And it is even more unconvincing because the rage the invisible man feels and the violence he acts out on the white man are quite convincing responses to white blindness. The invisible man’s demand for an apology after the white man’s first insult is effectively a demand to be seen and treated as a human being. It is born of his desire to be visible, a simple enough human desire. But the white man makes it clear that he would rather die than see the invisible man as a human being. Intractably committed to his blindness, this white man becomes a grinning tar baby—the more you hit him with hands and feet, the more you become stuck to him. Worse, each blow you deliver only infuriates you more until your own mounting anger finally spirals you into self-destruction. In the end your hands and feet are stuck to him, and he possesses you, all the while grinning impassively.
Tar babies infuriate and inflame the rages of pride by refusing to see the people who approach them. They assault with invisibility, and you want to annihilate them simply to be seen—perhaps the deepest human longing. But you only end up stuck to them. So Ellison chose the perfect conceit to reveal the effect of white blindness on its victims. Blithely, like an impervious tar baby, white blindness annihilates blacks with invisibility and so dupes us into a rageful pursuit of visibility. But after the rage and even violence, we are left to simmer in futility.
Well, this was the kind and quality of rage that I felt after my encounter with the “architect” of the Great Society. By now I have learned to sidestep such rage fairly well, to walk away from the tar baby, as it were. And today, in our age of white guilt, people or institutions in the grip of white blindness truly are tar babies. In the age of racism, white blindness was rooted in hate. Whites did not see you because their own identity—whiteness itself—was literally defined by your being less than human. But as infuriating as this kind of white blindness was, blacks could at least sneer back.
One of the few advantages of belonging to a despised group is that you so clearly owe nothing to your oppressor. In hatred and open oppression you are left, oddly, to possess yourself; behind the invisibility that hatred imposes there is what Ellison called a “margin of freedom” in which the oppressed autonomously reinvent themselves, making their own meaning and even culture. In the space of this freedom the oppressed will have their own mores and measures of character; their own ways of worship, rituals of romance, and music; and especially their own self-mocking absurdist humor. They will know that they are surviving against far greater odds than others, and despite the obvious unfairness of this, they will compose a brotherhood of the strong and assign themselves a broader and deeper humanity than others. Paradoxically, oppression always conveys a sense of superiority along with its abuses. This is why it is so profoundly mistaken to assume that racism and oppression automatically cause low self-esteem in blacks. The opposite is more likely the case.
In the age of racism blacks were not confused by white blindness, precisely because it was so openly antagonistic to us. When the invisible man is insulted by the white man, he does not wonder if the man is a friend or an enemy. He may worry about getting caught beating up a white man, but he has no doubt that he should beat him up. Racism forced an outward conformity and obeisance from blacks but not an internal agreement.
However, in the age of white guilt, white blindness has been driven not by racism but by the white need to dissociate from racism. Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today not out of bigotry but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority. And when they find a way to dissociate from racism—“diversity,” politically correct language, political liberalism itself—there is little incentive to understand blacks as human beings. Dissociation makes whites human again.
The white blindness that drives me to rage is, therefore, driven by the rage whites feel at having their humanity made invisible by the racist stigma. So it is not that whites want to be blind to the human circumstances and needs of blacks; rather, it is that they are fighting for their human visibility against a stigma, and in the process they become blind to all needs but their own.
The irony is that the “architect” felt rage toward me for precisely the same reason that I felt it toward him. We both felt assaulted by invisibility, and we both seethed at the other’s impassive refusal to see past our race’s reputation and into our individual humanity. We were each the other’s tar baby. He was enraged with me because I was leaving him to languish in invisibility behind the racist stigma as if he were no better than the common run of whites, white Americans who had never lifted a finger to repair all the injustices done to blacks. His rage was that I would not see the goodness in his individual human heart. And he stood before me as the invisible man stood before his tormentor, trying to bully me into an acknowledgment of his humanity.
But I knew that he had simply made theater of his good intentions, hoping that money thrown at blameless poverty would win moral authority. That he was right in this, that he could win moral authority without ever seeing blacks as human beings like himself, is what tripped my rage. Effectively, he wanted me to give him credit for saving whites at the expense of blacks. So there we were, two Americans, a black and a white, caught in a kind of pas de deux of rage because we both perceived the other as blind to our humanity.
But I don’t believe there was a genuine equivalency between us. I saw his humanity. I saw that he had behaved like most human beings when they are at first stigmatized. He had looked for the quickest and easiest way to live again without stigma. And, in his desperation, he had forgotten that blacks are human beings. It was precisely because I saw him as human that I understood the source of his blindness. And by continuing to see him as a human being, I could also understand his rage. My rage was that, forty-some years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he was utterly incapable of seeing the source of mine.
