, starring Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward. For me this film was first of all an articulation of adult sophistication and deserved to be studied on these grounds alone. The music was by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and the film was set in the jazz world of early-sixties Paris–a city that represented, in the folklore of American Negroes, a nirvana of complete racial freedom. To establish this freedom at the outset, Paul Newman (Ram) makes a pass at Diahann Carroll (Connie) as ffher race means no more to him than the color of her coat. Of course the protocols of segregation return soon enough, and the four stars are paired off by race. But I could not hold this against a film that gave me a chance to watch the beautiful, if prim, Diahann Carroll against a backdrop of Montmartre and the Seine, Paris a little dim for being next to her.
Sidney Poitier’s character (Eddie) has by far the most interesting internal conflict. He has come to Paris–like almost the entire postwar generation of black American artists, musicians, and intellectuals–to develop his talents and live as an individual free of American racism. Eddie finds this in Paris as a jazz musician in Ram’s band, and when he and Connie begin their romance, he is an unapologetic advocate of expatriation for blacks. Paris is freedom; America, interminable humiliation. “I’ll never forget the first time I walked down the Champs-Elysees…. I knew I was here to stay.”
But there is a ghost on his trail. And Connie, the new and true love of his life, embodies that ghost. A teacher on vacation in Paris, she brings him news of the civil-rights movement building momentum back home, and, as their love deepens, she makes it clear that their future together will require his coming home and playing some part in the struggle of his people. She brings him precisely what he has escaped: the priority of group identity over individual freedom. The best acting in the film is Eddie’s impassioned rejection of this priority. He hates America with good reason, and it is impossible to see him as simply selfish. He has already found in Paris the freedom blacks are fighting for back home. And he has found this freedom precisely by thinking of himself as an individual who is free to choose. For him individualism is freedom. And even if blacks won the civil-rights struggle, true freedom would still require individuals to choose for themselves. So by what ethic should he leave the freedom of Paris for the indignities of America?
Clearly no ethic would be enough. But love, on the other hand, is the tie that binds. And when the object of that love is Connie, Eddie begins to see a point in responsibility to the group. But at the very end Eddie does not get on the train out of Paris with Connie. He promises to follow her home as soon as he can arrange his affairs, and it looks like he will be good to his word. But the movie ends on his promise rather than on his action. It is a long time now since 1961, so we can know that Eddie will never have the same degree of individual freedom if he goes back home. If whites don’t use his race against him, they will use it for him. And there are always the pressures of his own group identity. As an individual he will have a hard swim. Thinking of the lovely Connie, some days I root for him to leave. Other days, even thinking of her, I root for him to stay.
The greatest problem in coming from an oppressed group is the power the oppressor has over your group. The second greatest problem is the power your group has over you. Group identity in oppressed groups is always very strategic, always a calculation of advantage. The humble black identity of the Booker T. Washington era–”a little education spoiled many a good plow hand”–allowed blacks to function as tradesmen, laborers, and farmers during the rise of Jim Crow, when hundreds of blacks were being lynched yearly. Likewise, the black militancy of the late sixties strategically aimed for advantage in an America suddenly contrite over its long indulgence in racism.
One’s group identity is always a mask–a mask replete with a politics. When a teenager in East Los Angeles says he is Hispanic, he is thinking of himself within a group strategy pitched at larger America. His identity is related far more to America than to Mexico or Guatemala, where he would not often think of himself as Hispanic. In fact, “Hispanic” is much more a political concept than a cultural one, and its first purpose is to win power within the fray of American identity politics. So this teenager must wear the mask that serves his group’s ambitions in these politics.
With the civil-rights victories, black identity became more carefully calculated around the pursuit of power, because black power was finally possible in America. So, as the repressions of racism receded, the repressions of group identity grew more intense for blacks. Even in Paris, Connie uses the censoring voice of the group: “Things are much better than they were five years ago … not because Negroes come to Paris but because Negroes stay home.” Here the collective identity is the true identity, and individual autonomy a mere affectation.
If Paris Blues ends without Eddie’s actual return to America, we can witness such a return in the life of a real-life counterpart to Eddie, the black American writer James Baldwin. In the late forties, Baldwin went to Paris, like his friend and mentor Richard Wright, to escape America’s smothering racism and to find himself as a writer and as an individual. He succeeded dramatically and quickly on both counts. His first novel, the minor masterpiece Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 and was quickly followed by another novel and two important essay collections.
