White Guilt

by Shelby Steele

  I didn’t think my little trip would clear any of these hurdles, but I wasn’t ready for it to end, and there were still a few hours of daylight left in the sky. So just where the vast fields west of Salinas came to an end, and where the rolling coastal mountains began, I pulled off the highway and into Toro Canyon Park. In minutes I was hiking slowly up a gently rising trail at the bottom of a deep canyon. I knew the trail well but appointed myself no destination, no time frame. Even if darkness caught me I would know my way out. So very soon I once again had the feeling that time was on my side.

  And it was out of this feeling that it occurred to me that Bill Clinton had truly benefited from white guilt, that it was responsible for the new idea of virtue that was keeping him in office. And this notion of virtue was a very specific response to a very specific problem: the problem of having great power but not a commensurate authority.

  The great acknowledgment had diminished the moral authority of whites but not their power or the degree of their responsibility for society. Whites continued to run America in every way after owning up to racism. This meant that whites, American institutions, and the American democracy itself began to run at a conspicuous deficit of legitimacy. Even the individual white who had lifted himself from poverty to great success could not say that simply being white had not helped him. Thus, in his success there was a tincture of illegitimacy.

  So America’s great acknowledgment did not cause power to change hands directly from one race to another, but it did make the power that whites wield in society a contingent power—a power that must satisfy certain social or moral contingencies before it can be considered legitimate. After the mid-sixties, power exercised by whites, in the public and private sectors, had to dissociate from the sins that had caused whites to lose moral authority in the first place—racism and racial discrimination but also imperialism, ecological indifference, sexism, and so on.

  President Johnson’s Great Society, for example, was created—above all else—to meet this new contingency of dissociating American power from the nation’s racist past. American legitimacy was the Great Society’s most important purpose. And it achieved this purpose through a dissociation from the ill will toward blacks that had characterized all of American history. The Great Society was essentially an apology for the racism that had made the American democracy illegitimate. And its true purpose was not to “end poverty in our time,” but to restore legitimacy to the American democracy.

  More recently the three branches of the American military submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan affirmative-action case arguing that they needed to use racial preferences for the sake of troop morale. Given the large number of minority recruits, they claimed to need more minority officers. And in order to achieve this they needed to be able to lower standards for minorities. I do not believe for a second that there is any sound military reason for engineering parity between minority officers and minority recruits at the expense of better-qualified people. Certainly minorities, like whites, deserve to be led by the best available officers rather than by officers of their own race. Double standards always stigmatize precisely those they claim to help, so it will be minority officers—not white officers—who will be seen as second-rate under such a system.

  But, of course, troop morale is no more than a rationalization by whites for the social engineering they must do for their own legitimacy. Are we to believe that the morale of young whites is improved when they must work their way up the ranks in a system stacked against them? The military is simply an American institution, and its legitimacy is contingent on an explicit dissociation from racism. Yet a fair application of merit would disproportionately favor whites and therefore seem a continuance of the racist past rather than a break from it. No moral authority here, no legitimacy, only a vulnerability to charges of racism. So the hard reality of a skill disparity between the races must be engineered around, not for minorities, who end up stigmatized and with no better skills, but for the legitimacy of the institution. Likewise, when President Bush proclaims his faith in “diversity” and brags about the “diversity” of his cabinet, he is really only arguing that he has satisfied the contingency that makes his possession of power legitimate.

  18

  BLAMELESS POVERTY

  Not many years ago I met a man at a conference who said he had been an “architect” of President Johnson’s Great Society. I was standing in a small clump of people at a conference reception when I noticed him looking at me out of dark and frankly glaring eyes. I could see that he had business with me. When he introduced himself, I thought I ever so vaguely recognized his name, but in fact I didn’t. I felt guilty that I couldn’t recall the name of an “architect” of the Great Society.

  He had read something I’d written that was critical of the Great Society, and he said bluntly that it bothered him. Then he paused, collecting himself as if what he had to say was too important to utter in anger. In measured tones he explained that he had not gone into government intending to help build the Great Society. “You never know what’s going to land in your lap when you’re in government.” But he and the others in the Johnson administration had done the best they could in a “difficult situation.” Now, decades later, he realized there had been many problems, but he thought there was also much to be proud of. “Don’t you give us credit for anything?” he asked. And it was a good question. I had given some years of my own life to Great Society programs. Had those years finally added up to nothing?

