White Guilt

by Shelby Steele

  This was the authority that had given white America the hubris to live rather easily with slavery and segregation even as these practices glaringly violated every principle the nation was founded on. White supremacy—commonly accepted as a moral truth about the world, as a fact of nature reflecting God’s intended hierarchy of races—gave whites the moral authority to exclude other races from the American democracy as inferiors. This was also the authority that justified European colonialism as a “white man’s burden.” Though this specious claim of innate superiority is a human impulse present in all races, it has been a special problem in the Western world because it is supported by a very visible and real superiority of wealth and power. The dangerous logic is very simple: if whites have more power than others, they must also have an innate superiority over others—the former proving the latter.

  But the clearest and most important implication of the great acknowledgment was that superior power is not the same thing as innate superiority, and that being in an inferior position is not the same thing as being innately inferior. The white Western world (like other dominant cultures in history) had often muddied this distinction precisely to grant itself an illicit authority over nonwhites in inferior positions. The whole point of racism (and sexism, anti-Semitism, etc.) is to seize authority illicitly at the expense of another race. The racist says, “My God-given superiority is my authority, so my domination of inferiors is in God’s plan. What I think is conclusive, and what I say determines the course of things because God and nature want it so.” Nazis acted against Jews on the authority of their God-given Aryan superiority. Whites segregated blacks in America on the authority of God’s gift to them of superiority. When America admitted racial wrongdoing and passed strong civil rights legislation in the sixties, it delegitimized exactly this kind of authority—authority justified by an assertion that God made your group superior to all others.

  But how did the delegitimizing of white supremacy expand white guilt? The answer begins in what replaced white supremacy: the view that white Western supremacy came not from an innate racial superiority but from an innate capacity for evil, that the wealth and power of whites did not prove God’s favoritism for them but rather proved their special talent for dehumanizing others on a grand scale—their will to go forth and dominate others; to steal resources; to enslave, to conquer, to convert, to exploit, to exclude, and even to annihilate others. So white supremacy was replaced, in its same proportion, by the idea of white evil. And this was a profound change for America and the West because white supremacy had been a great source of authority, and thus a license and a power to act without serious regard for nonwhites.

  I remember a tense interaction with my seventh-grade history teacher, the indomitable Mrs. Burgess, that illustrates the near-perfect invisibility—and thus the power—of white supremacy as a source of authority. It was the late fifties. America was still ensconced in its long age of racism, so my parents had had to finagle and sacrifice to get me into an all-white junior high school, where they hoped I would get the kind of education that segregation reserved for whites. So, moving from an all-black segregated school, I suddenly found myself the lone black in a classroom of white faces. But I got along well, made good friends, and began to recover from the years of academic blight I had endured in my old segregated school.

  Still, one day in American history class, we came to a moment that I had long been dreading. Our American history textbook, which to my great relief skimmed over the entire subject of slavery in mere paragraphs, included—as if in a cruelty meant especially for me—the photograph of a slave woman standing in a cotton field in a ragged and shapeless dress, her head bound in an Aunt Jemima bandanna as if to cover the indecency of her hair, her eyes fat and round and bulging, her thick lips pushed into a grotesque smile of doglike happiness. Today I would place this photograph in the Diane Arbus school of photography, where the art is in the bravery of unsparingly photographing the face of human inferiority. But I was twelve and the only black in the class, and there was no art for me in this photograph. There was only mortification and dread of the day when the class would come to this brief slavery section and everyone’s book would open to the page with this misbegotten, dehumanized creature, and the whole class would look over at me.

  The day came. I was mortified. The class indeed looked my way or, worse, looked down in embarrassment for me. The caption beneath the picture was our lesson for the day: that American slaves worked hard but were well cared for and were, therefore, a happy people that liked to dance and sing—like the happy woman in the picture. At home I had been primed to speak up politely at such moments, to try to make a point, if I could, and then to let it rest. In the age of racism, America’s oppression of blacks had not yet been officially acknowledged, so blacks had no special moral authority that whites recognized. White supremacy meant the reverse: that whites were entitled to ignore black complaint and protest without penalty. So even the most polite objections by blacks invited the “troublemaker” label.

  Still, in class discussion I managed to mumble something to the effect that I didn’t think the slaves had been entirely happy. Mrs. Burgess, a kind if stern woman with a rolling eye, ignored me so utterly that I began to wonder if she had heard me at all. Minutes passed before I realized that my little comment was going to disappear into the ether. Hours later that same day she stopped me in the hallway. Finally, I thought, I will get my response, even if it will now be between only the two of us. But she only reminded me about something mundane that I was supposed to do, like patrol-boy duty. I must have shown a little disappointment, which finally brought the flicker of recognition I had been hoping for. I could virtually see her remembering my little dissent, but as she did, her look turned to hard irritability. Clearly, she wanted me to see that I was pushing her too far, that if I was going to start making little racial protests, her magnanimity would soon be exhausted. Everything about her said that she was doing me a favor by not holding my dissent against me, and that she expected me to be grateful. I got the point and smiled, making it clear that I wanted no trouble. She smiled back, her rolling eye ambling off on its own. And that was it. Neither she nor I nor anyone else mentioned the subject of slavery again.