It was clearly the remove of Europe that gave Baldwin the room to find his first important theme: self-acceptance. In a Swiss mountain village in winter, against an “absolutely alabaster landscape” and listening to Bessie Smith records, he accepts that he is black, gay, talented, despised by his father, and haunted by a difficult childhood. From this self-acceptance emerges an individual voice and one of the most unmistakable styles in American writing.
Then, in 1957, Baldwin did something that changed him–and his writing–forever. He came home to America. He gave up the psychological remove of Europe and allowed himself to become once again fully accountable as a black American. And soon, in blatant contradiction of his own powerful arguments against protest writing, he became a protest writer. There is little doubt that this new accountability weakened him greatly as an artist. Nothing he wrote after the early sixties had the human complexity, depth, or literary mastery of what he wrote in those remote European locales where children gawked at him for his color.
The South African writer Nadine Gordimer saw the black writer in her own country as conflicted between “a deep, intense, private view” on the one hand and the call to be a spokesman for his people on the other. This classic conflict–common to writers from oppressed groups around the world–is really a conflict of authority. In Europe, Baldwin enjoyed exclusive authority over his own identity. When he came back to America, he did what in Western culture is anathema to the artist: he submitted his artistic vision–his “private view”–to the authority of his group. From The Fire Next Time to the end of his writing life, he allowed protest to be the framing authority of his work.
What Baldwin did was perhaps understandable, because his group was in a pitched battle for its freedom. The group had enormous moral authority, and he had a splendid rhetorical gift the group needed. Baldwin was transformed in the sixties into an embodiment of black protest, an archetypal David–frail, effeminate, brilliant–against a brutish and stupid American racism. He became a celebrity writer on the American scene, a charismatic presence with huge, penetrating eyes that were fierce and vulnerable at the same time. People who had never read him had strong opinions about him. His fame was out of proportion to his work, and if all this had been limited to Baldwin himself, it might be called the Baldwin phenomenon. But, in fact, his ascendancy established a pattern that would broadly define, and in many ways corrupt, an entire generation of black intellectuals, writers, and academics. And so it must be called the Baldwin model.
The goal of the Baldwin model is to link one’s intellectual reputation to the moral authority–the moral glamour–of an oppressed group’s liberation struggle. In this way one ceases to be a mere individual with a mere point of view and becomes, in effect, the embodiment of a moral imperative. This is rarely done consciously, as a Faustian bargain in which the intellectual knowingly sells his individual soul to the group. Rather the group identity is already a protest-focused identity, and the intellectual simply goes along with it. Adherence to the Baldwin model is usually more a sin of thoughtlessness and convenience than of conscious avarice, though it is always an appropriation of moral power, a stealing of thunder.
The protest intellectual positions himself in the pathway of the larger society’s march toward racial redemption. By allowing his work to be framed by the protest identity, he articulates the larger society’s moral liability. He seems, therefore, to hold the key to how society must redeem itself. Baldwin was called in to advise Bobby Kennedy on the Negro situation. It is doubtful that the Baldwin of Go Tell It on the Mountain would have gotten such a call. But the Baldwin of The Fire Next Time probably expected it. Ralph Ellison, a contemporary of Baldwin’s who rejected the black protest identity but whose work showed a far deeper understanding of black culture than Baldwin’s, never had this sort of access to high places. By insisting on his individual autonomy as an artist, Ellison was neither inflated with the moral authority of his group’s freedom struggle nor positioned in the pathway of America’s redemption.
Today the protest identity is a career advantage for an entire generation of black intellectuals, particularly academics who have been virtually forced to position themselves in the path of their university’s obsession with “diversity.” Inflation from the moral authority of protest, added to the racialpreference policies in so many American institutions, provides an irresistible incentive for black America’s best minds to continue defining themselves by protest. Professors who resist the Baldwin model risk the Ellisonian fate of invisibility.
What happened in America to make the Baldwin model possible?
The broad answer is this: America moved from its long dark age of racism into an age of white guilt. I saw this shift play out in my own family.
I grew up watching my parents live out an almost perpetual protest against racial injustice. When I was five or six we drove out of our segregated neighborhood every Sunday morning to carry out the grimly disciplined business of integrating a lily-white church in the next town. Our family was a little off-color island of quiet protest amidst rows of pinched white faces. And when that battle was lost there was a long and successful struggle to create Chicago’s first fully integrated church. And from there it was on to the segregated local school system, where my parents organized a boycott against the elementary school that later incurred the first desegregation lawsuit in the North.
