White Guilt

by Shelby Steele

  The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. Baby boomers, already rather inflated from growing up in the unparalleled prosperity of postwar America, were inflated further by an adult authority that often backed down in the face of their rebellion. It doesn’t matter, for example, that there was honor in America’s acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgement of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority—and, thus, adult authority—despite the good it achieved. And when you added to civil rights the Vietnam War, feminism, the plight of farm workers, a new environmentalism, a deepening animus toward materialism and corporate power, and a “credibility gap” between young and old, you could easily make a damning case against adult authority. No previous generation had been served up a richer menu of social and moral “contradictions” and “hypocrisies” with which to hammer away at the moral authority of adult American society.

  Much of this hammering may have made America a better society, may have resolved some rather profound contradictions in American life—the treatment of minorities and women, for example. But over time, it also expanded the vacuum of moral authority that is white guilt far beyond matters of race and the struggles of minorities. This meant that issue upon issue became framed by the paradigm of white guilt. With the environment, for example, America was essentially cast as an oppressor—a kind of environmental “racist”—and the environment as its victim. Disregard for the environment was presumed to come from that same soullessness, imperial greed, penchant for violence, and false sense of superiority that racism came from. And, as with race, “correct” attitudes toward the environment are enforced by the blackmail of stigma, so that Americans are stigmatized with a kind of environmental racism until they prove otherwise. If you don’t stand against, say, drilling for oil in Alaska, then you are displaying the soullessness and hubris thought to be endemic to the American character. You are a kind of bigot.

  So white guilt may have gotten its initiating, big-bang start in race relations and America’s great acknowledgment of racial wrongdoing, but it was quickly expanded by all the moral authority that America began to lose to other conflicts, especially the Vietnam War and the struggle for women’s rights. Certainly the country resisted acknowledging wrongdoing in these areas, but not as confidently or for as long as it had in the racial arena, where it took centuries to break through resistance. But after racial resistance was finally breached, America forever lost a certain innocence. The country had become rather familiar with this new phenomenon of acknowledging a moral wrong. So there was certainly support for the war and even some resistance to full equality for women, but the moral landscape had already begun to change. People who took these positions were increasingly stigmatized as Neanderthals who wanted women in the kitchen, blacks in their place, and a military that opened the world for American economic exploitation. They were more and more marginalized as living incarnations of the American soullessness and greed, all that decent Americans now wanted to move beyond.

  By the late sixties many in the establishment were not only acknowledging wrongdoing in race and war, but also suggesting that America suffered from a deeper, more characterological problem. All this acknowledgment—coming even from establishment figures like the grandfatherly TV anchor Walter Cronkite, who questioned the war in 1968—took moral authority away from traditional America. In the especially turbulent year of 1968, the vacuum of moral authority was so vast that some wondered if the country would stand. A conservative candidate, Richard Nixon, was narrowly elected president in that year to—among other things—stand firm against the young, many of whom were beginning to take the word “revolution” seriously. This ever-expanding vulnerability that the young sensed in America was white guilt.

  And it was, in fact, white guilt rather than American guilt, not only because the great loss of moral authority began in white racism, but also because whites were the nonoppressed Americans, the only race/clan for which all the precepts of the American democracy fully applied, and the group that conducted the nation’s affairs entirely in its own self-interest. Whites had kept blacks down, taken the country to war when it suited them, resisted pleas for equality from their own women, ruined the environment out of greed, practiced a capitalism that exploited the resources of poor countries around the world, and so on. It doesn’t matter that all of this is not precisely true, or that there is another and more positive side to at least some of it, or that America—for all its transgressions—is also indisputably great. White guilt follows from a Kafkaesque racial stigma that all whites—even baby boomers such as my classmate John—carry like Kafka’s character Joseph K., who is guilty merely because he is accused.

  So while it might be true that John was essentially driven by adolescent rebellion, it was also true that his race was in a kind of crisis. His race—normally confident to the point of thinking of itself as universal humanity—was suddenly struggling in the first stage of its open stigmatization as racist, soulless, and greed-driven. This was the beginning of the age of white guilt, when whites in America, if not the world over, began to live a little like Joseph K., for whom accusation was the same as guilt. And worse, the Kafka allusion did not perfectly apply, because there was considerable truth to the accusation that whites were racists. Joseph K., had in fact done nothing to feel guilty over, but white Americans had been raised in a thoroughly and explicitly racist society in which racism so infused every aspect of life that it was a form of good manners—propriety itself.

