And this is also the power that Betty used to stigmatize me as a black conservative—that is, someone you dissociate from to win moral authority.
PART FOUR
DISSOCIATION AND CULTURE
25
THE COUNTERCULTURE ESTABLISHMENT
The last mile of my slow trek back down Toro Canyon was done in the dark. I had misjudged how fast the winter sun drops, especially when one is walled in on two sides at the bottom of a canyon. At four o’clock I saw sunlight on the eastern face of the canyon, but already it was as cool as night down where I walked. By four-thirty it was dark. Still, the path was broad, and I knew it well. So I walked even slower, enjoying my little Chautauqua, stopping now and then to jot a note in the hazy dark.
When I finally reached the car, the Clinton-Lewinsky mess was still in high scream all over the radio. I quickly turned it off. For one thing, I thought I had at least the beginning of an answer to the dilemma I had set for myself that morning coming out of Los Angeles. Why had it now begun to look as though President Clinton might survive an ugly sex scandal that would surely have brought down President Eisenhower back in the fifties? And, conversely, why would President Eisenhower’s saying “nigger” on the golf course have no effect on his presidency when it would almost certainly have ended the Clinton presidency? In one era giving in to lust was the unpardonable sin; in another, giving in to racism.
In Clinton’s era white guilt was the great moral vacuum that had to be filled in order to hold the democracy together. Without the moral authority to fill this vacuum, the government itself, not to mention the other institutions in society, would be without legitimacy—a formula for revolution the world over. Today I am a citizen who honors his country because it responded—albeit very badly in the realm of public policy—to white guilt. It acknowledged its profound racial transgressions and determined to end them. Had America not done this, the government would have had no legitimacy for me, and I would most certainly have left my country or attacked it, as would any self-respecting person in that circumstance.
Multiracial societies, where prejudice has been allowed to create deep inequalities over time, require moral balancing. They cannot recover their authority and legitimacy without a self-conscious and explicit social morality.
And this was the social and historical imperative that gave moral context to President Clinton’s little imbroglio. White guilt meant that America had long ago decided to make social morality more important than individual morality because there was simply no other way to preserve the Union. Of course, rather than a serious social morality focused on fairness and human development, we got the jerry-built virtue of dissociation. Nevertheless, it was history’s elevation of social morality that diminished the importance of President Clinton’s lapse in individual morality.
As America’s first baby-boomer president, President Clinton was from the generation that invented the practice of using social morality as a license to disregard individual morality: “What counts is human equality and feeding the poor, not whom I sleep with.” Clearly, the idea that social morality was the more important of the two moralities was one of the great justifications for the sexual revolution of the seventies: “Free sex is not evil; racism and war are evil.” And, of course, President Clinton was defended in many quarters by the moral framework of the sexual revolution: that one’s social morality should be judged by a puritanical standard, while only nonjudgment and relativism should apply to one’s sexual practices.
The sexual revolution owes much to white guilt, since it is difficult to imagine how such a self-absorbed revolution could have thrived without the cover and justification provided by the new social morality that white guilt had made so important in the culture. It goes too far to suggest that white guilt caused the sexual revolution. But then again, it did make such a revolution virtually inevitable. It was white guilt that powerfully stigmatized (with racism, militarism, etc.) precisely the traditional values that had always prevented a sexual revolution. Also, in making social morality the nation’s preeminent morality, white guilt gave people the means to feel virtuous even as they marched into the sexual revolution.
So President Clinton was lucky to make his mistake in the age of white guilt. And he was lucky again that this social morality, which made him virtuous despite his personal lapses, was nothing more than the virtue of dissociation—an ersatz virtue that he could achieve through mere identification. To be a “moral man” in the most important way he had only to identify himself with dissociation. He would “mend not end” affirmative action. He would make black church appearances a staple of his presidency. True to his generation, he would be cool toward the military. Even his litany of bad habits from infidelity to chronic lateness would identify him as “America’s first black president.” So here we had—through the magic of dissociation by mere identification—an entirely emblematic social virtuousness that was enough to preserve the president in office.
Had President Clinton used the word “nigger,” he would have associated with white supremacy and militarism, with the excesses of empire. Moral authority would have been utterly impossible. Today the legitimacy of the American presidency is inextricably tied to an explicit, if only symbolic, dissociation from the nation’s racist past. So President Clinton had the “virtue” that counted in his era, just as President Eisenhower had the traditional values, at least as far as appearances went, that counted in his.
26
A CULTURE WAR
When I finally left the Great Society programs I had worked in and returned to graduate school, I was not a likely candidate for the designation I seemed to have earned later in life: “black conservative.” Despite all the corruption and incompetence I had seen in those programs—and despite my happiness in getting away to the comparative quiet of graduate school—I was still politically very far to the left. If I was not as intensely “black” (by then a term of political identity) as I had been in college, I nevertheless wore my blackness on my sleeve even as I read Proust and Kafka and Dostoyevsky.