Amidst all this protest, I could see only the price people were paying. I saw my mother’s health start to weaken. I saw the white minister who encouraged us to integrate his church lose his job. There was a time when I was sent away to stay with family friends until things “cooled down.” Black protest had no legitimacy in broader America in the 1950s. It was subversive, something to be repressed, and people who indulged in it were made to pay.
And then there came the sunny day in the very late sixties when I leaned into the window of my parents’ old powder-blue Rambler and, inches from my mother’s face, said wasn’t it amazing that I was making $13,500 a year. They had come to visit me on my first job out of college, and had just gotten into the car for their return trip. I saw my mistake even as the words tumbled out. My son’s pride had blinded me to my parents’ feelings. This was four or five thousand dollars more than either of them had ever made in a single year. I had learned the year before that my favorite professor–a full professor with two books to his credit–had fought hard for a raise to $10,000 a year. Thirteen five implied a different social class, a different life than we had known as a family.
“Congratulations,” they said. “That’s very nice.”
The subtext of this role reversal was President Johnson’s Great Society, and beneath that an even more profound shift in the moral plates of society. The year was 1969, and I was already employed in my fourth Great Society program–three Upward Bound programs and now a junior college-level program called Experiment in Higher Education, in East St. Louis, Illinois. America was suddenly spending vast millions to end poverty “in our time,” and, as it was for James Baldwin on his return from Paris, the timing was perfect for me.
I was chosen for my first Upward Bound job because I was the leader of the campus civil-rights group. This engagement with black protest suddenly constituted a kind of aptitude, in my employers, minds, for teaching disadvantaged kids. It inflated me into a person who was gifted with young people. The protesting that had gotten me nowhere when I started college was serving me as well as an advanced degree by the time I was a senior.
Two great, immutable forces have driven America’s attitudes, customs, and public policies around race. The first has been white racism, and the second has been white guilt. The civil-rights movement was the dividing line between the two. Certainly there was some guilt before this movement, and no doubt some racism remains after it. But the great achievement of the civil-rights movement was that its relentless moral witness finally defeated the legitimacy of racism as propriety–a principle of social organization, manners, and customs that defines decency itself. An idea controls culture when it achieves the invisibility of propriety. And it must be remembered that racism was a propriety, a form of decency. When, as a boy, I was prohibited from entering the fine Christian home of the occasional white playmate, it was to save the household an indecency. Today, thanks to the civil-rights movement, white guilt is propriety–an utterly invisible code that defines decency in our culture with thousands of little protocols we no longer even think about. We have been living in an age of white guilt for four decades now.
What is white guilt? It is not a personal sense of remorse over past wrongs. White guilt is literally a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality, and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America’s historical racism. It is the stigmatization of whites and, more importantly, American institutions with the sin of racism. Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative–that they are not racist–to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity. If they fail to prove the negative, they will be seen as racists. Political correctness, diversity policies, and multiculturalism are forms of deference that give whites and institutions a way to prove the negative and win reprieve from the racist stigma.
Institutions especially must be proactive in all this. They must engineer a demonstrable racial innocence to garner enough authority for simple legitimacy in the American democracy. No university today, private or public, could admit students by academic merit alone if that meant no black or brown faces on campus. Such a university would be seen as racist and shunned accordingly. White guilt has made social engineering for black and brown representation a condition of legitimacy.
People often deny white guilt by pointing to its irrationality–”I never owned a slave,” “My family got here eighty years after slavery was over.” But of course almost nothing having to do with race is rational. That whites are now stigmatized by their race is not poetic justice; it is simply another echo of racism’s power to contaminate by mere association.
The other common denial of white guilt has to do with motive: “I don’t support affirmative action because I’m guilty; I support it because I want to do what’s fair.” But the first test of sincere support is a demand that the policy be studied for effectiveness. Affirmative action went almost completely unexamined for thirty years and has only recently been briefly studied in a highly politicized manner now that it is under threat. The fact is that affirmative action has been a very effective racial policy in garnering moral authority and legitimacy for institutions, and it is now institutions–not individual whites or blacks–that are fighting to keep it alive.
The real difference between my parents and myself was that they protested in an age of white racism and I protested in an age of white guilt. They were punished; I was rewarded. By my time, moral authority around race had become a great and consuming labor for America. Everything from social programs to the law, from the color of TV sitcom characters to the content of school curricula, from college admissions to profiling for terrorists–every aspect of our culture–now must show itself redeemed of the old national sin. Today you cannot credibly run for president without an iconography of white guilt: the backdrop of black children, the Spanish-language phrases, the word “compassion” to separate conservatism from its associations with racism.
