White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era is a book by American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

Shelby Steele

-Awards:*National Book Critics Circle Award in the general non-fiction category for the book The Content of Our Character.*Emmy and Writers Guild Awards for his 1991 Frontline documentary film Seven Days in Bensonhurst.-External links:**...

in 2006.

In the book, Steele argues that white guilt

White guilt

White guilt refers to the concept of individual or collective guilt often said to be felt by some white people for the racist treatment of people of color by whites both historically and presently...

is much more than just a race problem:

Part One: The Story of White Guilt

Steele describes his experience growing up as a young black man in an era of Racism and white dominance. From a young age he dreamed of becoming a "batboy

Batboy

A batboy is an individual who carries the baseball bats around to a baseball team. A batboy may also lay out the equipment and mud the baseballs to be used in the game.Mascots and batboys had both been part of baseball since the 1880s....

" for an all-white baseball team. With segregation

Racial segregation in the United States

Racial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation or hypersegregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines...

at large, Steele feared his dream would never become a reality, however, Steele spent many weeks watching and admiring the baseball players. After catching the coach’s attention as someone with immense passion for baseball, he was granted the position of batboy, his dream now becoming a reality. The high of achieving his goal soon became shattered when the baseball team was to play at a whites-only stadium. When reflecting back on this event, Steele states, "I am certain that racist rejections like this do not cause low self-esteem

Self-esteem

Self-esteem is a term in psychology to reflect a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs and emotions such as triumph, despair, pride and shame: some would distinguish how 'the self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, the...

in their victims. They cause disenchantment with the world. My self-esteem was not diminished in the least by what happened to me on that Saturday morning."

Throughout the years, Steele watched the era of white power transform into an era of white guilt, the underlying theme throughout Steele's novel. Steele believes that the lack of time between transitioning from white supremacy to white guilt, ultimately led to the destruction of the civil rights era. According to Steele, since the transformation from white power to white guilt was presented to society with no cool-off period, the American people were not able to feel a sense of neutrality towards racism, and this is when bargainers came about: blacks in the political spotlight appealing to whites to take hold of white guilt and use it to their advantage. Steele talks about how being black can be an advantage due to how heavy white guilt is. Steele says that in today’s society this happens a lot, blacks appealing to white guilt to use it to their advantage and this is why Blacks and White together destroyed the promise of the Civil Rights Era.

Part Two: An Expanding Guilt

By the mid-1960s

1960s

The 1960s was the decade that started on January 1, 1960, and ended on December 31, 1969. It was the seventh decade of the 20th century.The 1960s term also refers to an era more often called The Sixties, denoting the complex of inter-related cultural and political trends across the globe...

, white guilt has emerged. Towards the end of racism, a movement of black and white youth shared an "integrationist" consciousness. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...

(SNCC) played a major part in the 1960s

1960s

to this movement. This new youth consciousness came about and became known as the "counterculture

Counterculture

Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...

," which was the cultural and political consciousness when Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

came of age. This was a large response to white guilt

White guilt

White guilt refers to the concept of individual or collective guilt often said to be felt by some white people for the racist treatment of people of color by whites both historically and presently...

. Some ideas and ideologies of this "counterculture" consciousness came from people like Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

, Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, Martin Luther King, Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...

, R.D. Laing, Chairman Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

, and Lao-tzu. Steele describes guilt as a vacuum in moral authority created by all of white America's moral failings and infidelities of democracy

Democracy

Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...

, like sexism

Sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...

, racism

Racism

Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

, imperialism

Imperialism

Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...

, materialism

Materialism

In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...

, conformity

Conformity

Conformity is the process by which an individual's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors are influenced by other people.Conformity may also refer to:*Conformity: A Tale, a novel by Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna...

