White Guilt

by Shelby Steele

  The theme of white blindness is one of the most persistent themes in twentieth-century writing by black Americans—blindness toward others but, more important, toward the self. The essence of this theme is that whites have always had to nurture a certain blindness toward themselves in order to preserve their moral character in a racist society that favors them, and that this nurtured blindness is a part of the American culture, a part of what it means to be white in America. Thus, the blindness of whites to their true motivations in racial matters is a rather timeless feature of American life, as visible in today’s university president rationalizing affirmative action as it was in Thomas Jefferson’s last rationalizations for the continuance of slavery. In both cases, a white man argues out of a humanity that is aloof and God-graced for a race-based system that will utterly define black life, but that he himself will never be subject to. That whites can devise and support such systems while being blind to their true motivations is a special terror in black life, one that is explored in the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and many other black writers. It is always the black who pays the price for white self-delusion. And it is always blacks who will have to seek out their opportunities—like Odysseus against the Cyclops—within the blindness of whites. Whites, on the other hand—today’s college president, yesterday’s Thomas Jefferson—not only will never suffer from the systems they devise, but will be forever celebrated for their good intentions, their courage in confronting such an intractable problem.

  The majority decision of the Supreme Court in the recent University of Michigan affirmative-action case is an especially insensitive example of white blindness, every bit as chilling and bizarre as the contorted mathematical calculations by which Thomas Jefferson tried to figure out the number of years it would take to ship all slaves back to Africa—calculations which so defeated him that he finally ended his lifelong wrestling with the slavery issue by ceding the problem to future generations. The odd reasoning of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion in the Michigan case has the same myopic and abstracted quality as Jefferson’s machinations. In a borrowed psuedoscientific doublespeak—“learning outcomes,” “soft variables,” “selection index,” “nuanced judgments,” “critical mass,” and “holistic reading”—O’Connor piles one social-science banality on top of another, hoping against hope that we buy her tall tale of “diversity” as so “compelling” a state interest that it justifies racial preferences. Her opaque language is a textbook illustration of George Orwell’s famous critique of political language as words used to “obscure” and hide reality rather than to illuminate it. So in thrall is she to a soulless and undefined “diversity” that she ignores the most basic legal issues in the case: the constitutionality of preferring one race over another, as well as the court’s careful precedents on racial preferences—“narrow tailoring” and “strict construction.”

  But more important, Justice O’Connor shows no interest in seeing the real causes of racial inequality in college admissions. She never identifies an actual problem that black students are having in college admissions that might be remedied by racial preferences. As always with white blindness, blacks and other minorities are invisible as human beings. So O’Connor never matches a problem that minorities are experiencing as human beings with a remedy.

  This points to the shocking irony that defines her decision and renders it absurd: she applies a remedy to something that is not a problem—diversity. Diversity, of course, is not unfairness, discrimination, or a systemic bias that disproportionately hurts minorities. To the contrary, diversity is put forth as a social good, something on the positive side of the ledger. So O’Connor is saying that it is perfectly constitutional to have a remedy that remediates nothing, a race-based remedy that does not remediate racial discrimination; and that this is so even when that remedy is literally executed through programmatic racial discrimination.

  But why is this an example of white blindness? And what specifically is white blindness? It is a blindness to the human reality of minorities that occurs when whites look at racial issues but see only the contingency they must meet to restore their own moral authority. White blindness is an unconscious self-absorption by which whites see racial issues—and even interracial encounters—as opportunities to dissociate from historic racism. Thus, encountering the black face is more an opportunity to dissociate than to see a human being like oneself. This is blindness because it confuses the mere dissociation from racism with sight, with seeing the human reality of racially different people. The two are not the same. To see humanity across racial lines one must see frankly how people of other races live as human beings, not as members of a race.

  As mentioned earlier, over one hundred American institutions—universities, corporations, the military, state and local governments—submitted briefs to the Supreme Court in the Michigan case supporting racial preferences. Yet, despite all this commitment to diversity and racial preferences, I am not aware of a single institution that based its call for preferences on a careful analysis of why so many minorities were not competitive enough to win places in their institutions unaided by racial preferences. Again, if we can’t specifically name the problems that make so many minorities noncompetitive, how can we argue that racial preferences are a remedy?

  But, of course, these institutions are not interested in the reasons for minority noncompetitiveness; they are interested only in the fact that this persistent weakness means they must use preferences to rope in enough minorities. And what is enough minorities? Enough is just enough to clearly dissociate the institution from America’s old racist patterns. Without preferences it would be utterly impossible to admit enough minorities for a convincing dissociation. Dissociation requires evidence of a proactive effort, a self-conscious and highly visible display of minority recruitment that shows the institution to be actively at war with its racist past. Thus, to conspicuously dissociate, it should be clear that preferences were used.

