White Guilt

by Shelby Steele

  Yet he restored three ramshackle homes to neat lower-middle-class acceptability by collecting bricks, discarded lumber, cast-off roofing shingles, and chipped porcelain bathtubs and sinks, and then by working and working—as if work were a kind of alchemy—until he had a rentable property. And there were other dreams—a “bug juice” extermination business, a garage-building enterprise, a trade in house paint—all workable, if limited, possibilities that he spotted within the cracks of a rigidly segregated society. Yet he could not buy property where his sweat might become real equity, or do business where real profits were possible and where banks didn’t run the other way. His society quite literally labored to defeat his ambition even as it left him entirely responsible for his life and family. When my parents died, the houses they had labored so hard to develop had been all but engulfed by ghetto blight. The family signed them over to their nonpaying renters for nothing, happy to be rid of the liability.

  9

  RESPONSIBILITY AS A TOOL OF OPPRESSION

  Let’s call this situation a crucible—or an absurd bind that forever denies one the opportunities to meet adequately the burden of responsibility one must carry, and that suppresses one’s higher aspirations almost altogether. It was the psychic tension of this crucible that made my friend and me so grateful for our bus-driving jobs. In this crucible blacks were literally oppressed and punished with responsibility. Common human responsibilities—getting an education, owning a home, raising a family—were very often touched by futility, defeat, and pathos. Segregation tried to take all the reward and possibility out of responsibility so that all that remained was its weight of worry and its burden of struggle. Thus, a heavy and often futile responsibility was the primary experience of racial oppression. If many whites, too, struggled in poverty under heavier burdens of responsibility than they could bear, there was still more freedom and possibility open to them. For blacks, this Sisyphean struggle with responsibility was the condition of oppression itself into which all the other indignities—discrimination, intimidation, humiliation—were absorbed.

  In high school—as if serving an apprenticeship in segregation’s crucible—I was turned down for a lowly stock boy’s job at JCPenney, for a fast-food job at one of the first McDonald’s, for paper routes in white neighborhoods, for caddying jobs on golf courses, for busboy work in restaurants, for any work that was either clean or reasonably well paid. I saw my white peers step into and out of these same jobs as whim and the need for pocket money dictated. Because this kind of segregation made it so much harder for me to meet my responsibilities, it also made it easy for me to confuse responsibility itself with racial injustice, to experience them as one and the same. When I was in the fields picking tomatoes and onions on the truck farms just south of Chicago rather than caddying at Olympia Fields golf course, the experience of being responsible was in fact an experience of injustice. And it was no doubt all the emotions generated by life inside this sort of crucible—some acknowledged, some not—that must have set me up for what happened in that hot church as Dick Gregory spoke. At the time it felt like an epiphany, a sudden new knowledge. But it wasn’t a new knowledge at all. It was something that I had always known, only then it exploded numinously to life.

  Somewhere toward the middle of Gregory’s long riff I was overcome by a feeling of utter relief. It was as if some old and grinding worry—one I had considered permanent, as inevitable as nature—had simply passed away. I felt exhilarated, wildly happy—this despite the fact that Gregory was clearly pulling for the era’s all-purpose emotion: black anger.

  But there was another meaning within his words. He was also saying that a racist society had inflicted responsibility on us while denying us the freedom to do much with it. In other words, he was describing the crucible in which responsibility was a tool of oppression. And his clear implication was that responsibility was therefore illegitimate where blacks were concerned. Responsibility made fools of us. Worse, it made us complicit in our own oppression. As we labored away with the odds fixed against us, we only reinforced the racist social order that oppressed us. Ever the sneering, smiling hipster, he created a rube character for our derision—the “good Negro.” Here was the honest, hardworking black man laboring to make a decent life for himself and his family, and by doing so reinforcing segregation as a perfectly commendable social order. Gregory was talking about men like my father, and this bothered me. But he softened his point by universalizing it. We were all honorable fools; all “good Negroes” unwittingly bolstering the forces that kept us down. Here we could all laugh at ourselves. We were suffering inside a crucible not because we were bad or lazy but because we were responsible. Responsibility was our tether to oppression.

  But why did all this fill me with such relief? Why did it make me feel happy?