22
ELITISM AS VIRTUE
After the Supreme Court came down with its decision in the University of Michigan affirmative-action case, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd responded with one of the most vile columns I have ever seen in print. It was a screed, a public tantrum, a display of apoplectic and racist anger directed at Justice Clarence Thomas, who had written a powerful dissenting opinion in the case. But the invisibility rage that was so clearly behind Dowd’s anger did not begin with her. It began in the flood of legal briefs submitted to the Court from over one hundred American institutions demanding that race preferences be kept alive. In other words, it began in white blindness, in that almost grim determination in whites to win dissociation from racism at virtually any cost. These institutions were fighting for their own visibility as fair and legitimate institutions open to all people. And Justice O’Connor’s decision, built on the logic of all their briefs, is certainly one of the most unequivocal examples of white blindness ever written, more so—given America’s moral evolution since the nineteenth century—even than Plessy v. Ferguson. Without the slightest self-awareness, and writing largely in reference to unexamined social science clichés, O’Connor jerry-rigged a majority decision that had no real purpose beyond enabling America’s institutions to dissociate themselves from racism. So here was a white justice, like my “architect,” rather self-satisfied as she validated a policy in the name of blacks that served primarily white institutions.
But then Justice O’Connor was, herself, fighting for her visibility and moral authority against the racist stigma—a stigma that threatened to “annihilate” her legitimacy as a decent human being, not to mention as a sage Supreme Court justice. Especially as the Court’s first woman she was under terrible, if unspoken, pressure not to be the justice who ended affirmative action. These are the pressures, I believe, that redirected her vision away from legitimate questions of racial discrimination and the law and toward the utterly artificial matter of diversity. “Diversity” is no more than code for white dissociation, and once O’Connor was in its thrall, she rendered herself utterly blind both to blacks
as human beings and to the question of whether racial preferences were constitutional. And blind in this way, she wrote a decision that both assaulted and insulted black Americans with human invisibility.
Is it any wonder, then, that Justice Thomas’s dissent in this same case is, above all else, a fiery and indignant demand that blacks be seen and understood first of all as human beings? Rare in Justice Thomas’s legal writing, this dissent offers the human details of his own experience in the Ivy League and elsewhere. Just as O’Connor’s decision was driven by a terror of human invisibility (being seen as a racist), Thomas’s dissent was likewise driven by the same terror (being seen as no more than a black). Here is a colleague, someone ostensibly of his same philosophical orientation, who allows herself to be terrorized into a blindness toward black humanity, and thus toward his humanity. Worse, implied in her decision is a view of blacks as inferiors who simply cannot compete without twenty-five more years of white paternalism. Add to this her rather imperial tone and you have a perfect tar baby.
So just beneath the surface of Thomas’s dissent there are echoes of the invisible man’s rage, a rage that first of all wants visibility, wants the human effects of preferences on blacks to be seen and, failing that, wants to “annihilate” the enemy—not to murder but to annihilate the offending ideas that enthrall the enemy. In this case, the enemy is not only Justice O’Connor but also the archetypal white liberal, that blind, blithe, and infuriating figure whose social morality is nothing more than dissociation. In the end Thomas’s dissent does “annihilate” these white liberals—and the entire canon of ideas that define them—by giving them no credit whatsoever for being on the side of good.
And then, with near-perfect predictability, Justice Thomas’s scathing rejection of racial preferences sends Maureen Dowd—here standing in for white liberals everywhere—into an invisibility rage of her own. Clearly she feels metaphorically annihilated by the Thomas dissent, by his utter refusal to give liberals even the slightest moral credit for their support of preferences. He simply will not see people like Dowd as socially moral human beings just because they are aligned with “diversity”; thus, he effectively assaults them with invisibility. Here was a black man—and therefore someone with far greater moral authority on racial matters than the white Dowd—making it clear that her support for diversity made her at best a blind fool and at worst a moral fraud.
And this while she likely felt that her position on these policies brought her not only moral esteem but even a certain social and cultural superiority. After all, diversity is a “progressive” idea conceived of by an elite. It did not spring naturally from the American soil, as it were. And to embrace it is, at the very least, to have pretensions toward that elite. So possibly she drew yet more esteem because she supported diversity as a progressive sophistication, a difficult but civilizing idea that would have to be imposed from above on the common run of white Americans, who, after all, didn’t even like affirmative action. In this age of white guilt, when dissociation from racism is the first pillar of decency, Dowd’s alignment with diversity would have given her, if not a moral complacency, then at least a sense of moral legitimacy and confidence.
And then, in the face of her considerable self-esteem, comes the scathing dissent of Justice Thomas, which implies that, apart from what she might think of herself, she is incapable of seeing blacks as human beings and individuals and fellow citizens. She is incapable of considering the human effects—the stigmatization, the loss of incentives, and the encouragement of a victim-focused group identity—that preferences have on blacks. Between the lines in Thomas’s dissent, people like Dowd are seen to make the classic liberal mistake of trying to pass off mere dissociation from racism as selfless virtue and real human empathy. Still, Dowd no doubt feels that diversity is real and that whatever dissociates her from racism only reflects her expansive and modern humanity.
