White Guilt

by Shelby Steele

  Unfortunately, all this gave blacks a political identity with no real purpose beyond the manipulation of white guilt. Worse, because this identity was thought to be absolutely essential to black power, it quickly became the most totalitarian and repressive identity that black America has ever known. All dissent became heresy, punishable by excommunication, because anything less than uniform militancy weakened the group’s effectiveness with white guilt. Dick Gregory was not just spelling out this new identity; he was also making it clear that our identity—our “blackness”—was contingent on our militance. And failing the litmus test of militancy incurred the Uncle Tom stigma.

  I quit my bus-driving job in order to be black. My friend understood this and promised to quit in short order himself. Actually he did not quit for over a year and even put off college to continue making the first good money of his life. But on that hot morning we both sincerely believed he would quit within days. In any case, he was my only witness, the only one who, as we said back then, had had his “consciousness raised” along with mine. He understood what I was doing. On the drive back home we constituted a little black avant-garde driving down the Dan Ryan Expressway. We were ahead of our friends, who would at first sneer at our report of the night, but then be impressed and ready for similar nights of their own. Within months every black I knew of my own generation—except for a few bourgeois and a few Pentecostals—was a militant. And they all came to militancy in the same way that I did, by what might be called a gesture of identification.

  When identity is everything because group power derives from it, a mere command of ideas or ideologies is not enough to identify. There must be an actual, if only symbolic, gesture of some kind that expresses militant disregard for the American “system.” A good gesture of identity will show contempt for the “white world” and a corresponding reverence for “blackness”—this is a vaguely spiritual vision of racial redemption through a “blackness” that reverses white racism by projecting black supremacy and white moral inferiority. Quitting my job was a rejection of white authority and personal responsibility in a society where racism made a joke of such responsibility in blacks. This gesture was clearly silly, but at the time it did exactly what a gesture of identification should do: it made me feel that I had a better world to belong to than the racist world I had always lived in, a counterworld that stood in contrast to the corruption of white America. But I had to do something to make common cause with that world. So I quit.

  Of course, I knew I would continue to have business with America, and three weeks later I was in fact using my chauffeur’s license to drive a bus again, this time a school bus back in my college town. But there was something different about this new job. I felt buttressed by my black identity. This identity was suddenly the source of a wonderful new self-esteem that was utterly independent of white America. I felt that simply “being black” aligned me with one of the world’s great stories of long-suffering innocence, and that this redounded to me as moral superiority over white Americans and, thus, gave me an immunity from their judgments.

  All my life I had had ingrained in me the expectations, rules, and values of broader America, but suddenly all this conditioning was suspect. Didn’t it represent the internalization of oppression itself? Wasn’t the desire to dutifully educate myself little more than complicity with a racist status quo? “Blackness”—automatically and instantly—gave me the self-esteem I would have to work a lifetime for in white America. So I didn’t care so much about advancing in American life. Back in college that fall my grades plunged, and though this would have mortified me earlier, now it didn’t bother me in the least. I cared nothing for what my professors thought of me, or for what affect all this would have on my prospects for graduate school. With my new esteem I could suddenly bear failure in the “white” world that would have been unthinkable before. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my first experience of how group identity can take the place of accomplishment as a source of individual esteem.

  Quitting my bus-driving job had been a gesture of identification with black authority—a morally superior authority in this new age of white guilt that was not offended by the self-destructiveness of quitting a perfectly decent job when there was still college to pay for. Blackness gave me a new esteem that was in no way contingent on performance or success in the white world. In fact, if I failed it would only be an opportunity to better display black victimization in the court of white guilt. So, for the price of a gesture of identification, I got enough esteem to be a little above the world I actually lived in. Like Black Panthers strapped in ammunition belts and storming the California legislature, or Stokely Carmichael in a dashiki screaming “black power,” I could enjoy a superiority that came to me by birthright alone.

  A gesture of identification could be almost any act—quitting a job, dropping out of school, giving up Christianity for Islam, dropping one’s “slave name” for a jerry-built African name, buying a weapon and learning to use it—that would show disengagement from white America and loyalty to the new black authority. Actually, the gesture of identification always required at least an element of self-destruction, a flirtation with failure in the white world, which verified black authority as the true source of one’s esteem. But this was not understood in the late sixties. Then I knew only that in being black I had come into a kind of privilege.

  PART TWO

  AN EXPANDING GUILT

  12

  WHITE REBELS

  At King City, Highway 101 takes an abrupt leftward turn as if to move you quickly away from something unsightly. You see a Denny’s sign, a Shell or Exxon sign looming over the highway, and then you are suddenly headed due west over more ravines of rock and scrub, a bank of coastal mountains in the distance. The tiny agricultural town of King City is gone before you can adjust yourself to look for it. And when the turns finally point you northward again toward San Jose and San Francisco, you are let out on the fertile plain of the Salinas Valley—Steinbeck country, and one of California’s great breadbaskets to the world. Between low mountain ranges on the east and west the earth is as flat and black as an Illinois landscape. Long, freshly planted rows are engineered for perfect drainage, sprinkled with water, and dusted with chemicals into a perfectly bankable fertility. There are no farmhouses in sight.