So then here you are, a black American living amidst all this. Every institution you engage–the government, universities, corporations, public and private schools, philanthropies, churches–faces you out of a deficit of moral authority. Your race is needed everywhere. How could you avoid the aggressions, and even the bigotries, of white guilt? What institution could you walk into without having your color tallied up as a credit to the institution? For that matter, what political party or ideological direction could you pursue without your race being plundered by that party or ideology for moral authority?
Because blacks live amidst such hunger for the moral authority of their race, we embraced protest as a permanent identity in order to capture the fruits of white guilt on an ongoing basis. Again, this was our first fall by our own hand. Still, it is hard to imagine any group of individuals coming out of four centuries of oppression and not angling their identity toward whatever advantage seemed available. White guilt held out the promise of a preferential life in recompense for past injustice, and the protest identity seemed the best way to keep that promise alive.
An obvious problem here is that we blacks fell into a group identity that has absolutely no other purpose than to collect the fruits of white guilt. And so the themes of protest–a sense of grievance and victimization–evolved into a sensibility, an attitude toward the larger world that enabled us always and easily to feel the grievance whether it was there or not. Protest became the mask of identity, because it defined us in a way that kept whites “on the hook.” Today the angry rap singer and Jesse Jackson and the black-studies professor are all joined by an unexamined devotion to white guilt.
To be black in my father’s generation, when racism was rampant, was to be a man who was very often victimized by racism. To be black in the age of white guilt is to be a victim who is very rarely victimized by racism. Today in black life there is what might be called “identity grievance”–a certainty of racial grievance that is entirely disconnected from actual grievance. And the fervor of this symbiosis with white guilt has all but killed off the idea of the individual as a source of group strength in black life. All is group and unity, even as those minority groups that ask much of their individuals thrive in America despite any discrimination they encounter.
I always thought that James Baldwin on some level knew that he had lost himself to protest. His work grew narrower and narrower when age and experience should have broadened it. And, significantly, he spent the better part of his last decades in France, where he died in 1987. Did he again need France in those years to be himself, to be out from under the impossible demands of a symbiotically defined black identity, to breathe on his own?
There is another final and terrible enemy of the black individual. I first saw it in that Great Society program in which my salary was so sweetened by white guilt. The program itself quickly slid into banana republic–style corruption, and I was happy to get away to graduate-student poverty. But on the way out certain things became clear. The program was not so much a program as it was an idea of the social “good,” around which there was an intoxicating enthusiasm. It was my first experience with the utter thrill of untested good intentions. On the way out I realized that thrill had been the point. That feeling is what we sent back to Washington, where it was received as an end in itself.
Now I know that white guilt is a moral imperative that can be satisfied by good intentions alone. In my own lifetime, racial reform in America changed from a struggle for freedom to a struggle for “the good.” A new metaphysics of the social good replaced the principles of freedom. Suddenly “diversity,” “inclusion,” “tolerance,” “pluralism,” and “multiculturalism” were all conjure words that aligned you with a social good so compelling that you couldn’t leave it to mere freedom. In certain circumstances freedom could be the outright enemy of “the good.” If you want a “diverse” student body at your university, for example, the individualistic principles of freedom might be a barrier. So usually “the good” has to be imposed from above out of a kind of moral imperialism by a well-meaning white elite.
In the sixties, black identity also shifted its focus from freedom to “the good” to better collect the fruits of white guilt. Thus it was a symbiosis of both white and black need that pushed racial reform into a totalitarian model where schemes of “the good” are imposed by coercion at the expense of freedom. The Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera says that every totalitarianism is “also the dream of paradise.” And when people seem to stand in its way, the rulers “build a little gulag on the side of Eden.” In this good-driven age of white guilt, with all its paradises of diversity, a figurative gulag has replaced freedom’s tradition of a respected and loyal opposition. Conservatives are automatically relegated to this gulag because of their preference for freedom over ideas of “the good.”
But there is another “little gulag” for the black individual. He lives in a society that needs his race for the good it wants to do more than it needs his individual self. His race makes him popular with white institutions and unifies him with blacks. But he is unsupported everywhere as an individual. Nothing in his society asks for or even allows his flowering as a full, free, and responsible person. As is always the case when “the good” becomes ascendant over freedom, and coercion itself becomes a good thing, the individual finds himself in a gulag.
Something happened at Harvard last fall that provides a rare window into all of this. Harvard’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, rebuked the famous black-studies professor Cornel West for essentially being a lightweight on a campus of heavyweights. These were not his words, but there is little doubt that this was his meaning. West himself has said that he felt “devalued” and “disrespected” in the now famous meeting between the two.