So Thomas’s dissent effectively annihilates Maureen Dowd’s conception of herself as a moral and socially responsible person. And this invisibility is simply too much to bear. Suddenly she is in a rage. In her column devoted to excoriating Thomas, she blurts out a word that chills the souls of all blacks. She says that instead of complaining, Clarence Thomas should show “gratitude” for affirmative action. Here, of course, she is trying to “annihilate” him, to put him in his place as an inferior who can advance only through the largesse of superiors like herself. Maureen Dowd, thinking herself quite incapable of racism, effectively calls Justice Thomas a nigger who—given his fundamental inferiority—should show “gratitude” to his white betters. In her rage, this ever so hip baby-boomer liberal invokes white supremacy itself to annihilate Thomas—in reaction to her sense of being annihilated by him. So mired in white blindness, so lost in the liberal orthodoxy that counts mere dissociation from racism as virtue, and so addicted to the easy moral esteem that comes to her from dissociation, Dowd plays the oldest race cards of all—I’m white and you’re black, so shut up and be grateful for my magnanimity. It is as though in fighting for her human visibility she is really fighting for her superiority—a superiority that Thomas annihilated and that she now wants back.
Dowd illustrates the great internal contradiction of white liberalism: that its paternalism, its focus on whites rather than on blacks as the agents of change, allows white supremacy to slip in the back door and once again define the fundamental relationship between whites and blacks. So the very structure of the liberal faith—that whites and “society” must facilitate black uplift—locks white liberals into an unexamined white supremacy. They can’t really believe in blacks but they must believe in whites. Whites are agents; blacks are agented.
So postsixties American liberalism preserves the old racist hierarchy of whites over blacks as virtue itself; and it grants all whites who identify with it a new superiority. In effect, it says you are morally superior to other whites and intellectually superior to blacks. The white liberal’s reward is this feeling that because he is heir to the knowledge of the West, yet morally enlightened beyond the West’s former bigotry, he is really a “new man,” a better man than the world has seen before.
23
“THE NEW MAN”
This “new man” is essentially the liberal identity that came out of the great acknowledgment of the sixties. Social and political movements that want to redeem a country in some way often generate the idea of a “new man” who broadly embodies the movement’s aspirations for the society. In many communist movements there was an ideal “comrade” whose character embodied the selflessness and common struggle that communism aspired to. Nationalist movements across the Third World have had “new men” who stood in sharp contrast to the subjugated colonial past by embracing not only independence but also the uniqueness of the national culture. Certainly the most diabolical “new man” of the twentieth century was Hitler’s Aryan man, whose blue eyes, blond hair, and erect bearing embodied the supremacy of the Aryan race—a myth that hoped to redeem Germany’s shame after its defeat in World War I. But the American liberal “new man” that emerged in the sixties also hoped to redeem through supremacy. He was superior to all previous Americans because he was without the great American shames of racism, sexism, militarism, and materialism.
But liberalism back in the age of racism had not produced a “new man.” This was classic Jeffersonian liberalism, grounded in timeless democratic principles and a commitment to individual freedom. Its argument was only that America had betrayed its great principles. And the civil rights victory of the mid-sixties was seen as a victory of principles rather than of a “new man” who embodied the nation’s redemption.
But, then, the white guilt that followed gave America an entirely new political and cultural liberalism—a liberalism of dissociation. In the age of white guilt the American struggle was no longer over betrayed principles; rather, it was a struggle for moral authority. So by the late sixties American liberalism had begun to shift from its time-honored focus on principles and
individual freedom to a new focus on dissociation. Suddenly there was a need for a “new man,” or more accurately a “dissociated man,” someone so conspicuously cleansed of racism, sexism, and militarism that he would be a carrier of moral authority and legitimacy.
You could already see this liberal “new man” on campuses in the late sixties among both faculty and students. And even then you could sense that he had fallen into a kind of trap. Dissociation is inherently elitist. Automatically, it creates a new kind of American, one who is better than most Americans because he has conspicuously dissociated from the litany of American sins. Thus, elitism, in itself, became a form of dissociation, a way to become a “new man,” to show oneself better than most Americans and, thus, worthy of moral authority. And, of course, one wanted to be better than most Americans had been in racial matters. One wanted a moral elitism in relation to the nation’s bigotries and bigots. But over time, as elitism became more entrenched as dissociation, a new American archetype emerged: the unreconstructed white American, the white who has failed to dissociate from the country’s racist past. Such whites may or may not actually be racist, but their failure to dissociate in this age of white guilt means they carry no moral authority, and add nothing to the legitimacy of the institutions they are a part of.
This is how postsixties liberalism—grounded in dissociation and therefore elitism—has divided the country. And since the sixties, these divisions have only deepened, giving us today a nation divided into so-called red and blue states. Blue states are more dissociational and elitist; red states tend to prefer a liberalism of principle more than dissociation. But it was white guilt, this yawning vacuum of authority, that set the forces in play that would leave us divided.
White Guilt Page 12