  Was Mrs. Burgess a white supremacist?

  No, I don’t believe so. Mrs. Burgess’s worldview—formed in the first half of the twentieth century—may have been informed by ignorances and stereotypes that would easily qualify her as a racist today. But she was essentially a kind person and no part of her self-esteem seemed propped up by racial animus. Still, like all white teachers in those days, she was imbued with an authority that came from white supremacy. I have little doubt that she saw the idea of happy slaves as ridiculous. But in those areas where a society is repressed, so that even obvious truths are explosive, people often go along with the ridiculous as the least of many evils. Mrs. Burgess was not going to open the can of worms I wanted to open, and in that age of racism she had the authority not to. She was going to maintain the propriety of white supremacy, which made truth in the matter of slavery an impropriety. And also in this context, she was trying to save me from myself. She believed, as I did, that the age of racism would continue indefinitely. I would have to live in it, and she wanted me to know that this sort of challenging attitude would not work no matter what my parents—known troublemakers—had told me.

  So it was out of a certain human kindness—even affection—that Mrs. Burgess had ignored my comment. She knew that we would both live under the authority of white supremacy no matter what we thought of white supremacy itself. And she wanted me to learn how to live with that authority. But more important, she was utterly secure in her authority to teach me this lesson. In that age of racism, her judgment in racial matters had authority even though—and especially because—she was white. So all that year she would watch me and then, in some quiet and private way, let me know what she thought. After a basketball game in which I fouled out early, she let me know th
e next day that it wasn’t good for the only black on the floor to commit so many fouls. “People will think the wrong thing.” Her comments were made quickly, often in passing, and they were never open for discussion.

  Today Mrs. Burgess would be seen as an enforcer of racial hierarchy because she was essentially an accommodationist: someone who showed kindness to blacks by helping them accommodate to white supremacy. And shouldn’t her kindness have gone into combating white supremacy? Maybe so, but this is a little like glibly passing judgment on someone who learns to survive under a totalitarian regime. White supremacy was the authority we were both accountable to, and though today Mrs. Burgess could easily be judged an accommodationist, back then I thought of her only as a kind of friend.

  Nevertheless, it was a mere ten years later that I stood in Dr. McCabe’s office—with a full beard and an Afro approaching the size of a healthy yard shrub—defiantly spilling cigarette ashes onto the carpet and reading out a list of demands. Mrs. Burgess would surely have disapproved. And I cannot imagine her ever restraining herself in the way that Dr. McCabe restrained himself. But then I cannot imagine her outside her full authority, a part of which came from white supremacy. But for Dr. McCabe this source of authority was already fast disappearing. I met him after America’s great acknowledgment, thus after the idea of evil had begun to attach to America and to whites. All around him, like an aura, was the specter of white moral inferiority, of American moral cowardice. White supremacy had been Mrs. Burgess’s aura and a very important source of her incontestable authority. But this same white supremacy later robbed Dr. McCabe of authority. Not only did he put up with behavior that Mrs. Burgess would never have tolerated, but he took up many of our demands, silly as they were, and implemented them—as did countless other college presidents across the country. It wasn’t just that he had lost the authority of white supremacy, that special grace that whiteness bestowed. But that grace had become a disgrace, a shame that weakened his authority to the point where he found himself appeasing black students who were asking for utterly absurd things simply to feel the power that white guilt had opened to them.

  And so the delegitimizing of white supremacy greatly expanded white guilt because it turned an authority asset into an authority deficit by linking white supremacy more to a capacity for evil than to innate racial superiority. It created a new moral/racial iconography in which whiteness became more an icon of racial evil than of racial supremacy. One part of white guilt is the horrible moral hypocrisy of racism in a democracy, of loving freedom and then denying it to nonwhites. The other part is the claim of innate white superiority as a justification for this hypocrisy and as a license to commit evil against racial inferiors. Once acknowledged, as happened in the mid-sixties, this legacy of hypocrisy and evil simply began to corrode the moral authority of whites.

  Some long-simmering power that had always been weakly alive beneath the repressions of white supremacy had finally broken through and won its point, so that traditional America could never again see itself as an innocent society, as a straightforward society of honest, optimistic, ingenious, and freedom-loving whites.

