White Guilt

by Shelby Steele

  The corruption of “results”-oriented racial reform is that it separates racial reform from all accountability to the actual development of excellence and merit in black Americans. The inferiority imposed on blacks by four centuries of oppression is ignored as institutions shoehorn minorities into their midst (by lowering standards) simply to get the “result” that shows the institution to be beyond racism. Preferential affirmative action, the classic “results”-oriented racial reform, tells minorities quite explicitly that they will not have to compete on the same standards as whites precisely so they can be included in American institutions without in fact achieving the same level of excellence as whites. The true concern of “results” reform is the moral authority of the institution. Minority development is sacrificed to the magnanimity of the institution.

  Neither black militancy nor white guilt has ever been at all accountable for overcoming—or even moderating—the terrible underdevelopment that oppression imposed on blacks. But the “results” reform that these two forces generate does redistribute responsibility for black advancement to American society. This redistribution has been the all-defining centerpiece of racial reform since the sixties. Moral authority comes to institutions only when they relieve minorities of responsibility (lowered standards, racial preferences). In this age of white guilt responsibility is synonymous with oppression where blacks are concerned. So whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism. This is the formula that locks many whites into publicly supporting affirmative action even as they privately dislike it.

  It is also the formula that keeps black America underdeveloped even as we enjoy new freedom and a proliferation of opportunity. No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement. Of course white guilt—this voracious vacuum of authority—more than wants the responsibility that black militancy is determined to give it. It needs and demands it. But this sad symbiosis overlooks an important feature of human nature: human beings, individually or collectively, cannot transform or uplift themselves without taking full responsibility for doing so. This is a law of nature. Once full responsibility is accepted, others can assist as long as it is understood that they cannot be responsible. But no group in human history has been lifted into excellence or competitiveness by another group. No group has even benefited from the assistance of others without already having taken complete responsibility itself—complete to the point of saying that we appreciate your desire to help, but the help itself is unwelcome for the weakness it breeds. This is precisely the leap of faith that transforms people from slaves into their own masters.

  All this was especially ironic, since we had just won the great battle for our civil rights by taking mastery over our own fate. Others joined our struggle, but clearly we did not allow the movement to be contingent on what others did. We also have never allowed our performance in sports, music, literature, or entertainment to be contingent on whether or not others helped us.

  These last points are important because they illustrate a pattern. Wherever and whenever there is white guilt, a terrible illusion prevails: that social justice is not a condition but an agent. In this illusion social justice procures an entirely better life for people apart from their own efforts. Therefore it makes sense for minorities to make social justice a priority over their individual pursuit of education and wealth. (There will always be time for development when social justice is won, goes one rationalization. Another argues that a lack of social justice still stymies individual ambition despite the fact that blacks now live in freedom and are surrounded by opportunity.) The reason for this illusion is that white guilt wants no obligation to minority development. It needs only the display of social justice to win moral authority. It gets no credit when blacks independently develop themselves.

  So white liberals and American institutions (along with a corrupt black leadership) keep seducing blacks with social justice as though it were also developmental. When universities bring in black students with SAT scores 300 points below the student average, the illusion is that by arranging this diverse “result” they will magically develop black students until this 300-point gap disappears. But, of course, there is no evidence that this gap ever disappears or even shrinks. Nevertheless, institutions win their moral authority around race. This is why white guilt generates only “results,” affirmative action–style reform—reform that brings moral authority to whites without the bother and expense of minority development. And to achieve this corruption white guilt commits another one: it constantly portrays problems of minority underdevelopment as problems of injustice.

  Since the sixties, black educational weakness has been treated primarily as a problem of racial injustice rather than as a problem of blacks rejecting or avoiding full responsibility for raising their performance levels. Thus we got remedies pitched at injustices rather than at black academic excellence—school busing, black role models as teachers, black history courses, “diverse” reading lists, “Ebonics,” multiculturalism, culturally “inclusive” classes, standardized tests corrected for racial bias, and so on. All this but no demand for parental responsibility, for harder work on reading, writing, and arithmetic.

  When there is no white guilt vying for responsibility over minority struggles, there is no incentive to distort these problems into instances of injustice. We blacks, then, remain entirely responsible for them whether or not we get help from others. In music, literature, sports, and entertainment our deficiencies are, thus, simply deficiencies that we overcome in the way all people overcome deficiencies: through skill development, innovation, and relentless practice.

