White Guilt

Shelby Steele

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061868467
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Not unlike some of Ralph Ellison's or Richard Wright's best work. White Guilt, a serious meditation on vital issues, deserves a wide readership." — Cleveland Plain Dealer

In 1955 the killers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted because they were white. Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. The age of white supremacy has given way to an age of white guilt—and neither has been good for African Americans.

Through articulate analysis and engrossing recollections, acclaimed race relations scholar Shelby Steele sounds a powerful call for a new culture of personal responsibility.

PART ONE

THE STORY OF WHITE GUILT

1

A DILEMMA

Sometimes it is a banality—something a little sad and laughable—that makes you aware of a deep cultural change. On some level you already knew it, so that when the awareness comes, there is more recognition than surprise. Yes, of course, things have changed.

So it was not long after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal began that it occurred to me that race had dramatically changed the terms by which political power is won and held in America. When I woke on that January morning to the sight of President Clinton wagging his finger on the morning news and saying “I never had sex with that woman,” I thought two things: that he was lying and that he would be out of office within two weeks. It was a month later that I realized not only that he might survive his entire term but also that his survival, even for a month, already spoke volumes about the moral criterion for holding power in the United States.

I came to this realization on a drive back to northern California from Los Angeles with the scandal keeping me company on the car radio. A commentator said that President Eisenhower would not have survived a single day had he been caught in circumstances similar to President Clinton’s. Having grown up in the fifties, I thought this was probably true, and this is when the deep cultural shift became clear.

I seemed to remember—in the way that one vaguely remembers gossip about the famous—someone once telling me that Eisenhower occasionally used the word “nigger” on the golf course. Maybe he did; maybe he didn’t. In that era we blacks fully assumed that whites in all stations of life used this word at least in private. However, I cannot imagine that a reporter in that era, overhearing Eisenhower speak in this way, would have seen it as anything more than jocular bad taste. Certainly no one would have questioned his fitness to hold office. Yet, if an affair with a young female intern had exploded in the national media, with details of secret retreats off the Oval Office, thongs, cigars, etc., there is little doubt that 1950s America would have judged him morally unfit to hold power. It was taken for granted in that gray-flannel era that public trust had to be reciprocated by a rigorous decorum around sexual matters, even if that decorum was the very face of hypocrisy.

Yet, on that long drive talk-show callers passionately argued that private indiscretions were no bar to public trust, that what Clinton did in his private life had no bearing on his ability to run the country. It was unapologetic moral relativism—the idea that sexual morality is relative only to the consent of the individuals involved, and that there is no other authority or moral code larger than their choice. In the voices of many callers you could hear this expressed as a kind of pride. Relativism spares us from far worse sins, they seemed to be saying, those greatest of all sins for my baby-boomer generation—judgmentalism and hypocrisy.

All this drew me back to my college days in the sixties when we would sit around in the student union, smoking French cigarettes and arguing that monogamy was a passé bourgeois convention. Of course it was an adolescent argument of perfectly transparent wishful thinking, since beneath all the big ideas—at least for us boys—was the fervent hope that the girls would actually believe it. There was a lot of lust in this kind of thinking—lust everywhere in baby-boomer thinking—and over time it became part of the generational license that opened the way for a sexual revolution. But it was jarring these many decades later—so deep now into adult life—to hear such thinking hauled out in defense of the president of the United States.

But then something occurred to me. I wondered if President Clinton would be defended with relativism if he had done what, according to gossip, Eisenhower was said to have done. Suppose that in a light moment he had slipped into a parody of an old Arkansas buddy from childhood and, to get the voice right, used the word “nigger” a few times. Suppose further that a tape of this came to light so that all day long in the media—from the unctuous morning shows to the freewheeling late-night shows to the news every half hour on radio—we would hear the unmistakable presidential voice saying, “Take your average nigger…”

Today in America there is no moral relativism around racism, no sophisticated public sentiment that recasts racism as a mere quirk of character. Today America is puritanical rather than relativistic around racism, and if Clinton had been caught in this way, it is very likely that nothing would have saved him. The very legitimacy of the American democracy in this post–civil rights era now requires a rigid, if not repressive, morality of racial equality. A contribution of the civil rights movement was to establish the point that a multiracial society cannot be truly democratic unless social equality itself becomes a matter of personal morality. So a president’s “immorality” in this area would pretty much cancel his legitimacy as a democratic leader.

The point is that President Clinton survived what would certainly have destroyed President Eisenhower, and Eisenhower could easily have survived what would almost certainly have destroyed Clinton. Each man, finally, was no more than indiscreet within the moral landscape of his era (again, Eisenhower’s indiscretion is hypothetical here for purposes of discussion). Neither racism in the fifties nor womanizing in the nineties was a profound enough sin to undermine completely the moral authority of a president. So it was the good luck of each president to sin into the moral relativism of his era rather than into its puritanism. And, interestingly, the moral relativism of one era was the puritanism of the other. Race simply replaced sex as the primary focus of America’s moral seriousness.