  Most Ivy League universities want their freshmen classes to be roughly 8 percent black. This works as dissociation because they would be no more than 1 or 2 percent black without racial preferences. Eight percent verifies proactive effort because, at the very least, it quadruples the number of blacks that would otherwise be there. This, really, is the meaning of the infamous terms “quotas” and “quota system,” terms that can be understood only in the language of white guilt. A “quota” is simply the percentage of minorities required to verify proactive minority recruitment in a given institution—minority recruitment at a level that sacrifices the institution’s integrity, its timeless standards, and its fairness to whites and Asians. Lower standards and collateral discrimination—these are the tests of dissociation. And once dissociated, the institution goes about its business without worrying why minorities do so poorly within it.

  20

  WHITE BLINDNESS AND SAMBO

  By far the best literary depiction of white blindness ever written has to be the “Mr. Norton” episode in Ralph Ellison’s classic 1953 novel, Invisible Man. This episode is a virtual allegory of white blindness in which the invisible man—the novel’s young black protagonist—ends up being kicked out of college because he lacks the time-honored black skill of manipulating white blindness. Dr. Bledsoe, the president of this college based on the real Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, tells him just before sending him away, “Every nigger in the cotton patch knows you’re suppose to lie to a white man.” And this is precisely what the invisible man failed to do as he toured the pompous and self-absorbed Mr. Norton around the campus. Norton is a wealthy white philanthropist from the North who contributes lavishly to this small black college in response to the soaring rhetoric of Dr. Bledsoe—a man who has crafted his “lies” to the white man into a perfect moneymaking mask. In his sermons Bledsoe essentially presents the striving black race as an opportunity for white transcendence. By contributing to his college, whites can dissociate from the devastation racism has wrought on black
s. They can tell themselves that their contributions so improve the lives of blacks that they are effectively rendering racism benign. So Bledsoe, making his way in an openly racist society, sells whites a kind of absolution, a renewed sense of moral authority as they live out lives that are unavoidably complicit with racism.

  But the invisible man threatens to crack Bledsoe’s carefully constructed mask when he unthinkingly allows Norton to meet the rough-hewn black sharecropper Trueblood, who has—to the outrage of both black and white communities—impregnated both his wife and his daughter. Trueblood (a name symbolizing the unvarnished lower-class Negro) represents precisely the dark, messy, and fallen human reality of black life that Bledsoe labors so hard to keep hidden. Bledsoe offers up his people as innocents, as simple, almost childlike people who, without guile or resentment toward their oppressors, strive to live by an American ethic of hard, honorable work and humble hope. It is a vision of the Negro as a kind of pet, a figure of sweet and harmless inferiority to whom one gives out of the largesse of one’s superiority. So Bledsoe throws the invisible man out of his college for being “dangerous,” for allowing a white man with money to look behind the black mask and see the human frailty, and even Oedipal complexity, of black people—and all the more dangerous because Norton has unknowingly revealed an unnatural obsession with his own daughter.

  Bledsoe’s panicky fear is that the Trueblood encounter will give sight to Norton, an ability to see past the delusion of race and into the human reality of blacks—and perhaps even to experience a human brotherhood with them. This possibility is simply too dangerous for Bledsoe even to contemplate, because he has predicated all his advantage on white blindness, on the easy gratification he can offer whites by giving them the opportunity to help inferiors, people who will be forever beneath them.

  Norton’s own unacknowledged incestuous impulse is a human—not a racial—link to Trueblood. It is only Norton’s blindness to blacks as human beings—despite all the money he gives to their cause—that saves him from seeing himself in Trueblood. And this blindness allows him to experience vicariously the sin of incest in scintillating detail by getting Trueblood to recount vividly the terrible cold night when he made love to his daughter as his wife slept beside them. If Norton consciously saw anything of himself in Trueblood, he would fall outside the framework of white supremacy and black inferiority, and he would no longer be a great white redeemer. He would simply be a lecherous old man little different from the “nigger” whose taboo-breaking intrigues him. This sort of racial equality, grounded in common humanity, is precisely what Bledsoe cannot abide. His appeal is to the vanity and largesse of white supremacy. Racial equality—the idea that people are the same under the skin—is Bledsoe’s private terror.

  So he kicks the invisible man out of his college for putting Norton’s white blindness at risk, for situating Norton precariously close to an experience of human commonality with an ignorant black sharecropper and, thus, close to an experience of something like both human vision and racial equality. Bledsoe—like such contemporary black leaders as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, and the entire civil rights establishment—essentially sells a “Sambo” image of his own people, an image of black weakness and inferiority offered in trade to blind whites looking to buy an easy moral authority.

  This points to a sad irony at the core of black-white relations in America. The price blacks pay for the mere illusion of recompense for past injustice always requires them—literally as well as metaphorically—to be “Sambo-ized,” to be merchandised to whites as inferiors and victims. The Sambo doll, as an image of grotesque black inferiority sold to whites in homage to their superiority, is an ominous and recurring image in Invisible Man, a novel set in the era of segregation. Yet, even today, when people argue for diversity and, thus, for racial preferences, black students are effectively Sambo-ized. They are assigned an inferiority so intractable that nothing overcomes it, not even good schools and high family incomes.