  People wrongly dismiss black achievement in these areas for reasons that can be ascribed only to racism—that our compelling excellence follows from a mere genetic advantage. The fact is that we are good at sports and music because we subject ourselves to unforgiving standards of excellence and then work ferociously to meet those standards. Ruthlessly, we allow absolutely no excuses. The same poverty and deprivation that afflict us as we walk to school in the morning afflict us later in the same day on the playground or in the tenement basement where we practice obsessively on a cheap electric keyboard. The difference is that white guilt makes no appearance on that playground or in that basement. There is no carnivorous white need standing between us and the pursuit of excellence. No pity. Thus, excellence is allowed to entice us with its own intrinsic joys and rewards; and we come in thrall to it. Suppose Marvin Gaye or Duke Ellington or Richard Wright or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Condoleezza Rice or millions of others (all people from humble beginnings born in the age of open racism) had let their pursuit of excellence be somehow contingent on the ministrations of white guilt, on the spiritually withering interventions of needy, morally selfish white people betting on the cliché of black inferiority rather than on the natural human longing for excellence that resides in us all?

  Black achievement in music and sports should never be dismissed; rather, it should point the way to black achievement in all other areas. Here is the self-possession, the assumption of full responsibility, the refusal to trade on one’s plight, the engagement with the broader American mainstream, the insistence on excellence as the currency of advancement—all of which makes blacks utterly irrepressible in these areas. And then, in concert with this, come the hard work, imagination, discipline, sacrifice, relentless effort, and—most important—openness to competition with all others that gave us our Ellingtons, Ellisons, and Kings.

  If a young black boy cannot dribble well when he comes out to play basketball, no one will cast his problem as an injustice. No one will worry about his single-parent home, the legacy of slavery that still touches his life, or the inherent racial bias in a game invented by a white man. His deficiency will be allowed to be what it is—poor dribbling. And he will be told to “tighten his ga
me,” which simply means to practice more. Very likely his peers will taunt him mercilessly, and even adults will give him no hugs to assuage his self-esteem. Very likely he will live through all this without the consultations of a father. Moreover, the standard of excellence for dribbling will be so high that many will not reach it and nothing less than virtuosity will satisfy it. When and if he meets this standard, he will be told “You bad” even by his competitors. This expression, of course, means its literal opposite: that he has at last earned entrée into a fraternity of nothing other than excellence. Surely he will feel proud of himself as a result.

  But if this boy’s problem is reading or writing rather than basketball, white guilt will certainly prevent even a modified version of this natural human process from occurring. Career-hungry academics will appear in his little world, and they will argue that his weaknesses reflect the circuitous workings of racism. His reading and writing problems will be seen to follow from countless racial and psychological determinisms that make it impossible to ask that he and his family be fully responsible for overcoming these problems.

  The boy will not be asked to truly work harder, nor will he be guided in the mastery of sentence structure, parts of speech, and verb tenses. No one will righteously insist that he speak correctly (as certain people once did for me). Yet he will be an object of abstract compassion for everyone. And permeating his classroom, like a stalled weather pattern, will be a foggy academic relativism in which scholastic excellence is associated with elitism, and rote skill development with repression. Yet just beyond the window of his classroom, on the pockmarked basketball court with the netless and bent hoop, another weather pattern prevails. On that court almost nothing is forgiven, and he will be “blamed” and held entirely responsible for all his deficiencies. And all through the torpor of a day structured to spare his feelings around reading, writing, and arithmetic, he will long to be on the other side of that window, where everything is asked of him.

  The greatest black problem in America today is freedom. All underdeveloped, formerly oppressed groups first experience new freedom as a shock and a humiliation because freedom shows them their underdevelopment and their inability to compete as equals. Freedom seems to confirm all the ugly stereotypes about the group—especially the charge of inferiority—and yet the group no longer has the excuse of oppression. Without oppression—and it must be acknowledged that blacks are no longer oppressed in America—the group itself becomes automatically responsible for its inferiority and noncompetitiveness. So freedom not only comes as a humiliation but also as an overwhelming burden of responsibility. Thus, inevitably, there is a retreat from freedom. No group that has been oppressed to the point of inferiority is going to face the realities of new freedom without flinching. Almost always, oppressed groups enter freedom by denying that they are in fact free, this as a way of avoiding the daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes.

  Freedom becomes a great problem for an emerging group because of all the illusions the group falls prey to as it buffers itself from the humiliations and burdens of freedom. Instead of taking full responsibility for our underdevelopment, we convince ourselves that we should pursue social justice and that this will agent us into a competitive equality with whites. We avoid the terrifying level of responsibility that freedom imposes by arguing that whites should be responsible for our development. We even define full black responsibility as an intolerable injustice. Our understandable fear of freedom has led us to bank our fate on an absurdity: that we can develop by taking less responsibility for ourselves. We have defined freedom as a kind of heaven in which the inhabitants are forgiven responsibility. Thus, we have conspired to throw away the greatest power we have: complete responsibility for our own development, an opportunity that we finally have the freedom to assume.