  In this landscape, with its clear radio reception, Clinton is again ubiquitous on the car radio. At first his troubles seem especially shameful in this valley where people live so directly off the land. But, of course, this is no longer the small-town world of pernicious gossip and bluenosed fundamentalism suggested by Steinbeck’s early fiction. These fields are a high-tech factory laid out on the land, and the people who own and manage them are no more likely to be scandalized by Clinton than Chicagoans or Atlantans. Baby boomers are in charge pretty much everywhere these days, and Bill Clinton is not foreign to them. He is as familiar as the sixties consciousness itself and, thus, the first president they know as a peer.

  Toward the end of the age of racism, at the height of the civil rights movement, there was a moment when progressive black and white youth seemed to share an “integrationist” consciousness. White college students flooded into the South and onto the front lines of the struggle against segregation in the early sixties. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was as white as it was black. But in the mid-sixties, as the age of white guilt was launched by the civil rights victories, blacks began to expel whites from the cause of civil rights. This racial divergence was not only the beginning of the militant black consciousness that I fell in thrall to in the late sixties; it was also the beginning of a progressive white “youth” consciousness that was no longer centered on the struggle of black Americans.

  Young whites politely accepted that blacks would have to run their own movement, and then raced to the cause of the Vietnam war. In time, many other causes—particularly feminism and environmentalism—became themes of this new youth consciousness, which ultimately became kno
wn as the “counterculture.” This was the cultural and political consciousness in which Bill Clinton came of age, just as I came into black militancy in my twenty-first year. And driving through the rich Salinas Valley, I hear this same baby boomer–counterculture consciousness on the radio, tempered very little by the decades. It is now the establishment consciousness, while traditional American values now constitute a kind of counterculture. And listening to these callers, it becomes clear to me that there is not enough raw indignation in America over Clinton’s behavior to truly empower the traditionalists. For the first time since the wagging finger, it seems almost certain to me that this sex scandal will not bring down the president.

  It was Vietnam that pushed the youth consciousness of the sixties far across the continuum of disaffection into possibly the worst case of generational alienation in American history—bad enough to spawn an essentially anti-American counterculture with greater moral authority than traditional America. Of course, this consciousness clearly began in civil rights because this was where America effectively confessed to profound moral corruption and hypocrisy. This was the confession—the crack in the facade of American greatness—that was then held against America as the Vietnam War escalated. Thus, it enlarged from a localized confession of racism into a broad confirmation of America’s inherent evil and oppressiveness.

  And then, simmering away behind all this from as far back as the fifties, was the idea that America, with its greedy “military-industrial complex,” was essentially a “repressed” nation. Here a little bastardized Freud was mixed with Marx to make a rather neat formula: a sexually repressed society was necessarily a bigoted and oppressive society. Thus, the underside of postwar America’s “gray flannel” conformity was social evil. But this pairing of sexual repression and social evil also had an especially appealing upside: it linked sexual openness to social virtue. The idea that a lack of sexual inhibition signified a deeper and more compassionate humanity became one of the more fabled ideas of the counterculture. Here casting aside one’s sexual inhibitions was a way of opening up to one’s deeper humanity and, thus, separating oneself from the dark human impulses to racism, sexism, and militarism that plagued the repressed, bourgeois world of one’s parents. At the center of the sixties consciousness was always this confluence of the personal and the political where freedom from bourgeois repressions was always somehow an aspect of social responsibility. This was the counterculture consciousness that Bill Clinton encountered in the mid- to late sixties.

  I believe that the most important—if seemingly incongruent—point to understand about the sixties youth consciousness is that, like the sixties black militant consciousness, it was largely a response to white guilt. This guilt is the vacuum in moral authority created by all of white America’s moral failings and infidelities to democracy: racism, sexism, imperialism, materialism, conformity, environmental indifference, educational inequality, superficiality, greed, and so on. Thus, white guilt is a much broader phenomenon than the “race problem” from which it takes its name. Race provided the first and most conspicuous instance of infidelity to democratic principles, and the first instance where the wrong was openly acknowledged. But then the Vietnam War, escalating almost simultaneously with this acknowledgment, further injured America’s moral authority in the eyes of many young people. And, in quick succession, other issues—women’s rights, the plight of farm workers, degradation of the environment, black and white poverty—converged rather spectacularly to give the impression (especially to the young) that oppressiveness, greed, exploitation, and violence were the essence of the American character. The sixties were simply a time when seemingly every long-simmering conflict, every long-standing moral contradiction in American history, presented itself to be made right even as an ill-conceived war raged on. And the resulting loss of moral authority was the great vacuum that literally called the counterculture consciousness into being.