  Even if one had no animus toward blacks, there would have been the complicity of going along with racist customs, practices, and attitudes. This much active and passive racism among white people only meant that whites could be more credibly stigmatized as racists. It was the first time in all of American history that whites began to be truly accountable for their racism. And John, like millions of other baby boomers, launched his adolescent rebellion at the precise historical moment when all this came into play. In other words, baby boomers began to rebel just as white guilt emerged as one of greatest social, cultural, and political forces in all of American history.

  13

  ADOLESCENTS ALL

  I remember a brief encounter I had with John during his dramatic return to campus. At a party he told me that if I really cared about civil rights, I too should head out to California. He said something about big things happening in the East Bay, as if I would certainly know where the East Bay was and what was happening there. I didn’t know, or at least not until it was far too late to impress him with my up-to-the-minute command of the black protest scene. I just smiled, hoping he wouldn’t notice the blank I was drawing, and waited for him to make his point. But there was to be no point. He took on the pained look of a man who would have loved to talk forever were it not for all the pressing calls on his time. He made a quick apology, and then he was gone. I never saw him again. Only later that night did I remember that the East Bay meant Oakland, California, the home of the Black Panthers.

  But it was also surprising even to hear the words “civil rights” pass from John’s lips. Like many young whites of that era, he seemed to have been untouched by racial matters. This was the first generation raised on TV and Disney, on sitcom images of an immaculately raceless America. Only the evening news, with its images of the civil rights struggle, gave most white children a window into the nation’s “race problem.” But this only made it a rather far-off and abstract “current event,” something to be dutifully kept up with, and something therefore easily neglected. I would have been surprised if John even knew that there was a student civil rights group on our campus. Certainly racial injustice had nothing to do with the grand rebellion he was stagin
g. And yet, the mere act of rebellion at that late sixties moment not only gained him an association with the great social issues of the day but also positioned him as a man of progressive sympathies, a man on the moral side of important issues.

  This happened because John, I, and baby boomers generally were the beneficiaries of a near-perfect synchronicity between our adolescent rebellion and the advent of white guilt. We began to question adult authority at the precise historical moment when our parents began to lose moral authority to race, war, the women’s issue, and so on. The adolescent rebel is always—at least secretly—a bit insecure, worrying on some level that his indictment of his parents might be wrong, fearing that they might in fact be better and more knowing people than he gives them credit for. This rebellion is normally more focused on achieving autonomy than on explicitly defeating one’s parents. But for baby boomers, there was almost no way to avoid defeating them, no way to give the parental generation the benefit of the doubt. History itself seemed to have rendered a summary indictment against them. They were racist, sexist, militaristic, sexually repressed, hypocritical, shallow, “uptight,” materialistic, chauvinistic, compassionless, and philistine. It was as if they had been called out, made to stand in military formation, and then frankly stripped of their authority before our very eyes.

  The infamous “credibility gap” of that era between the government and its citizens, and the “generation gap” between the young and the old, were caused in part by this disgracing of adult authority. The old and powerful were not to be believed. And all of this was a formative, generation-defining experience for baby boomers, this witness to a far greater collapse of adult moral authority than previous generations had experienced. So, just as all the very normal tensions of youth roiled and built into something like a will—the adolescent will to individuate—we met an adult world so stripped of moral authority that it could not do the timeless work of adults, which is to say, “Here, and no further.”

  It was a strange experience to come of age in a society where most of what was familiar—the mainstream itself—lacked moral authority. This meant we were a generation that could not negotiate with the past, with traditions. We had to reject the past for its moral failings; therefore, we could not be reformers, only revolutionaries—thus our attraction to so many ideologies of revolution, so many ideas and faiths that flatly overturned what we were raised to believe. Mark Twain’s quip simply did not apply to baby boomers. The foolish and morally compromised father that we knew at fourteen did not become brilliant and wise when we were nineteen. He remained foolish and was even more morally compromised than we had realized at fourteen, and it fell on us to make the world he had let down into a better place.

  So this widening vacuum of moral authority in the adult world, this white guilt, constituted a default of adult authority that effectively put baby boomers in charge of redeeming America—of reinventing an America that would have moral authority in all the places where the “over thirties” had lost it. So, among other things, white guilt defined the overriding social responsibility of the baby-boom generation: to restore America’s moral authority by tackling such issues as racial equality, international peace, and equality for women.