The facts are all on Summers’s side. West’s achievements are simply not commensurate with his position as a University Professor, the very highest rank a member of an already esteemed faculty can ascend to–a rank normally reserved for Nobel-level accomplishment. West had spent the previous year on leave making a rap CD and chairing Al Sharpton’s presidential exploration committee. Privately–that is, behind the mask of the protest identity–few serious black academics saw West much differently than Summers did. Even publicly, where the mask is mandatory, he was never more than “officially” defended.
But Harvard itself had created the monster. Harvard did not promote Cornel West to a University Professorship because his academic work was seminal. Cornel West brought to campus the special charisma of the black protest identity–not, of course, in its unadorned street incarnation but dressed up in a three-piece suit and muted by an impenetrable academese that in the end said almost nothing and scared no one. This was not someone akin to the young Eldridge Cleaver, who had a real fire and could really write but who also might be rather difficult in and around Harvard Square. With Cornel you could sit the black protest identity down to dinner amidst the fine china and pretty girls from tony suburbs and everyone would be so thrilled.
Here, in the University Professorship, white guilt and black protest perfectly consummated their bargain. It was never Cornel West–the individual–that Harvard wanted; it was the defanged protest identity that he carried, which redounded to the university as racial innocence itself. How could anyone charge this university with racism when it promoted Cornel West to its upper reaches? His marginal accomplishments only made the gesture more grand. West was not at Harvard to do important work; he was there precisely to be promoted over his head. In the bold irrationality of the promotion was the daring display of racial innocence.
What Lawrence Summers did not understand, when he became Harvard’s new president, was that West was an important part of the institution’s iconography of racial innocence. Or maybe he did understand and wanted to challenge this way of doing things. In any case, he did the unthinkable: He saw West as an individual. Thus, he did not confuse the charisma of the protest identity with real achievement.
His rebuke of West caused an explosion, because it broke faith with the symbiotic enmeshment of white guilt and black protest. West has now left Harvard for Princeton, where this enmeshment prevails unthreatened by ham-fisted administrators who might inadvertently see their black moral-authority hires as individuals. Summers himself–as if fresh from re-education camp–has apologized to West and professed his support for affirmative action. The age of white guilt, with its myriad corruptions and its almost racist blindness to minority individuality, may someday go down like the age of racism went down–but only if people take the risk of standing up to it rather than congratulating themselves for doing things that have involved no real risk since 1965.
I know Cornel West to be a good man, whose grace and good manners even with people he disagrees with have been instructive to me. As contemporaries, we have both had to find our way in this age of white guilt. As educated blacks, we have both had to wrestle against the relentless moral neediness of American institutions, though I’m sure he wouldn’t see it that way. I saw the way race inflated people like us back in those Great Society programs I mentioned, and it was my good luck to enter them when the corruptions were so blatant that it was mere self-preservation to walk away.
One of my assignments in that last program was to help design some of the country’s very first black-studies programs, and by 1970 I already knew that they would always lack the most fundamental raison d’etre of any academic discipline: a research methodology of their own. This meant that black studies could never be more than an assemblage of courses cobbled together from “real” departments, and that it could never have more than a political mandate–a perfect formula for academic disrespect. But, as I say, it was luck to learn this early, before white guilt became infinitely more subtle and seductive.
In the age of racism there were more powerful black intellectuals, because nobody wanted them for their race. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and many others were fully developed, self-made individuals, no matter their various political and ideological bents. Race was not a “talent” that falsely inflated them or won them high position. Today no black intellectual in America, including this writer, is safe from this sort of inflation. The white world is simply too hungry for the moral authority our skins carry. And this is true on both the political left and right. Why did so many black churches have to be the backdrop for Clinton speeches, and why should Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell have to hear Bush crow about their high place among his advisers?
James Baldwin once wrote: “What Europe still gives an American is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself.” If America now gives this sanction to most citizens, its institutions still fiercely deny it to blacks. And this society will never sanction blacks in this way until it drops all the mechanisms by which it tries to appease white guilt. Guilt can be a very civilizing force, but only when it is simply carried as a kind of knowledge. Efforts to appease or dispel it will only engage the society in new patterns of dehumanization against the same people who inspired guilt in the first place. This will always be true.
Restraint should be the watchword in racial matters. We should help people who need help. There are, in fact, no races that need help; only individuals, citizens. Over time maybe nothing in the society, not even white guilt, will reach out and play on my race, bind me to it for opportunity. I won’t ever find in America what Baldwin found in Europe, but someday maybe others will.