I was infected with an odd form of schizophrenia that I have come to see in many black academics and professionals of my generation. I was happy to be back in school “taking care of business,” and I enjoyed all that I was learning. But there was also an expectation on campus that I “be black” in interesting and politicized ways. As a black you were a bit of an exhibit on these largely white campuses. And one way I carried this burden—without thinking much about it—was to be both “black” and far left. If I was hazy about what either of these things actually meant, I did know the postures, the right-on phrases, and the stereotyped ideas that fit me easily into the community. It never occurred to me—as it doesn’t occur to many young blacks today—that a person of my race and background could be conservative without betraying himself profoundly. So I went on laboring my way through graduate school like a perfectly respectable petit bourgeois, yet thinking myself—on the rare occasions when I took stock—the exponent of a radical politics of alienation.
I often wonder these days what might have happened to my generation of black academics and intellectuals if, back then, we had built a politics based on the way we actually lived. Eventually, I did precisely this for one reason: I got very tired of the schizophrenia. Elsewhere I have called this “race fatigue,” an almost existential weariness with things racial, not because you don’t care, but because the racial identity you are pressured to squeeze into is a mask you wear only out of calculation. This mask is untethered from your real life so that, over time, it draws you into a corrupting falseness—and an inner duplicity—that grows more and more rigid with the years. Ultimately it affects the integrity of your personality. You have to start living off rationalizations and falsehoods that a part of you knows to be false.
This schizophrenia was everywhere evident among blacks when the comedian Bill Cosby famously criticized poor blacks for not taking more responsibility for themselves and their children. Black elit
es who would never utter such a statement—for fear of seeming to betray their identity—knew that Cosby was absolutely right. A 70 percent illegitimacy rate among all blacks (90 percent in certain inner cities) pretty much makes the point that there is a responsibility problem. To know this, as all blacks do, and to have to pretend that it is not strictly true or that certain “systemic” forces are more responsible than blacks themselves is knowingly to lie to oneself. You sensed in the umbrage and anger in Cosby’s voice when he made these statements that he had finally just had it, that race fatigue had overwhelmed him, that he was tired of living a lie. “You’re asking me to lie in order to be black,” he seemed to say, “and I won’t do it anymore.” Predictably, many blacks—quite accustomed to squeezing themselves into a mask of blackness and living schizophrenically—chastised Cosby or quibbled with his choice of words or his tone of voice.
Where did this pressure to live schizophrenically come from?
For me it began in the culture war that developed after the sixties. People like the above-mentioned Betty assumed that my skin color automatically put me on the left side of hostilities in this war. And this might not have bothered me if the left I was assumed a part of had still been like the left I had grown up in. But this was no longer the left that banked black freedom on democratic principles and black advancement on individual responsibility. It did not exclaim, as was the mantra of the early civil rights worker, “I am a man.” The emphasis then had been on the fundamental humanity and individuality of blacks, and on the illegitimacy of any government’s attempt to make us be a race. The left back then did not take race seriously; it wanted to puncture the illusion of race so that we could live as free individuals. (It fought against having to identify one’s race on job and school applications, as did the “conservative” Ward Connerly in a recent California ballot initiative.) But the left that Betty assumed I belonged to was not this old left of individual freedom, principles, and responsibilities; it was a left that turned against all these things. It was a left of dissociation.
When the American left responded to the crisis of white guilt, and began to define social virtue as mere dissociation, it effectively started the culture war. Dissociation is always achieved at the expense of democratic principles and demanding values grounded in fairness and individual responsibility—what in shorthand might be called “the culture of principle.” Dissociation wants to “engineer,” “defer,” and “relativize” around precisely this culture of principle in order to expediently garner moral authority and legitimacy. So there it was, beginning in the sixties, a culture war between two political and moral cultures, one grounded in principle and values, the other in dissociation—the former broadly focusing the right, the latter focusing the left.
By the mid-eighties the schizophrenia imposed on me as a black who was identified with the left had become unbearable. I had no interest in becoming a conservative. I just instinctively disliked the left’s disregard of principles that had always been important to me. Worse, I had become terrified of the Faustian bargain waiting for me at the doorway to the left: we’ll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you’ll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for “helping” you. When they called you a nigger back in the days of segregation, at least they didn’t ask you to be grateful. So by the mid-eighties I was asked by the left to believe in dissociation rather than in demanding principles as the road to black advancement. Or, if I chose to continue believing in principles, I was asked to lie about it and say that continuing racism justified sparing blacks the rigors of principle.