  Though I could not have said it at the time, this was the moment—listening to Gregory go on about “good Negroes”—when I realized that the civil rights movement had truly won. Dick Gregory and all the other new militant leaders were really just being redundant. America had already agreed with them. Two years before this night President Johnson had launched the Great Society in his famous Howard University speech by saying: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’”

  Here the president of United States had virtually described the crucible blacks had endured, saying for all the world that blacks had been “hobbled” by that old oppressive formula—full responsibility with little freedom—so they had never been allowed to become competitive. Johnson clearly realized that full responsibility had been an unfair and oppressive burden on blacks. His Great Society was, among other things, a redistribution plan for responsibility by which he asked white America to assume considerable responsibility for black advancement. Thus, by implication, the president of the United States had agreed with the new militants that it was morally wrong—given what blacks had been through—to ask them to be fully responsible for pulling themselves up.

  So suddenly in American life the matter of responsibility was qualified by a new social morality. If you were black, and thus a victim of racial oppression, this new morality of social justice meant you could not be expected to carry the same responsibilities as others. The point was that the American society no longer had the moral authority to enforce a single standard of responsibility for everyone because—by its own admission—it had not treated everyone the same.

  It is true that Muhammad Ali lost his heavyweight boxing crown when he refused the military draft—a universal responsibility for American males at the time—but it is also true that he only added to his legend by doing so. When he said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong,” even his enemies understood his point. Where was the moral authority to ask this black man, raised in segregation, to fulfill his responsibility to the draft by fighting in a war against a poor Asian country?

  Standing there in that church I realized that no one—least of all the government—had the moral authority to tell me to be responsible for much of anything. And this realization, blooming in the mind of a twenty-one-year-old after a hard day’s work, was like winning my own private revolution. I could hardly stand still.

  And the moral authority that America suddenly lacked passed into me as pure moral power. Suddenly I could use America’s fully acknowledged history of racism just as whites had always used their race—as a racial authority and privilege that excused me from certain responsibilities, moral constraints, and even the law.

  Up to this point I, like my father before me, had lived like a citizen in a totalitarian state. But what happens when an authority that was totalitarian—against which you had no recourse—admits that it was wrong, that it violated and dehumanized you? For one thing, you lose a degree of fear. I knew, of course, that America was going to continue holding blacks accountable to its basic laws. But I also felt a new fearles
sness in showing my disdain for whatever the country might hold me accountable to. Not only was this totalitarian power broken, but now I was the one—as a victim—who possessed an almost reckless moral authority. Now I could shame and silence whites at will. With this moral authority there was the power to better defend myself against racism, but there was also a new, abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me—a power of racial privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin. This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new “black power.” Then, as this power supported the next generation of civil rights leaders, it evolved into what we call today “the race card.” But back on that hot August night I only felt a weight drop from my shoulders as I began to understand that my country was now repentant before me. I now possessed a separate power that it could only appeal to, appease, or placate. Now America had to prove itself to me.

  I have already discussed the narcotic effect of all this. This was the inflation that, months later, would lead me to spill cigarette ashes on Dr. McCabe’s fine carpet. But far more important, this great infusion of moral authority gave blacks the power to imprint the national consciousness with a profound new edict, an unwritten law more enforceable than many actual laws: that no black problem—whether high crime rates, poor academic performance, or high illegitimacy rates—could be defined as largely a black responsibility, because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems. To do so would be to “blame the victim,” thereby repeating his victimization. Thus, in the national consciousness after the sixties, individual responsibility became synonymous with injustice when applied to blacks.

  When America acknowledged its racism, it effectively made blacks into the nation’s official and, seemingly, permanent victims—citizen-victims, as it were, for whom demands of responsibility are verboten lest the larger nation seem to be oppressing them all over again. If President Johnson’s Howard University speech meticulously spelled out white America’s responsibility for black uplift, there was not a single reference to black responsibility. Even though the president was about to spend billions of dollars on blacks, he still lacked the moral authority to spell out the ways blacks needed to be responsible for their own advancement. It was a classic white-guilt speech, implying that racial inequities are overcome solely by the efforts of whites and American institutions. (Today’s college presidents routinely make such speeches when they stand to proclaim their institution’s commitment to “diversity.”) The speech insistently and conspicuously refused to imagine blacks outside a framework of victimization. And no president since Johnson has done any better.

  President Roosevelt’s New Deal had frankly asked for sacrifice and hard work from the average American because it was clear that whatever the government did had to be met by the responsibility of the citizens. But Roosevelt was seeking prosperity, not redemption. It is nothing less than stunning that in the four decades of racial reform since the sixties, and amid constant racial debate, there has not been a single articulation by an American president of how blacks might so much as even share responsibility for their own advancement.

