White Guilt

by Shelby Steele

  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, I turned around and walked back into the YMCA. I will never forget the sanctuary of the huge revolving door at the front of the Y, nor the words that I said to myself as I passed through it: “This really happened, didn’t it. And it’s really bad.”

  Segregation was, of course, an institutionalized infidelity to democratic principles. But to say this is only to state a fact. Incidents like this gave this fact an emotional history. Through them the societal infidelity marked the human being—and here it marked the coach and all the players as well as myself. Back then I would have denied any mark. Who is tougher than a twelve-year-old boy? And even today I am certain that racist rejections like this do not cause low self-esteem in their victims. They cause disenchantment with the world. My self-esteem was not diminished in the least by what happened to me on that Saturday morning. That is not how injustice is absorbed. That morning I had had what I would much later understand to be an existential experience. This had been an encounter with the absurd, and the world was simply no longer as firm for me as it had been. So my loss of faith was not in myself; it was in the world. Ironically, this put me a little above the world and gave my own judgments a new authority. I did not become a Nietzschean superman, free to define the world on my own terms. But a new voice, and a new will, opened within me. If anything, this experience was a passage to higher self-esteem.

  Ten years later, in early June of 1968, I was sitting with my parents in a hotel room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, watching my mother across the room silently crying. I was to graduate from college that weekend, and my parents had driven up from Chicago for the ceremony. While they slept that first night—and while I embarked on a weekend-long graduation party—Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Greeted with this news at breakfast, my parents—especially my mother—were as shattered as I had ever seen them by a public event. My mother was a strong, even commanding, woman, and I had seen her cry no more than a few times in my entire life.

  And probably what happened next was triggered precisely by the fact that tears were so uncharacteristic of her. But the mere sight of her sitting by the hotel window, eyes wet over the assassination of Robert Kennedy, sent me into a paroxysm of rage. She had said quite clearly what saddened her. And it had nothing to do with any silly feeling for the Kennedy mystique. She had never particularly liked or trusted any of the Kennedys. She was sad, she said, because Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, coming on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination, meant that history had lost a chance. She kept repeating that history had lost a chance. But the idea that racial overcoming had come to depend on the presidential bid of this arrogant little Kennedy sent me over the top. I had by then come into a new, uncompromising idea of what it meant to be black. Blackness had suddenly become that year—well before even King’s assassination—more and more defined as a will to power, as an imperative by masters rather than a plea by slaves. So it was slavish to think that black advancement was somehow dependent on the good offices of a white man without half the gravitas of black leaders like King or James Farmer or Malcolm X. Thus, for twenty minutes I berated the newly assassinated candidate with more fury than I might have mustered for George Wallace, who—it was vogue to say—was at least an honest bigot.

  The fact is that we live different lives than our parents, no matter how much we love them and they us. We have a separate experience to contend with. My parents were classic civil rights people. I had grown up watching them struggle against an unapologetically racist America. In their generation protest had to be persuasion, since they were vastly outnumbered in a society that took white supremacy as self-evident truth. Like most people in the King-era civil rights movement, they were Gandhians because nonviolent passive resistance was the best way to highlight white racism as an immorality. Their rejection of violence, even as a weapon against racial oppression, gave them the extraordinary power of moral witness—the great power of the early civil rights movement. What could America think of itself when passive freedom riders were beaten or when a little black girl in crinoline and pigtails—an image of perfectly conventional human aspiration—had to be escorted into school past a screaming white mob?

  This kind of moral witness transformed America forever, and its very success meant that it had, in fact, persuaded America. But what do all the postures of Gandhian passive resistance look like when the enemy has been persuaded? Suddenly the nonviolence that looked courageous in the face of the mob looks a little obeisant and supplicating when the mob disappears, when the government itself passes laws ending the segregated way of life the mob stood for. My parents believed with all their hearts in the moral power of turning the other cheek, but by 1968 this strategy was passé and Dr. King himself was a bit of an anachronism.

  My generation had a new and different mandate. Our job was not to persuade; it was to replace passivism with militancy.

  A few weeks before my parents arrived for graduation, I had led the black students on my campus into our college president’s office unannounced with our generation’s favorite instrument of confrontation: a list of demands. As I read these demands to the president, with all the militant authority I could muster, I allowed the ashes from my lit cigarette to fall in little gray cylinders onto the president’s plush carpet. This was the effrontery, the insolence, that was expected in our new commitment to militancy. But it had not been preplanned.