* * * * *
THE FIRST AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CANDIDATE
By JOSEPH PRUDER
FrontPageMagazine.com | 2008-01018
Shelby Steele, an African-American research fellow at Stanford University Hoover Institute and author of White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era pointed out that, “By the mid-sixties White Guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of Black leadership, not selfless men like Martin Luther King who appealed to the nation’s moral character but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers, and haranguers – not moralists but specialists in moral indignation – who would set up a trade with White Guilt.”
Barack Hussein Obama is different from previous African-American presidential contenders – he understands that the key to the U.S. presidency and power is making deals with the White-American establishment. Unlike Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, characterized by Shelby Steele as “bluffers and haranguers,” and, one might add, extortionists who trade in White guilt for personal gain, Obama is more of a “bargainer.” His appeal to White America is that he is not overtly trading on White guilt but at the same time he and his aides know that White America seeks moral legitimacy, and his bargain is in promising to provide such legitimacy in exchange for power. It is far more sophisticated a bargain than previous Black leaders have had with White America.
To the adoring eyes of the liberal mass media, Obama is the closest expression of a rock star, if not a “black messiah.” While every white candidate is scrutinized and criticized, Obama remains “beyond criticism.” Had any white candidate, with less than three years experience in the national arena declared himself a candidate for the presidency, especially at the tender age of 46, he/she would have been ridiculed. The media’s collective white guilt with its derivative of “political correctness,” does not seek articulation on policy or substance from Obama. It does not demand answers as to how he would tackle Iran’s terrorist aggression and nuclear pursuits, or ideas on how to grow the U.S. economy? His generalized “vision” is sufficient for the liberal media. The white liberal media would love a black president in order to end the perceived stigma of white institutional racism – a way to cleanse the soul and regain moral legitimacy.
There is little difference between the rhetoric of Obama and the white candidates. They all speak of hope and change. Why should Obama’s words be more believable, legitimate or acceptable? The answer is white guilt.
American institutions tainted with white guilt are ready to dispense with justice for what they perceive as the higher goal of attaining moral legitimacy. The charge of racism in contemporary America is probably the most intimidating, if not the most ruinous, to white people’s careers. The case of O.J. Simpson illustrated to perfection how America has gone from one extreme to the other. Shelby Steele writes, “In 1955 the murderers of Emmet Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly because they were white. Forty years later, O.J. Simpson, who many thought would be charged with the murder of his white wife and Ron Goldman, by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, was also acquitted after his black attorney (Johnny Cochran) portrayed him as a victim of racism.”
Steele observed that, “Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist…Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until proven otherwise.” Political parties and universities “not only declare their devotion to diversity but also use racial preferences to increase the visibility of minorities so as to refute the racist stigma,” Steele added. This is especially apparent within the Democratic Party, where support for racial preferences is widespread and pandering to African-Americans votes is routine.
The blind support and almost universal cheering of college students for Obama is a by-product of years of indoctrination on college campuses (especially Ivy League universities) under the stern eyes of faculty and administrative “political correctors,” who bar the teaching of Western Civilization and bash Europeans as imperialists, oppressors and racists. It seems as if American college students have been groomed to cheer a black presidential candidate thereby providing them with a small measure of ablution from their “racist sins.” Unfortunately, they were not trained to apply universal moral standards and sound judgment when analyzing issues and individuals. Rather, their worldview is seen through the limited prism of white guilt. The outcome of which is that white America, Europe and Israel are tainted with sin, and blacks, Muslims and those of the third-world are victims, and therefore virtuous regardless of their actions or motivations.
America, it appears to Shelby Steele, is governed by this “white guilt” and, it is destructive to blacks and whites alike. “Whites and American institutions” he argues, “live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism. This is a formula that locks whites into publicly supporting affirmative action even as they privately dislike it.”
It also stigmatizes black excellence.
Can you imagine proclamations posted on the church websites of the white presidential candidates (Protestant or Catholic), proclaiming that they are “unashamedly white?” Seems Obama’s pastor; Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the Chicago Trinity United Church (of which Obama has been a member of since 1988) is quoted as stating that he is “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.” Rev. Wright, whom Obama credits with being the inspiration for his book, The Audacity of Hope, subscribes to what he calls the “Black Value System.” Does Obama also subscribe to this value system? Obama has distanced himself from Wright’s decision to present an award to Louis Farrakhan, but he has not otherwise distanced himself from this black radical pastor.