  How could a people that has survived centuries of slavery and segregation—through ingenuity, imagination, and great courage—get this confused, this alienated from man’s most elemental power: responsibility? Because freedom scared the hell out of us—our first true fall, our first true loss of innocence—and because there was nothing less than a locomotive of white guilt coming our way and hungering to prop us up in our every illusion. White guilt has wanted nothing more than to confuse our relationship to responsibility, to have us feel responsibility as an injustice, a continuation of our oppression. It exploited our terror of freedom in precisely the same way that plantation owners once exploited our labor. Whites needed responsibility for our problems in order to gain their own moral authority and legitimacy. So they set about—once again—to exploit us, to encourage and even nurture our illusions, to steal responsibility from us, to take advantage of our backwardness just as slave traders had once done on the west coast of Africa. Suddenly, in the age of white guilt, we were gold again.

  And so, once again severed from responsibility and in service to white need, we became—as if by some cruel karmic principle—slaves again, our fate the responsibility of others. Always in slavery and segregation our genius went into the pathetic task of adapting to the needs of a master, of fashioning a face for survival under his power. And so it is that the terrors of freedom have only deepened our slave mentality, our belief in the mask that manipulates the master. For us, group pride does not come from our capacity to stand our ground and compete equally with all others; it still, tragically, comes from our genius for shape-shifting, for working over the master for the rube that he is.

  11

  QUITTING

  When Dick Gregory finally ended his monologue, the crowd was exhilarated, a little manic. It was nearly midnight, but as we spilled out into the muggy night there was a morninglike energy, as if we had skipped past the night and run straight into the new day. My friend and I should have gone straight home to grab a few hours of sleep before work the next day, but there was too much to talk about. Sleep was unthinkable. So in my ’54 Chevy, with its slipping clutch and leaking oil, we drove to the Robin’s Nest on Stony Island and talked frenetically over the jazz until closing time. Then, near Sixty-third Street, we found a blues club that took us almost to dawn. By the time we turned onto the Dan Ryan Expressway southward toward home, the sun was up and the new day was already hot.

  After only a few miles I pulled off the expressway and found a phone booth. Without giving myself time to think, I called the dispatcher at the Seventy-fifth Street bus barn and quit the best job I had ever had. I was scared and my voice was a little weak, but I did the deed. I quit. I walked back to the car with a proud if nervous smile, and admonished myself—against a sudden “bourgeois” anxiety over what my father would say—to stay strong. I knew it was an irresponsible and even futile gesture, since the job was scheduled to end in three weeks anyway. Still, it meant something to me, and I was glad I had done it.

  Since well before this night I had been struggling within myself to undo the strict civil rights conditioning of my youth, especially the Gandhian propriety of humility and nonviolence by which a demeanor of quiet dignity highlighted the outrages of segregation. This conditioning required an acceptance of American moral authority, a faith that America was good and great in every way except for its racism. Thus, we blacks—like Martin Luther King—should conform to every code of common American decency so that our dress, speech, and graces shamed the racist notion of our inferiority. This is not to say that the dignity so many blacks displayed in that era was only an act. It was not. Still, there was an unspoken admonition that we must behave better than whites—show ourselves more morally civilized—in the hope that they would find their guilt and end segregation.

  But if all this dignity was not an act, it was also not self-referential. It was aimed, as an instrument of social revolution, at whites. And this is what—after America’s great acknowledgment of racial wrongdoing—made it so intolerable to me. In the age of white guilt, long-suffering dignity in blacks was an Uncle Tomish redundancy. White guilt had triggered a racial role reversal. Suddenly whites had to prove
their broader humanity by displaying a human dignity that was above racism. And blacks, now validated as fully human by America’s acknowledgment of racism, were all but commanded to show the indignation and outrage of full human beings—thus the new militancy, the rageful new black consciousness.

  The point is that we blacks organize our political identity—our consciousness of ourselves as blacks—around those themes that most effectively manipulate white America. And the stoic “Rosa Parks” black identity of the civil rights era had actually worked. This was the identity that morally “manipulated” white America into an open acknowledgment of its racism and, thus, ushered in the age of white guilt. Dick Gregory was simply a part of my personal white-guilt reeducation program. He, along with the new generation of militant leaders, was schooling blacks in the best identity for this new age. Ideas like social determinism and the rejection of responsibility by blacks inspired precisely the angry and petulant black identity that best coerced white guilt.

  This leadership did not want to rely on ideas, ideologies, or careful historical analyses. It wanted blacks to act reflexively out of identity itself. So militance toward whites became a litmus test of “blackness.” Even if you felt no such militance, you developed a militant posture simply to secure your black identity. This was an ingenious use of identity as power because it enabled these leaders to base their power on something deeper and more reliable than ideas. The litmus test for being black required one to accept racial victimization not as an occasional event in one’s life but as an ongoing identity. When victimization is identity, then the victim’s passionate anger can be called out even when there is no actual victimization. In other words, the victim’s anger can be relied on as a political force. The remarkable achievement of the sixties black militants was to create a substantial political power for themselves out of the identity of their people. This identity, of course, was not power in itself. White guilt was the power, and this identity was the leverage militant leaders used to access that power.