Around this time I began to have many little “Cosby moments,” as we might call them today. In meetings, at faculty parties or dinners, or simply in innocent encounters on campus, someone would make a dissociational comment as if uttering a self-evident truth—“What does merit mean, anyway?”; “We must improve the climate here for women and minorities”; “The minority voices in my classes are so important”—and then I would erupt. Such banalities spoke of an entire Orwellian culture composed of glassy-eyed true believers and cunning power-mongers like Betty. The schizophrenia I carried to survive in that culture made me more and more alienated and angry. Every relationship I had began to suffer, and by the late eighties, every single one of them had ended. I would run into people who had been closer than family, people who had known my children in infancy, and there would be deep awkwardness, a chilling smile. And certainly my heart, too, had gone cold. The culture war had made me fight too hard for my individuality, and I became a little merciless, happy to reject before I was rejected.
At the heart of this culture war there remains a terrible contradiction: the new “progressiveness” that America achieved around race after the sixties was accompanied by considerable cultural decline. The problem is that the dissociational left destroys the principles that would realize its goals, and the right lacks the moral authority to enforce those selfsame principles. The result is a kind of impotence. Whether the problem is school reform or minority poverty, there has been no way to bring demanding principles to bear. So, as Americans have made great moral progress where the nation’s old sins are concerned, they have also stood by helplessly as the nation’s public schools have declined right before their eyes, and as inner-city poverty has become more intractable and isolating than ever. (Inner-city black English diverges more from standard English today than it did in the fifties.) The nation’s moral development has correlated to a deepening powerlessness in the face of its social problems—this the legacy of a white guilt–inspired culture war that allows social problems to be addressed only by dissociation.
This contradiction has also more and more shaped America’s political landscape. The left abandoned its compassionate Jeffersonian liberalism of the early civil rights era in favor of the dissociation that enabled it to respond to the crisis of white guilt (broadened by the sins of sexism, Vietnam, and environmental indifference). In this crisis, if you could win moral authority for a society threatened with revolution, you would be given real political power. So, in trading in principles for dissociation, the left stumbled onto the formula for power that would see it through the next several decades.
But this was a deal with the devil. In choosing dissociation over principles the left became impotent; without demanding principles it could not solve the very social problems that justified its existence. Principles associated; they didn’t dissociate. Therefore, even as the left garnered great moral authority for being socially concerned, it stood handcuffed as a black underclass burgeoned forth in America’s inner cities, and it looked on helplessly as the greatest public school system in the world collapsed into one of the worst in the world. In the end, the devil got the better part of his bargain with the left. Today’s left is both impotent before social problems and alienated from the principles that might solve those problems.
What about the right?
The right today enjoys a new political and cultural ascendancy for two reasons. First, the left has effectively ceded its old territory—compassionate Jeffersonian liberalism—to the right, thereby ceding to it precisely the democratic principles and values of individual freedom and responsibility that have made America a great nation despite its many betrayals of these principles. The second reason is that today’s right has been chastened and now understands that racism, sexism, and reckless militarism are morally wrong.
The right of my segregated childhood took white supremacy to be the natural order of the world and sought to preserve it. The conservatism of that era was not simply about free markets and smaller government. It also wanted to “conserve” the prevailing racial hierarchy that made America a “white man’s country.” This history associated conservatism with the nation’s evils. And today all forms and schools of conservatism remain stigmatized as carriers of these evils.
In fact, most of today’s conservatives sound like Martin Luther King in 1963. Contemporary conservatism treats race with precisely the s
ame compassionate Jefferson liberalism that Martin Luther King articulated in his “I Have a Dream” speech. Is there, on the right, a covert, unspoken loyalty to racial hierarchy, a quiet atavistic commitment to white supremacy? In the hearts of some there must be. There are fools and devils everywhere. But today’s right has made itself accountable to the democratic and moral vision of the early Martin Luther King.
In many ways, the special character of contemporary conservatism comes from the fact that it is a reaction to the cultural decline caused by the culture of dissociation. This conservatism tends to think of itself as a historical corrective. Its great mission is to reassert principle as reform. For decades now it has been preoccupied with social problems that were once the sole province of the left—education reform, inner-city poverty, marriage and family issues, youth culture, and so on.
And yet, white guilt means that this reformist conservatism still labors under a stigma. It struggles against an opposition that now operates more by association and dissociation than by reason and principle. A great power for today’s left is the power of association. Whether the issue is Social Security, school reform, or even war, the left forces the right to do battle with associations drawn from an imagery of America’s past evils. The Iraq war is the rebirth of American imperialism. Private retirement accounts privilege the rich. Accountability in school reform blames the victims of underfunded schools. Reasoning against an association is like punching a shadow.
White Guilt Page 14