  The ideas and ideologies that shaped this consciousness no doubt came from many sources—Marx, Freud, Martin Luther King, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Chairman Mao, Lao-tzu, to name only a few. But it was white guilt—this enormous vacuum of moral authority—that called out the counterculture and the black militancy that I encountered in the sixties. Both these “counter” movements were new assertions of moral authority that hoped to combat the illegitimate authority of racist/imperialist/sexist traditional America. But if the new black consciousness wanted only the fruits of white guilt, the counterculture wanted to remake America altogether. And in many ways it succeeded.

  I remember first noticing this counterculture consciousness when it seemed to enter and then take over the life of a college classmate. We had come to college in the same year but knew each other only in that small-college way in which you know all about people you don’t really know. I knew that John (as I will call him) was from a well-to-do military family. He was as clean-cut as a marine and yet he dressed with just the right dash of patrician disregard. He was the first person I ever saw wear a jacket, tie, and Bass Weejun loafers with no socks to Sunday dinner—a little subversion of our midwestern dress code that spoke of an East Coast prep school background. But there was also an inescapable sense of angst about him that seemed quite real, and thus made him all the more appealing to girls. People said it had to do with a far-off father whom he seemed to both hate and admire—a figure he sometimes excoriated and at other times, rather reflexively, showed reverence toward.

  This was the John we all knew, or knew about, for the first two years of college. But at the start of our junior year, John did not show up. Someone said he had gone out to California and become a hippie—a new word, as well as concept, at that time. And, as unimaginable as this seemed given the John we all knew, it was nevertheless confirmed a month later when he reappeared on a huge black motorcycle to retrieve a girlfriend before heading back to the hippie life in California. His blond girlfriend had not yet been “hippie-ized,” and they made quite a sight racing around the day or two before they left—he now rather dirty-looking in jeans, fringed Indian jacket, and bandanna; she still in the tailored skirts and prim blouses of a Tri Delt, striving on the back of his powerful bike to show an excitement equal to the grand gesture they were about to make while at the same time struggling with the propriety of her skirt.

  Of course, their rebellion had no connection to the social and political upheavals of the day. It was only a rather histrionic version of what psychologists call adolescent rebellion—a normal feature of human development by which the young (teen years to early adulthood) separate from parental authority to experience the world on their own. Maybe it was the far-off father—an unbending set of expectations—that pushed John to a more dramatic rebellion than most. But whatever the motivation was, it was not political. John’s eyes rolled whenever a discussion veered toward politics. And without the gravity of political or social themes, it was hard to see his rebellion as anything more than an action taken to enrage an overbearing father.

  What made John’s rebellion seem so much grander than this was the turbulent, fast-changing world that surrounded it. In the fifties adolescent rebellion met a society that still had a strong sense of its own moral authority. Fifties rebels like James Dean and Elvis Presley were not the popular vanguard of a new dissenting politics. And Elvis only enhanced his celebrity by serving honorably in the military—thus acknowledging the moral authority of his country. But John rebelled into the age of white guilt and, thus, into a society that was growing less and less certain of its moral authority. If John’s rebellion had no political motivation, if it was simply personal, it met a society where political forces and social upheaval suddenly justified—even glamorized—all kinds of rebellion. Rock stars, black militants, antiwar leaders—all their rebellions touched a broadly anti-American politics that gave them a special charisma in the sixties.

  So the sixties were a time when even the most ordinary and personal acts of youthful rebellion were aggrandized by a powerful new dis
senting politics that let you rebel against “the system” rather than merely your parents. In that first decade of the age of white guilt, when America’s moral authority began to weaken, youthful rebellion suddenly represented a further challenge to the moral authority of American society and its institutions. Like the protests against racism and war, it seemed to represent a historical judgment against America. It seemed to be yet more evidence that there was something soulless and avaricious at America’s core that was now coming home to roost in the rebellion of an entire generation of young—just as America’s racism and militarism had come home to roost in the civil rights and antiwar movements. Thus, adolescent rebellion in the sixties, because it coincided and melded with such great transformative movements, took on a historical resonance it would never have had outside the reflected light of these movements. It came to seem like a social movement in its own right, a broad and happily amorphous youth movement taking on the injustice of America’s soullessness.

  Usually adolescent rebels are quickly humbled because they overestimate their own truth and underestimate the truth of their elders. As Mark Twain famously put it, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one’s self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. One opposes it to discover its logic and validity for one’s self. And by failing to defeat it, one comes to it, and to greater maturity, through experience rather than mere received wisdom. Of course, every new generation alters the adult authority it ultimately joins. But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past.