  Before I could answer he began to describe for me what it had been like back then, as this great social experiment had unfolded. And here he was softened by a tone of nostalgia, an older man recalling a golden age. They had wanted, very literally, to invent a new society, he said, to do something extraordinary and grand. Then, with an ironic smile, he uttered that age’s great cliché: “to end poverty in our own time.” They had been true believers. And they had had the power of the United States government, the wealthiest and most powerful government in the entire world, to work with—billions of dollars and, if not a clear mandate, at least a certain political momentum coming off the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  But for me the Great Society had been more a dark age than a golden one. By the time I got to East St. Louis in 1968 I had already worked in two programs—one in rural Iowa, one in Minneapolis—but East St. Louis was of a different order. This small, and almost entirely black, city was famous as what was once called a “black bottom.” On Thanksgiving morning I heard loud voices and looked out the kitchen window to see our neighbor shooting at his teenage son with a pistol, grazing the boy’s stomach. Weeks later, walking into a convenience store one block from our apartment, I saw a dead body lying at the foot of a Dumpster, dressed in a sharkskin suit, impeccable in every detail except for the seepings of blood that left beet-colored stains on the shiny cloth. One of my best students—bright, well loved, college-bound, and a bit of a nerd whose innocence had been preserved by a devoted mother who had ensconced him in the sanctuary of the black church—was shot dead standing outside a teenage house party in a gang drive-by. The brilliant “cool” kid in the program, the urban equivalent of the suburban homecoming king, was shot to death beneath a viaduct near the Mississippi River for trying to move in on the local drug trade. Other boys came back from juvenile hall wearing lipstick and earrings. East St. Louis foreshadowed the welfare-gang-drug culture that was soon to infuse one urban ghetto after another, and so it qualified for virtually every Great Society program there was.

  The Great Society presented itself to East St. Louis primarily as money—money given in the name of black poverty but with no real accountability for being effective against poverty. Thus it engendered a kind of “upscale” corruption in which money changed hands and the government was told what it wanted to hear: that because we were black we knew the people we were working with, and because we were “innovative,” we had the magic to steer them out of poverty. All we needed was more
money, always more money.

  In fact, we did not know what we were doing. “Innovation” was simply a mantra we took up as a license to entertain all manner of gimcrack educational ideas, the “beauty” of which was that they always promised to let us achieve great things by demanding less of our students and of ourselves. We talked of “black ways of knowing,” which, of course, effectively gave all black teachers a kind of racial teaching credential that whites could never have. We devalued rigorous academic work by insisting that black students learned “experientially” and “intuitively,” and by arguing that “street knowledge” was often more valuable than “book” knowledge. There were certainly exceptions to all of this, people who worked earnestly with their students and taught substantive classes. But these serious people found themselves in an atmosphere of black excuse-making and incompetence, and they quickly left.

  So the program began to decline almost as soon as it began, yet it burned through as much government money as it possibly could, increased its budget requests each year, and constantly developed specialized proposals for even more money. (One such proposal brought us the services of an itinerant psychologist, an attractive blond woman who came by a few times a week to provide often rather noisy closed-door sessions to several of our male students.) Factions developed as better people left and as those left behind vied for their positions and money. There were occasions when people appeared at staff meetings with weapons conspicuously outlined under their clothes. So, finally, the two worlds of corruption—the street world of gangs and drug lords, and the poverty-program world of abundant government money—began to merge.

  This program, like so many others in that era, failed because it operated out of a new definition of poverty, one born of the impossible constraint that white guilt imposed on the exercise of government power where race and poverty were concerned.

  This was the new definition of poverty that led to the excoriation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. As assistant secretary of labor, Moynihan had presumed that he had the authority—if not a responsibility—to look frankly at black poverty. And his study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, offered a description of black poverty that history has now shown to have been amazingly prescient. There is no longer serious debate among scholars on Moynihan’s broad finding—that children from single-parent, female-headed households have more, and more serious, problems than do children from two-parent homes. But Moynihan had not accounted for the ascendance of white guilt and for the fact that his white skin—once a source of impunity—now robbed him of authority in racial matters. Nor could he have realized in 1965 that he was working for a government with power but little authority around race. In this context, whites simply could not criticize black life without being seen as racist, no matter what their intentions were. His fine study immediately became an untouchable document in both government and academia. He was made an object lesson for America’s intellectual class: castigation and disregard await all white scholars who see black poverty outside a context of victimization.

  But more important, Moynihan’s fate marked the end of white America’s authority over the problems of inequality and poverty, problems for which it nevertheless retained responsibility. Since the sixties, poverty has been defined in America not by its reality but out of the squeeze of a double bind: responsibility without authority. Thus, poverty came to be seen as a condition unrelated to the dysfunctions of those who suffer it, and always treatable by the “interventions” of government and other institutions. With this “blameless” poverty (poverty that never “blames the victim”), the government can be responsible for poverty even as it lacks authority over it. And responsibility is all the government needs, because therein lies the moral authority and legitimacy it seeks. So “blameless” poverty is no more than a white ingenuity which allows institutions to steal responsibility for a problem they lack the authority to even honestly define.