  10

  THE REDISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

  But I couldn’t have known any of this as I stood listening to Dick Gregory. I just felt greatly relieved that the burden of responsibility I had always known was suddenly without moral authority. I remember thinking a little nervously of my father. Would he buy Gregory’s implication that responsibility was a “trick bag” for blacks, a submission to white authority that extended our oppression? I could not imagine it. Responsibility was his great faith; he would never see the logic in thinking of it as something that “blamed the victim.”

  But this thought gave me only brief pause. I was convinced that we were in a new era of civil rights. Even whites as high as the president now agreed that responsibility had been oppression itself for blacks. So here, I thought—with the arrogance my generation was famous for—was a case of age having no advantage over youth. My father had no more experience of this new era than I had.

  And if, in the long run, time proved me wrong, in the short run it proved me right. By the night of my encounter with Dick Gregory the goal of the civil rights movement had escalated from a simple demand for equal rights to a demand for the redistribution of responsibility for black advancement from black to white America, from the “victims” to the “guilty.” This marked a profound—and I believe tragic—turning point in the long struggle of black Americans for a better life.

  Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion’s share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late sixties—and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next four decades—grew out of black America’s complete embrace of the latter option.

  Racial militancy and anger are, of course, easy emotions to feel when your country finally admits to having oppressed you for no reason other than the color of your skin. But if blacks had left America in the mid-sixties for a land of their own where no whites dwelled, this militancy and anger would have been beside the point. Without whites it would have had no object, no point. And instead of the interminable preoccupation with race and social justice that we blacks developed after our civil rights victories, there would have been only the hard work of making the group competitive with other groups and societies. But we did not leave America in the sixties. We remained inside the same society that had wronged us, a society that suddenly needed to show great concern for us on pain of its own moral authority. Why not look to this society to take responsibility for what it had done to us? America had been responsible for our suffering, why not for our uplift?

  Black militancy, then, was not inevitable in the late sixties. It came into existence solely to exploit white guilt as a pressure on white America to take more responsibility for black advancement. Effectively, black militancy and white guilt are two sides of the same coin. Neither exists but that the other exists. Together and separately their goal is always to redistribute responsibility for black uplift from blacks themselves to American institutions. So black militancy, for all its bluster of black pride and its rhetoric of self-determination, is a mask worn always and only for the benefit of whites.

  Authentic black militancy, of the sort that Malcolm X at times seemed capable of, always embraced responsibility as power itself. It demanded only the freedom and equal treatment under the law that would allow responsibility to be the same fount of hope, power, and advancement in blacks that it was for others. If Malcolm X railed ferociously against white America, he never called for a redistribution of responsibility for black uplift to whites or American institutions. His was a self-help black militancy that was naturally skeptical about what others would actually do for blacks. You might call it “hard-work” militancy, since it was built around the difficult principles of self-sacrifice, delayed gratification, family unity, individual initiative, entrepreneurialism, and so on. If it carried an ugly theme of separatism, it more importantly focused on racial redemption through human development and nation building. What made this militancy authentic was that it truly sought to restore an oppressed people to human dignity through real development and without an enmeshment with or dependency on the guilt of whites.

  But the black militancy that actually emerged in the sixties—what might be called “white-guilt” militancy—was the opposite of this. Because it was really a strategy to redistribute responsibility to American institutions, it literally argued that blacks could not be fully responsible for their own advancement—this simply to make the point that whites had to
be more responsible for it. Thus, since the sixties, black leaders have made one overriding argument: that blacks cannot achieve equality without white America taking primary responsibility for it. Black militancy became, in fact, a militant belief in white power and a correspondingly militant denial of black power.

  Black leader after black leader argued that we could not pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, because we “don’t have any bootstraps.” But this humiliating plea for white intervention only projected whites as powerful and blacks as helpless. So, finally, we embraced a black militancy that argued nothing more strongly than our own perpetual weakness—or, put another way, our inferiority. To be a proud and militant black after the sixties, you screamed black power in order to induce the application of white power. And you lived by an ethic that still sees full responsibility as oppression, if not racism, when applied to blacks. Still today, the best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement.

  This is a black militancy of inferiority that assumes the continuing inferiority of the people it tries to speak for. And this is where it again meshes so perfectly with white guilt, which always assumes a nearly intractable black inferiority. Because American institutions stand in such pressing need of moral authority, they cannot wait for blacks to develop a true equality of competence out of which they could win entrée on merit. Therefore, since President Johnson’s Howard University speech, racial reform has focused on what Johnson called equality “as a result.”