  When you give a racial preference to the child of two black professionals with advanced degrees and six-figure incomes—as entrée to a university that has not discriminated against blacks in more than sixty years—then you are clearly implying an inherent and irremediable black inferiority. You are saying that even the absence of racism and the fruits of a privileged life do not make it possible for blacks to compete with whites and Asians who may come from fractured homes and underprivileged backgrounds. So even the most gifted and affluent blacks—many of whom can compete on their own—must pull on the Sambo mask and reinvent themselves as the sort of inferiors that will trade well with white guilt. Even as opportunity virtually stalks their lives, they must learn to “lie to the white man.”

  21

  THE RAGE OF INVISIBILITY

  I always come away from arguments like the one with the “architect” of the Great Society feeling empty and frustrated. But these are only the polite feelings. Beneath them is always a palpable anger, potentially more intense even than any I felt back in the sixties when confronted by open racists. It is a sharp, bristling, and ego-fueled anger that, on the level of metaphor, would annihilate the offending party. It is triggered by encountering someone who cannot see you, even as he stands before you, because of all the presumptions he has made about you. Such a person has metaphorically annihilated you. He doesn’t hit you; he simply doesn’t see you, out of a conviction that there is nothing of you worth seeing beyond his own thin preconception of you. So you cease to exist in your own right and exist, instead, as a figment of his imagination. And this, of course, burns you up. You want to return fire, to employ a terrible violence—something, again on the metaphorical level, with the intimacy of, say, a switchblade or a tiny pistol. “Now you see me, don’t you,” you hiss into his ear as the blade goes in or the pistol pops.

  This sort of rage is the human ego defending itself, and, thankfully, it very rarely plays out on the literal level because we are so conditioned to fear and suppress it. Also, as we age and the brickbats of life batter the ego down to size, as they say, there is less ego territory to defend, and in any case, there is less energy to waste on such defense. That said, this kind of anger is archetypal. It is always at work in the world.

  People who are in the grip of white blindness, and thus unaware of their true motivations, always miss the human being inside the black skin, and so provoke this kind of anger. Your color represents you in the mind of such people. They will have built a large part of their moral identity and, possibly, their politics around how they respond to your color. Thus, a part of them—the moral part—is invested not in you but in some idea of what your color means. And when they see you—the individual—they instantly call to mind this investment and determine, once again, to honor it. They are very likely proud of the way they have learned to relate to your color, proud of the moral magnanimity it gives them an opportunity to express. So, in meeting you, they actually meet only a well-rehearsed and “better” part of themselves. Of course, if they are unapologetically racist, they would meet a well-rehearsed “superior” part of themselves. In either case, rage is likely to be your response.

  Invisible Man opens with an extraordinary image of this rage. The invisible man is bumped by a white man on a dark street one night, and the man—“a tall blond”—calls him an insulting name. The invisible man grabs the white man by the lapels and demands that he apologize. He refuses, and the invisible man pulls the man’s chin “down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and blood gush out.” The man still refuses to apologize, and the invisible man butts him again, and again, until he finally goes down. And once the white man is on the ground, the invisible man kicks him “repeatedly,” yet the man continues to utter insults, though his mouth is now “frothy with blood.” Finally, when the man is utterly helpless, the invisible man pulls out his knife, opens it with his teeth, and prepares to slit the man’s throat. But at that instant, with the knife “
slicing the air,” the invisible man has an epiphany: “it occurred to me that the man had not seen me.”

  This is the point at which the invisible man begins to understand that he is invisible and that the man, a white everyman, is blind. Instantly—and luckily for the white man—he is overcome by the irony that blindness and invisibility impose on the situation. “Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life.” In the man’s head there was a “phantom,” the idea of a nigger, an inferior being whom a white could insult at will and without consequence. This “phantom,” rather than the individual human being he had bumped into, was all the white man could ever see; and so this phantom of his own making, this nigger, is what had leaped out of the darkness and beaten him nearly to death. The invisible man laughs at the irony of his “crazy discovery.”

  Yet, despite its great drama, I have never found this scene entirely convincing. We are asked to believe that the invisible man’s sudden insight into blindness and invisibility, his almost literary comprehension of the moment’s irony, is sufficient not only to dispel his anger but also to enable him to feel “sincere compassion” for this “poor blind fool.” But can a murderous rage really be swept away by cool insight? Ellison’s themes of invisibility and blindness would have stood even if he had allowed his young protagonist to kill the white man. But then the invisible man would have been a different sort of protagonist, one capable of rageful murder like Richard Wright’s hero, Cross Damon, in The Outsider. Invisible Man required a more naive, even innocent, hero-narrator, so Ellison could not allow that knife to find its mark. Then, too, in 1953 when the novel was published, there would have been the practical matter of allowing a young black hero to kill a white man on the second page of the novel. So Ellison, unconvincingly, allows insight—epiphany—to still his hero’s rage and save the “blind fool’s” life.