Just out of Los Angeles I decided to set myself the task of exploring this dilemma on the long drive up to Monterey and home. The idea of driving with a mental task was appealing. Maybe the physics of plunging ahead through time and space would give motion and focus to my thoughts. I had been thinking a lot about white guilt just as the Clinton scandal broke. And now I thought this phenomenon might have something to do with the little dilemma I wanted to explore.

But what about form? In the nineteenth century there was a narrative form called the Chautauqua, a kind of narrative lecture through a subject or dilemma that people would listen to for hours, a little longer even than we spend at movies today. There was always an interplay of theme and pertinent digression, and the faith was that digression would bring fuller understanding. Maybe this form would do, with a little of the personal journal thrown in. I could move through two landscapes at the same time—one of coastline, small charming towns, and lush wintergreen coastal mountains; the other of memory and thought. All I really needed was something I had already procured: two Starbucks double espressos and a bottled water.

Conventional wisdom says that the America I was driving through on that sunny winter morning had been in moral decline since the sixties—almost everyone’s idea of when the American character began its denouement. And there is much evidence to support this wisdom. Since then divorce, illegitimacy, single-parent homes, drug use, and crime have gone up greatly. Marriage rates, levels of academic performance, church attendance, reading, and voting have all gone down. “Declinism” is now a kind of postmodern ideology in certain circles and an academic subject in others.

But something else was also true about America, something that became clear to me as I turned off Highway 101 into San Luis Obispo for a bite to eat. Cruising into the town proper, I experienced what might be called a “segregation flashback.” I remembered cruising into another town, decades earlier, on a trip from Chicago to Kentucky with my father to visit relatives. Just off the highway we did what we always did upon entering a new town—what we had to do before any of our personal needs could be met. We went in search of a black person.

Usually we could spot one quickly, but not always, not if we came into town from the white end. Whites were often friendly enough but they had no hard information. Bladder full and stomach empty, it was like finding a treasure to come upon a black person, and my father would swing the car in to the curb, hop out, and in a tone that was at once pleasant and conspiratorial, shout, “Say, chief.” In minutes he would be back behind the wheel with a complete local geography of black possibility—houses where we might spend the night (often run by widows), places to eat, and information about churches, taverns, and barbershops. Every black a chamber of commerce unto himself. And then, of course, we would essentially disappear from the white world, where none of these things were available to us, and enter an all-black territory similar to the Chicago-area neighborhood we’d come from.

Now President Eisenhower, along with most white Americans, took a rather relativistic stance toward the segregation that required my family to travel in this way. If he felt it was morally wrong, he nevertheless easily lived with it. He could be, in fact, “sophisticated” about it, “tolerant” of the racist imposition of a segregated existence on blacks and mindful of the need to “go slow” in ending it. He did not want to push Americans (read: whites) away from this immorality too fast.

So, yes, there has been much moral decline in America since the sixties, but it is also true that I drove into San Luis Obispo on that winter morning knowing that I could sleep or eat anywhere my wallet would take me. I had no need to search out a local black person or to find the black part of town. So, in the same decades of America’s “moral decline” there had obviously also been a great moral advance. A great evil had been stilled, pushed back, repressed. In downtown San Luis Obispo I searched only for a restaurant that suited me, not one that would have me. And after parking my car, I walked through a world cleansed by a very hard-earned moral advance and held in this new benign state by an unforgiving social puritanism. So it was hard for me, having walked down streets where one’s color was a bar to everything, to believe fully in declinism. No doubt the divorce rate in this town is twice what it was when I was unwelcome here. But it is also true that in other ways people here are better than they once were.

Thus, President Clinton’s sin was a little anachronistic, a sin against the moral sensibility of another time more than of his own. And this makes the point that the great moral preoccupation and commitment in America today are social. I believe it was our racial history that effectively renormed American culture around social morality. As I was reminded on that morning in San Luis Obispo, there is much good in this. But there is also much bad, much that undermines social equality as surely as racism once did.

But first, how did social morality become ascendant?

2

FIDELITY

The answer begins in the matter of fidelity. In a democracy the legitimacy of institutions and of government itself is earned and sustained through fidelity to a discipline of democratic principles. These principles strive to ensure the ennobling conditions that free societies aspire to: freedom for the individual, the same rights for all individuals, equality under the law, equality of opportunity, and an inherent right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom, then, is not a state-imposed vision of the social good (say, a classless society); rather, it is the absence of any imposed vision that would infringe on the rights and freedom of individuals. In a true democracy freedom is a higher priority than the social good.