  I had unthinkingly lit a cigarette—a Kool, the black brand of the day—just as our march reached the administration building. As we wound our way through the building up to the president’s office, I had looked for ashtrays—the bourgeois in me insisting on propriety—but found none. And as the leader of this march, I could hardly wander off to find one. So I kept moving up the stairs, right past the president’s startled secretary, and into the inner sanctum of his office, lit cigarette in hand.

  And once face-to-face with the president—thirty or so black students crowding into the office behind me—I had an epiphany: I should not worry about putting the cigarette out. It was exactly the gesture I was looking for. Its stinking, roiling smoke and its detritus of ash made the point that we were a new black generation operating under a new historical mandate. No more long-suffering, “go-limp” passivism. The bourge
ois Martin Luther King would never deign to smoke at such a moment, if at all, which was exactly why I had to. Our point was that black power would no longer come from being better than whites; it would come from not being better.

  My parents heard about all this from other parents when they arrived. They broached the subject with me in a tone of grave disappointment. My cigarette had given away the high ground, they said, and invalidated the protest. It was all Kingism, the civil rights credo, the beauty and power of passivism. They spoke as if my entire youth had not been an instruction in the manipulation of moral power.

  It was the next morning that I went to their room hoping to say something reasonable about the position my generation was in. But the sight of my mother crying over Bobby Kennedy brought an end to reason, and suddenly I was filled with the same militancy and outrage that had prompted the cigarette ploy in the president’s office. And at the heart of this anger was an empowering feeling of license—the feeling that being black released me from the usual obligation to common decency and decorum. I was perfectly justified in spilling cigarette ashes on a beautiful carpet and in disdaining Bobby Kennedy. I was licensed to live in a spirit of disregard toward my own country.

  Where did this kind of black anger come from?

  Conventional wisdom, as well as black protest writing, suggests that it comes from the wound of oppression and that it is essentially an outrage against injustice. My humiliating rejection at the hands of the YMCA baseball coach, even for the lowly position of batboy, would perfectly illustrate the conventional understanding of how people are psychically wounded and made angry by oppression. The theory is that each such wound fires more and more anger and alienation in the soul of the oppressed until there is an inevitable explosion. In Richard Wright’s protest novels, Native Son and The Outsider, there is a clear determinism between the wounds inflicted by a racist society and the deadly outbursts of violence in which his black protagonists murder whites. Against the backdrop of wounding oppression, murder is shown to be a futile and pathetic attempt to control one’s fate and, thereby, to reclaim one’s humanity.

  But, in fact, I did not work myself up for either of these displays of “black anger” with memories of my racial mortifications. My batboy debacle, and all the other indignities and deprivations of a segregated childhood, never crossed my mind as I prepared to confront my college president. There is no determinism between one’s racial wounds and the acting out of black rage—a phrase that came into use only after the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Oppression, in itself, pushes people neither to anger nor to revolution. If it did, black slaves would have been so relentlessly rebellious that slavery would have been unsustainable as an institution. It is wishful thinking in those who rightly abhor oppression to see it as a kind of dialectic that leads automatically to the rages that eventually topple it. Slavery might never have ended had not larger America—at the price of a civil war—decided to end it. The slave’s rage meant nothing and brought only the lash.

  Anger is acted out by the oppressed only when real weakness is perceived in the oppressor. So anger is never automatic or even inevitable for the oppressed; it is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice.

  Wounds and injustices create only the potential for anger, but weakness in the oppressor calls out anger even when there is no wound or injustice. In both the best and the worst sense of the word, black rage is always a kind of opportunism.

  On the way home from my batboy humiliation, I knew only that all protest would be futile. Racism was not racism to me then. It was not an outrage but an impersonal and immutable feature of the world, like snow in winter or rain in spring. I was not going to be a batboy, and anger was not relevant to me, because there was no ambivalence about this in the larger society for anger to work on. I never even bothered to tell my civil rights–obsessed parents, because they would only have brought me more humiliation by protesting something that simply wasn’t going to change. I was quite calm by the time I got home, certainly not happy but not especially sad either. By midmorning I was on to other things.