  14

  STUMBLING INTO POWER

  None of this had yet become clear when John left our little college to answer the call of hippie life in California. And yet, John’s surprising mention of civil rights and the East Bay shows me now that he had instinctively known enough to exploit the synchronicity between his personal act of rebellion and the default of adult authority. He would have known that his father was vulnerable to the charge of racism, that if racism was not a purple passion with his father, it was at least an unexamined predisposition, a habit of good manners—like taking one’s hat off in the presence of ladies. He would have known, too, that his father’s military background very likely made him a hawk on the war in Vietnam. Name the issue, and John, with reasonable confidence, could place his father on the wrong side of it. So whatever there was actually between them—the father’s too narrow expectations, or John’s unsuitability for college, or some other father-son grievance—would metamorphose from the personal to the political, where John could actually have moremoral authority than his uptight father, who was implicated in so many social evils. Once on the political level, there would be a role reversal: the son would have the greater authority and the father would be on the defensive, arguing in support of a discredited “status quo” that had easily tolerated white male supremacy and American imperialism. The father would make a fat target for his son’s sarcasm because even when he made good sense—demanding, say, that John finish college—his good sense would be bereft of moral authority. “Sure, I could finish college,” John could say, “and join the racist, napalm-dropping, baby-killing establishment that you so love.” John’s father would have to answer his son from a great and deep hole dug by white guilt.

  Wherever there is a vacuum of moral authority, there is inevitably a transfer of moral authority and, therefore, of power.

  Thus it was that John—and baby boomers generally—happened onto possibly the greatest source of political, social, and cultural power in the late twentieth century: white guilt. This was the power—even the command—to invent America all over again in the interest of redeeming it. It was the power to transform every important institution and every area of society that had ever been touched by social injustice. And this included everything from the military to education, from the corporate world to the law, from voting rights to housing, from the practice of religion to the preservation of the environment. This was the power that launched the Great Society virtually overnight and that “integrated” public schools from Little Rock to Boston. It changed welfare into a socialism of guaranteed income and helped to ravage what had been the world’s greatest public school system by battering it with decades of mindless, if well-intended, reforms. And it transformed American citizens for both better and worse. It made whites understand that racism is evil, but it also coerced them right back into racial discrimination by miring the nation in the race-based “results” reforms of diversity and affirmative action. It seduced blacks into the self-destructive and ironic politics of militant dependency by encouraging a black identity of entitlement and grievance—an identity that produced a black leadership capable of little more than trading off moral authority to whites and American institutions for racial preferences.

  If you think of all the ways that white racism affected and controlled American life before the sixties—from the ugly customs of a segregated society, to the private bigotry that propped up the identities of millions of whites, to the power of racism to stigmatize both blacks and whites—that will be a good measure of the scope and power of white guilt in American life since the sixties. Like racism, white guilt not only generates new social customs, redefines the way institutions function, gives us new law, and reorients our national politics; it also, in a sense, makes a new world by forever altering our idea of virtue. It says that white supremacy is not a moral truth that decency requires us to observe, but rather an evil that decency requires us to condemn. This new virtue demands that whites condemn the idea of their own racial superiority. So white guilt means that white skin now subtracts moral authority from rather than adds it to people and, thus, imposes humility where it once granted superiority.

  White guilt is essentially a historical force that follows naturally from a moral evolution in a specific society. Thus, it is implacable. It remakes the world as profoundly, and as awkwardly, as the immorality it overthrows once did.

  15

  THE END OF WHITE SUPREMACY

  White guilt was the enormous source of power that John and other baby-boomer rebels found themselves carried forward on, as if a great gravitational pull were bearing them into a future entirely of their own making. In a reminiscence of his time in the sixties within the orbit of the writer and sixties icon Ken Kesey (the subject of Tom Wolfe’s New Journ
alism classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), the novelist Robert Stone says: “More than the inhabitants of any other decade before us, we believed ourselves in a time of our own making.” Elsewhere he describes himself and Kesey enjoying one of the sixties’ more notorious pastimes—on the bank of a creek in the soft coastal mountains above Palo Alto they shared a joint. “We sat and smoked and possibility came down on us.”

  Possibility coming down like a kind of rain. Living in “a time of our own making.” These were the new promises that the sixties made to our generation, and these promises imbued John with a certain charisma during his brief return to campus. He had attached himself to a new unfolding history and crossed out of our mundane world of eight o’clock chem labs and work-study jobs. With him all was suddenly numinous and poignantly possible.

  It would be overreaching to suggest that white guilt was the only historical force behind all this—behind not only John as an augur of things to come but also the social, cultural, and generational transformations that began in the sixties. Certainly each transformation had its own source and logic and history—feminism, for example. And yet, I would argue that white guilt—this unforeseen diminution of moral authority that came after the open acknowledgment of racial wrongdoing—was a far more powerful force than commonly assumed. This is so because it replaced one of the greatest sources of “moral” authority in the history of the modern world: white supremacy.