So freedom is what follows from a discipline of principles—equal treatment under the law, one man one vote, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, the litany of individual rights, and so on. Both citizens and the government (which exists only by the “consent of the governed”) are enjoined to practice this discipline even when it requires great sacrifice. Thus, fidelity to a discipline of principles—rather than to notions of the social or public “good”—is the unending struggle of democracies. And the legitimacy of democratic governments and institutions depends on the quality of this struggle.

In totalitarian or feudal societies legitimacy and moral authority are, a priori, coming from God (the divine right of kings) or from ideological “truth.” Fidelity is not to a discipline of principles but to the grand vision at the center of the ideology or to the king. Free societies become more like these unfree societies when they decide that some social good is so important that it justifies suspending freedom’s discipline of principles.

The most tragic American example of such a “social good” is white supremacy. For centuries white Americans presumed that white supremacy was a self-evident divine right, so freedom’s discipline of principles did not apply where nonwhites were concerned. But over time this lapse of democratic discipline undermined the moral authority (interchangeable here with legitimacy) of the American democracy and its institutions. The civil rights movement disciplined America with democratic principles, establishing the point that one’s race could not mitigate one’s rights as an individual. In democracies true moral authority is always man’s responsibility rather than God’s, and it can only be earned through fidelity to principle.

3

INFIDELITY

When I was eleven or twelve years old and crazy for baseball, I wanted to be the batboy for the local YMCA team. I wanted this so badly that I paid no mind to the fact that the team was all white. In the black suburb where I lived there was no organized baseball, only pickup games in scruffy vacant lots that flooded in the spring and turned to dust in July. The Y team played on a real baseball diamond with cut grass, a raked dirt infield, dugouts, and bleachers all around. The players were five or six years older than I and almost at the semipro level. They drove cars, had sideburns and girlfriends. Best of all, they played hardball and stood in there against the fastest pitching an eighteen-year-old arm could deliver. You knew it was fast because little puffs of dust would ascend from the catcher’s mitt when a fastball was swung at and missed. It wasn’t complicated. I had sort of dreamed my way into their world, and becoming the team batboy was the best way I knew to hold on.

My manner of application for the job was simply to hang around. The coach avoided me for a long time, and I knew it was because I was black and that this was not an opportunity open to black kids. But I had no white competitors, so the more he avoided me, the more ubiquitous I became. I was at the age when wanting something very badly involves as much denial as longing. I knew about segregation and knew, on some level, that I was heading into a brick wall. But between the flowering of my dream and that brick wall, denying what I knew only too well allowed me to enjoy the sweetness of aspiration itself.

Things turned my way one day when I picked up a couple stray bats and handed them to the coach. I had done a hundred little jobs like this to make myself the solution to his stoop-labor problem, but on this day I finally saw a look of resignation in his eyes. He shook his head as if to wonder at his own helplessness, and then he began to give me orders. The orders meant I was hired, and I was exhilarated. I learned every player’s bat, and at home games I quickly mastered the batboy’s art of speed and unobtrusiveness. I could retrieve the newly dropped bat after a play, get it back into the dugout bat rack under the right name, and get the next man on deck his bat in one unbroken circle of movement. After games and practices I pounded the dust out of the bases, packed them in the coach’s trunk, bucketed loose balls, bagged the catcher’s equipment, and last, made sure the field and dugouts were completely denuded of team equipment. For all this I received absolutely nothing, though I hoped for a team cap that would finally force my snickering friends to see that I really was team batboy.

This was not to be. On the Saturday morning of our first away game I arrived at the Y early to load up the bus we were taking to a famous semipro ball field in South Chicago. The players were excited and playful when they arrived, and I looked forward to this first bus ride with the team.

It was when I was pushing the last few bags into the bus’s hold that I noticed that the entire bus had gone silent. When I looked up, I saw eyes in every window, and they were all trained on me. I knew instantly that I had come to the brick wall that had been waiting for me all along. What an effort it had taken not to acknowledge it, as if all by myself I was going to will evil out of the world. But here it was finally, almost welcome for the relief it brought.

Still, there had been a great momentum in this entire effort to become a batboy, and that momentum—a kind of good faith—would not let me stop just because reality was finally showing itself. So I stood aside as the bus driver locked the hold, and then I walked straight to the bus’s door. But the coach was already descending the boarding steps as I got there. He paused for a second to meet me with his eyes, and then he stepped down to the sidewalk and put a huge hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But they don’t allow coloreds in the park we’re going to. And that’s the way it’s going to be for all the away games. I can’t use you anymore.”

The same momentum that had led me to offer myself up in this way made me start to resist, to say something, to beg or protest or both. But then it was as though my very insides dropped out and I was utterly hollow. No words ever came. He patted my shoulder, then climbed back into the bus. I wanted to cry, felt all the precursors for a collapse into tears, but I did not cry, and I never cried. Encircled by all those eyes...