  Nevertheless, it is an ingenuity that brings real power to whites who embrace it. But it is not the responsibility for poverty that really matters; what matters is that responsibility brings legitimacy. And if you can restore legitimacy to American institutions in this age of white guilt, then you have real power. This has been the essential power of the political left in America since the sixties—this promise to restore legitimacy by taking responsibility for inequality and poverty even though there is no authority to define these problems accurately. What all this boils down to is that black poverty—of the kind I encountered in East St. Louis—became a currency of legitimacy (and power) for the government, the political left, and American institutions. The only catch was that those who suffered poverty had to be utterly blameless so that responsibility (legitimacy and power) would automatically fall to whites.

  19

  WHITE BLINDNESS

  Clearly the man who introduced himself to me as an “architect” of the Great Society saw nothing cynical in what he and his fellow architects had done in the sixties. He was quite proud of the effort they had made. “And I’ll tell you something else,” he said, his fierce black eyes boring into me, “we just needed to keep at it. We were learning new things all the time, but then the war took all the money away, and, you’re right, things did sort of go to hell after that, but…”

  “What kind of things did you learn that would have helped all those programs do better?”

  “Look,” he said irritably, “only—and I mean only—the government can get to that kind of poverty, that entrenched, deep poverty. And I don’t care what you say. If this country was decent, it would let the government try again.”

  “But what did you learn from all those programs and all that money spent?”

  But then he only wanted to tell stories—a trip he had taken to the Mississippi Delta, the gratitude of the people for a local VISTA program, the “new hope” they had taken from seeing their government caring about them. I told him I had heard the same gratitude countless times in the programs I had worked in, but there were tough questions to be asked. If so many people were grateful and newly hopeful, why didn’t they build on what they had been given and continue to improve themselves after the programs dried up? Why did so many just hold out for welfare or merely plod along as before? Why wasn’t there a better use of the public schools, a demand that they teach at a higher level? Why not private schools in basements and churches? Why not simple credit unions to provide capital? (My own father had started one in the segregated neighborhood where I grew up. My mother had organized a free baby clinic.) Why inertia instead of an energized focus on all the new possibilities that the civil rights victories had opened up? And finally, if the Great Society was so good, why did black America produce its first true underclass after it was over?

  “Damn it, we saved this country!” he all but shouted. “This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend.”

  “That’s my point,” I said. “The Negroes you met in the Mississippi Delta were a means to your end.”

  “They were no goddamn means to any end. I will never forget those people. If the government had stayed there, we would have saved them.”

  I tried to explain about white guilt, moral authority, and legitimacy, but it was no use. Exasperated, he turned sharply and walked away; then he turned again and came back. His anger had given way to a cold contempt, and his black eyes were dull now, almost gray. “I’m telling you, we saved this country and you need to appreciate that.”

  I had met a few others like him, men who had been in on the ground floor of important racial policies back in the sixties and seventies, like school busing, various Great Society programs, and affirmative action. They were a touchy lot, and I could understand why. For one thing, they were victims of what historians call “presentism”—having their past innovations constantly judged in the light of present-day standards and with all the smugness of hindsight. Policies t
hat had once seemed destined to deliver America from centuries of racial shame were now seen through the prism of decades of failure and cultural divisiveness. The innovators themselves—men who once heroically challenged America’s moral inertia around race—found themselves now associated with all this failure rather than with the glory of past good intentions.

  One such man that I knew wrote eloquently on what America was like back then, on how racial discrimination—an entrenched practice that gave millions of unskilled whites an economic advantage over blacks—had still prevailed everywhere in America in the late sixties, and on how his innovative policies had broken up many of these enclaves of white privilege. His subtext was that he had done a good thing, and if the policy he had created to breach white privilege had turned out to be disastrous over time and in other contexts, then that in no way mitigated the good he had done. It must also be added to the credit of such men that they had often faced down open racists, as President Johnson himself had done in his negotiations over the 1964 Civil Rights Bill when he told his old friend and mentor, Sam Rayburn, that things were going to change.

  And yet these men were also victims of another, far more common human problem: they did not entirely know themselves (like most of us), which often left them blind to their actual motivations. Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations. In the age of racism, whites said blacks were inferior so as not to see their own desire to exploit them, their true motivation. In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.