  But ten years later I was nurturing anger as the central feature of my racial identity. I was bringing imagination and even a certain work ethic to the expression of black anger. What had changed in those ten years? The broad answer is that America had moved out of its long age of white racism and into a new age of white guilt. A moral ambivalence and guilt around race had opened in white America that could be worked on by black anger. By 1968 black anger and militancy had replaced the passivism of the King era as the best means to opportunity and power for blacks.

  4

  A CERTAIN KNOWLEDGE

  If the president of my college, Dr. Joseph McCabe, was rattled when this gang of black students burst into his office, there was no sign of it as he came smiling from behind his desk to greet us. This was well before the era of the pained and solicitous college president, and his smile was meant only to suggest a certain largesse and command. He would handle us like any other intrusion on his business day, unflappably, and with grace and dispatch.

  I began to read the list of demands as he moved back behind his desk and sat down. I read slowly, looking for a tone and rhythm of just suppressed anger. He had seen my cigarette by this time, and as I got to about the fourth demand, I could see that it was all becoming too much for him. This was the age of housemothers, jacket-and-tie Sunday dinners, and professors who lopped off a full letter grade for each grammatical error. There was no precedent for this sort of assault on authority, no administrative manual on how to handle it. I saw something like real anger come over his face, and he grabbed the arms of his chair as if to spring himself up. Here, finally, was the assertion of authority I had expected. I girded myself, determined to give back as good as I got.

  But his arms never delivered him from his seat. I will never know what thought held him back. I remember only that his look turned suddenly inward as if he were remembering something profound, something that made it impossible for him to rise up. Then it was clear that the cigarette would be overlooked, and that he would not seriously challenge us in any way. In that instant we witnessed his transformation from a figure of implacable authority to a negotiator empathetic with the cause of those who challenged him—from a traditional to a modern college president.

  He said that he knew there was something to our protest and that the college, too, wanted to make things better. For appearances’ sake, he said he wasn’t entirely happy with the term “nonnegotiable demand”; still, he promised to give serious consideration to each demand. And he did. To my great regret today, many of those unfortunate demands were later implemented in one form or another. On that day we ended on an almost collegial note with handshakes all around and promises to quickly follow through. By then my cigarette had burned down to the filter and simply gone out. On the way out I slipped the dead butt into my pocket.

  I know two things about Dr. McCabe that help explain his transformation before our eyes into a modern college president: he was a man of considerable integrity, and he did not deny or minimize the injustice of racism. He had personally contributed money to Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference when this was not typical of college presidents. Thus, on some level—and in a way that may have caught him by surprise—he would have known that behind our outrageous behavior was a far greater American outrage.

  And in this intransigent piece of knowledge was the very essence of what I have called white guilt. Dr. McCabe simply came to a place where his own knowledge of American racism—knowledge his personal integrity prevented him from denying—opened a vacuum of moral authority within him. He was not suddenly stricken with pangs of guilt over American racism. He simply found himself without the moral authority to reprimand us for our disru
ptive behavior. He knew that we had a point, that our behavior was in some way connected to centuries of indisputable injustice. So he was trumped by his knowledge of this, not by his remorse over it, though he may have felt such remorse. Our outrage at racism simply had far greater moral authority than his outrage over our breach of decorum. And had he actually risen to challenge us, I was prepared to say that we would worry about our behavior when he and the college started worrying about the racism we encountered everywhere, including on his campus.

  And this is when I first really saw white guilt in action. Now I know it to be something very specific: the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one’s race is associated with racism. Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on. They step into a void of vulnerability. The authority they lose transfers to the “victims” of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why white guilt is quite literally the same thing as black power.

  5

  WHITE GUILT

  It was thirty years later, in 1998, when I pulled into San Luis Obispo for a bite to eat and noted that I had no need to find a black person. This was a college town, and I wondered what a black student would do if I swerved in to the curb, hopped out of the car, and shouted, “Say, chief. Is there a house where I can spend the night?” Today you meet another black and neither of you has much specialized racial knowledge to share. Segregation generated that sort of knowledge, and without segregation you can get good information from almost anyone. Maybe the self-segregation of blacks on college campuses and in some workplaces at least partly involves a longing for that old racial bond—the chance to concretely help and be helped by each other. But bonds that came automatically under oppression now require a self-consciously politicized racial identity that insists on a bond when there is no concrete need for one.