Obama’s revered pastor considers “Middle Classness” (which Obama claims to extol) a way for American (white) society to “snare” blacks rather than “killing them off directly or placing them in concentration camps.” In sermons and interviews, Wright has claimed that Zionism equals racism and has equated Israel with apartheid-era South Africa. Following 9/11, Wright charged that the attack on America was a consequence of violent American policies, and later suggested that the murder of 3,000 Americans was “retribution for America’s racism.” At the kick-off of Obama’s presidential campaign on February 10, 2007, Wright was asked to stay away. He responded: “When Obama’s enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit Col. Muammer el-Qaddafi with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in Hell.”
Obama’s pastor Rev. Wright is a race-monger, but you will not discover that from the mainstream liberal media. What you will find in the liberal media is an unrestrained attack on Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion, but little about the racism and anti-Semitism of Rev. Wright. Obama’s brilliant academic background will be extolled, while, for example, Romney’s extensive experience in government and business will be downplayed.
In the final analysis one must ask the simple question: In a color-blind society, devoid of white guilt, does an inexperienced, untried, albeit bright contender like Obama, deserve to be president in contrast to Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudi Giuliani – candidates who are equally as bright and have far greater experience? To vote on any other basis would be racist.
* * * * *
Obama’s Gordian Knot
The candidate’s politics are entangled in racial contradiction, says Shelby Steele.
14 December 2007
“I am rooted in the African-American community,” Barack Obama told 60 Minutes earlier this year. “But I’m not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity . . . but that’s not the core of who I am.”
“My only trick as a writer,” Shelby Steele wrote in his book White Guilt, “has been to write about America without the schizophrenia imposed on blacks by the culture war. I don’t have to ‘protect’ blacks or any other group by pretending that certain self-serving lies (‘systemic’ racism remains a barrier) are true. . . . It is the rare black who gets to live without the world expecting him to pretend.”
Steele and Obama make a compelling pair. Both children of interracial marriages, they have carved out unique places in America’s racial landscape. Obama, of course, is a black presidential candidate who, unlike his predecessors in that effort (Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton), could conceivably win. Steele is America’s bravest and most eloquent racial commentator; he views American race relations as an existential struggle for moral innocence. In his telling, blacks, by virtue of their history of oppression, claim victimhood as a source of political power. As the historically wronged group, they can collect on grievance by exploiting white guilt. For whites, the quest for racial redemption often leads to a kind of narcissistic selfishness. White liberals, in particular, favor racial policies that preserve their own sense of goodness, even if these policies’ effectiveness, let alone justice, is dubious. The result is a fundamentally corrupt racial dialogue.
In his new book, Steele brings this distinctive perspective to the Obama phenomenon. A Bound Man manages to combine some of the philosophical sweep of Steele’s previous work with a focus on one individual’s character and thinking. Obama’s candidacy has sparked excitement, Steele writes, both because of its plausibility – he is a legitimate contender for the Democratic nomination, not a mere protest candidate – and because it symbolizes “the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference.” And yet, notwithstanding this sense of what Steele calls “high possibility,” Obama is “bound” between the two competing pressures that hold blacks today: the need for belonging within the racial group, which requires that he cultivate his “blackness” and to some degree adopt the language of victimization; and the need to be true to himself, which requires rejecting the crippling and false premises of victimization and Afrocentrism and acknowledging his broader humanity. In Obama’s case, that humanity is broad indeed, as he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and was raised largely by his white mother, who emphasized not bloodlines but self-reliance.
Steele is clearly sympathetic with Obama. He identifies with Obama’s struggle as a young man to understand his racial identity, complicated further by his black father’s abandonment of the family when Barack was only two. He has high regard for Obama’s first memoir, Dreams from My Father, which he likens to a novel for its narrative power and anguished psychological probing—and which probably predates Obama’s recognition of his larger political ambitions.
Obama’s struggle to define himself is made more difficult by the confining pressures of racial identity in America, and specifically by what Steele calls the two “masks” that black Americans have typically worn when dealing with whites: challenging and bargaining. Challengers, he writes, assume that “whites are incorrigibly racist until they do something to prove otherwise.” They put whites on the defensive and make demands in return for retracting the accusation of racism: think Jackson and Sharpton. Bargainers like Obama, on the other hand, give whites the benefit of the doubt and say, “I will not use America’s horrible history of white racism against you, if you will promise not to use my race against me.” What both postures have in common is a belief in some degree of white responsibility for black progress. Where challengers threaten consequences if that responsibility isn’t met, bargainers are more collaborative and assume that whites want to help.