  16

  A COHERENCE GONE OUT OF THE WORLD

  So the vivid sense of possibility that young baby boomers walked into in the early sixties—which opened the way for the coming counterculture—came to them through the death of white authority, the authority that white skin itself had always carried in America. Possibility was a positive fallout of this death, but there was also another, more ambiguous fallout. When white supremacy was delegitimized so that common decency required Americans to treat it as a great evil, all whites lost the right to any racial self-consciousness. In other words, they lost the right to a white identity. Whites cannot celebrate their race without aligning themselves with white supremacy and, thus, with the murder, enslavement, and exploitation of millions the world over. This prohibition is a feature of their lost moral authority, another element or territory of white guilt.

  In fact, if there is a white racial identity today it would have to be white guilt—a shared, even unifying, lack of racial moral authority. As other group identities derive from a shared fate, white guilt is a shared white fate rendered up by history. Whites can no more escape white guilt than blacks can reject being black—the latter cannot know themselves racially without the memory of slavery, and the former cannot know themselves racially without the memory of white supremacy. Two shaming fates, yes, but two identities? Can an identity revolve around contrition and deference toward darker races, as a modern white identity would have to? Does it make sense for whites to go around saying, “We are the contrite people, and we defer to other races; this is our identity”? Yet to gain employment today in most American institutions whites must somehow pledge allegiance to “diversity” as if to demonstrate a white identity of contrition and deference. Even in the corporate and military worlds—not to mention academia—no white goes far without genuflecting to diversity. Nevertheless, beyond an identity that apologizes for white supremacy, absolutely no white identity is permissible.

  But isn’t this a good thing? Aren’t America and the Western world—if not the entire world—already much better off now that whites are denied white supremacy and any form of racial identity outside contrition?

  It is very easy to be morally glib about this, to see the loss of white authority only in relation to an idea of justice, and thus to say that it was entirely a good thing and overdue to boot. It was a good thing, and it was overdue. But the death of white authority also meant that something culturally enormous—something that had brought great cohesion and coherence to society—began to go out of the world. If white Western societies were racist and imperialistic, they were also the centers of an indisputably great civilization (one that absorbed contributions from many other races and cultures). But when white supremacy was delegitimized, whites did not simply lose the authority to practice racism. The loss of authority generalized well beyond that, so that whites also lost a degree of their authority to stand proudly for the values and ideas that had made the West a great civilization despite its many evils.

  This points to a fundamental problem with moral authority, whether in societies, institutions, or individuals: it is absolutely necessary because it bestows legitimacy on the exercise of power, but it generalizes too easily, often granting more legitimacy than it should to those who have moral authority, and denying more legitimacy than it should to those who don’t have it. When white supremacy was itself a source of moral authority, Western societies felt nothing less than an extravagant legitimacy, ranging over the entire earth, taking what they wanted, even “depopulating” many regions of “inferiors.” The authority derived from their presumed innate superiority made whites gods of the earth whose every base instinct for plunder, rape, and systematic oppression could be legitimately indulged. But without white supremacy as a source of moral authority, the reverse began to happen. The loss of moral authority went too far the other way, not only denying legitimacy to the plunder of the nonwhite world but also denying it to that entire set of difficult “character” principles that bring coherence and even greatness to free societies: personal responsibility, hard work, individual initiative, delayed gratification, commitment to excellence, competition by merit, the honor in achievement, and so on. How could these principles be important when they had coexisted so easily with racism? Weren’t they, in fact, a part of the machinery of white supremacy?

  In the age of racism, blacks were held accountable to these values and principles even though they were also openly oppressed. Therefore, there was a cultural coherence in America based on these values and principles that applied to everybody despite the presence of segregation. This coherence, in itself, was a good thing, and was surely responsible for much that was great in the character of white and black Americans. Moreover, it might have provided an ideal consensus of values out of which to build a post-white supremacy society. But the delegitimization of white supremacy
greatly injured this cultural coherence by taking authority away from the values and principles it was based on. After America admitted to what was worst about itself, there was not enough authority left to support what was best.

  PART THREE

  THE WAYS OF BLINDNESS

  17

  A CONTINGENT POWER

  At last I turned off Highway 101 just before the city of Salinas and headed due west on Highway 68 toward the Monterey Peninsula and the cool Pacific. It was still a sunny and clear winter day, which meant there would be no fog over the coast to smother the sun. In summer the ocean fog—sucked over land by hot air from the central valley—could greet you many miles inland from the coast, and almost immediately the world would be gray and seasonless and the air would be thirty degrees cooler. But this winter day my trip into Monterey and home would be sunny all the way.

  My only worry was that home would come too quickly. I wanted at least some resolution of the little Clinton-Eisenhower dilemma I had posed for myself that morning. At home there would be distractions. It had been a luxury just to drive along in Chautauqua-like contemplation of a paradox: why it was that each of these presidents would very likely lose office for committing the other’s sin but not for committing his own sin. The luxury had been the fullness of time, the empty hours in which to let experience and idea build on each other—and to experience the landscape as a kind of friend to thought. In mythology journeys always end in epiphany or knowledge or resonant meaning.