The quintessential bargainers, Steele writes, are Oprah Winfrey—now on the campaign trail for Obama—and before her, Bill Cosby. But Cosby, after a lifetime of wearing the bargainer’s mask, tossed it aside and began speaking a forbidden truth in recent years about black inner-city crime and the indispensable role of personal responsibility. As a result, Steele writes, Cosby lost his iconic cultural status, and “no longer sells Jell-O, or anything else, on national television.” Not only did Cosby infuriate many blacks, who felt that he was blaming the victim, but he also denied whites the role that they currently enjoy in the narrative of black progress—moral accomplices who, in overcoming their shameful history, can redeem their souls. “Black responsibility is verboten,” Steele writes, “because it snuffs out the market for white innocence.” Steele argues that if Obama were to take Cosby’s path, he would suffer a similar fate, because “white Americans would no longer see the possibility of their own racial innocence in him.”
The only way, then, that Obama can maintain his appeal to whites is to hold out the promise of redemption, a message of healing that promises a moral partnership with whites in finishing the work of black uplift; and the only way he can maintain standing with blacks is to offer enough suggestions of challenging, of being “authentically” black, to convince them that he is not letting whites off the hook. If he sounds too much like a challenger, he will drive whites away; yet if he seems too free of racial resentment, he risks his membership in the black community, already fraught by virtue of his mixed racial heritage and his instinctively magnanimous bargainer’s personality.
For the first time in reading one of Steele’s books, I felt that he was imposing abstractions on a messy world. While Steele articulates complex racial dynamics as brilliantly as ever, his formulation is deterministic, ascribing a seeming immutability to these forces that denies the individual agency that he otherwise so firmly upholds. Rather than rejecting Obama if he starts talking about black responsibility, whites, it’s easy to imagine, might rejoice in a black candidate who speaks this language—which many whites, for fear of being called racist, feel they can use only among themselves. Steele does not consider the possibility that whites might receive the talk about black responsibility not as a denial of their innocence, but as a confirmation of it (which might well cause other problems).
Of course, the racial dynamic that Obama must master is not the only obstacle he faces: in the harsh world of politics, he is contending with a ruthless, well-funded opponent and attempting to win over voters who are scrutinizing his ideas, experience, and political viability. In Steele’s narrative, though, Obama’s effort is so subsumed within the conflict of challenging and bargaining, so overwhelmed by the struggle for an authentic black identity and the complex existential choices that it offers blacks and whites, that his actual candidacy is a dim shadow in a thick mist.
Steele does note, accurately enough, that Obama “is decidedly not a conviction politician. His supporters do not look to him to do something; they look to him primarily to be something, to represent something.” Indeed, Obama’s apparently unscotchable appetite for platitude has encouraged a soaring rhetoric that reveals almost nothing about his actual ideas. His voting record is much more consistently left-wing than his NutraSweet slogans of unity would suggest. Woefully inexperienced, Obama is a presidential candidate, Steele suggests, because of “his power to enthrall whites.” Even so, he is polling well and raising money—indeed, putting fear into Hillary Clinton’s campaign. If it was safe to dismiss his chances in February, when he announced his candidacy, it is less so now, three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, where some polls show him in the lead. Something seems to be happening out there.
Steele isn’t buying. His final assessment is blunt: Obama “is a bound man because he cannot be two opposing worldviews at the same time—he cannot grant whites their racial innocence and simultaneously withhold it from them.” To which one is tempted to reply, with apologies to Jay Gatsby: “Can’t be two things at once? Why of course he can!” The country Obama proposes to lead embodies duality; its circles are never squared. That Obama could represent opposed ideas to opposed groups, that he could veer between representations at different points on the campaign trail—as Steele points out, he is already doing this—and that he might be able to win the presidency in just this fashion is not so implausible. Think of it as the political equivalent of what Keats called Negative Capability: “That is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” A serious black presidential candidate in the U.S. will, almost by definition, conduct his politics within a contradictory space.
Neat, platonic categories of analysis tend not to fare too well in American life, where surprises are common; that Obama has come this far has already surprised most hardened political observers. Yet Steele, the great voice of black individualism, seems closed to the possibility of transformation as the Obama story unfolds. He overlooks the defining feature of our culture—its relentless, grinding pace of change. That pace leaves logical abstractions, even those involving race, in mangled heaps, trampled on by events that we are always attempting to understand and predict, with vision that is nearsighted at best.
Paul Beston is associate editor of City Journal.