, environmental indifference, educational inequality superficiality, greed, etc. The sixties were a time when the ordinary acts of rebellion

Rebellion

Rebellion, uprising or insurrection, is a refusal of obedience or order. It may, therefore, be seen as encompassing a range of behaviors aimed at destroying or replacing an established authority such as a government or a head of state...

were aggrandized by a politics that let you go against "the system" then just your parents. Some big rebels from back then were James Dean

James Dean

James Byron Dean was an American film actor. He is a cultural icon, best embodied in the title of his most celebrated film, Rebel Without a Cause , in which he starred as troubled Los Angeles teenager Jim Stark...

and Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....

. This rebellion became like a social movement taking on the injustice of America's soullessness. As every new generation comes around, they alter the adult authority. If the youth win their rebellion against the old, then their maturity will get cut short and they won't be as humble. In the sixties, people won first rebellion because it was around white guilt which lead to increase in uncertain adult authority. White guilt

White guilt

White guilt refers to the concept of individual or collective guilt often said to be felt by some white people for the racist treatment of people of color by whites both historically and presently...

starts from race relations and expands by the moral authority that America lost to other conflicts, like Vietnam

Vietnam

Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

and women's rights

Women's rights

Women's rights are entitlements and freedoms claimed for women and girls of all ages in many societies.In some places these rights are institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behaviour, whereas in others they may be ignored or suppressed...

.

White guilt has the power to invent America all over again and transform every important institution. It launched the Great Society

Great Society

The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States promoted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice...

overnight which integrated public schools. It also transformed Americans for better and worse by showing whites that racism is evil. As Sambo would say, "White guilt is essentially a historical force that follows naturally from a moral evolution in a specific society." White guilt then replaces white supremacy

White supremacy

White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...

. White supremacy gave whites the authority to exclude other races from American democracy and treat them as inferior. People thought that if whites have more power, then they must be more superior. With black supremacy, blacks could ignore whites complaints without any penalty. Even if they were really polite, they were just looked at as "troublemakers." blackness became more of an icon

Icon

An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...

of racial evil than of racial supremacy. There were two different parts to black guilt: one part is the horrible hypocrisy

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie....

of racism and denying freedom to nonblacks, and the other part was the black superiority as a justification for the hypocrisy which allowed you to commit evil against nonblacks. Blacks can not escape from black guilt just like whites can't reject themselves of being white. At the end of the black supremacy, blacks couldn't practice racism, which lead them to lose their sense of power.

Part Three: The Ways of Blindness

The acknowledgment that racism was a moral wrongdoing had diminished the moral authority of whites, however it didn't affect their power or their responsibility for society. After owning up to racism

Racism

whites continued to run America. This meant that America

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

began to run at an apparent shortage of legitimacy, meaning any white success couldn't say that simply being white had not helped. This acknowledgment didn't cause a power shift from one race to another, instead it made the power that whites held in society a contingent power. After the mid-1960s] any powers whites used, needed to be dissociated from the racist past that caused whites to lose moral authority. This was how President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society

Great Society

plan came about, white's needed to re-legitimize American democracy, and an apology for racism in the nation's past through the Great Society plan allowed whites to dissociate and therefore restore legitimacy to America. The idea that poverty is "blameless" is due to white blindness, many of the architects of the Great Society believed that only the government can get to entrenched deep poverty, however their policies that once seemed able to deliver America from its racist past have over time failed. Whites continue to support these silly racial policies without seeing that their real reason for supporting these policies, which is to prove that they are innocent of racism. Whites choose to be blind and believe that if they continue to give money and other aid to minorities they are helping, but this is just reaffirming white supremacy. Giving racial preference to a black child with a privileged background implies that blacks are inferior and even in the absence of racism and a privileged upbringing blacks aren't able to compete with whites and Asians, even though these whites and Asians may come from underprivileged backgrounds. So even the most talented blacks whom are able to compete on their own must reinvent themselves as inferior to be accepted in a society run by white guilt.

People who are held in the grip of white blindness always miss the human being inside the black skin, they see people for their color and not who they are. Instantly they notice your skin color and build a picture of who you are, they are blindfolded purely by skin color even though they may not necessarily associate negative connotations with race. In this age of white guilt, white blindness has not been driven by racism or bigotry, whites are blind to blacks as humans out of an obsession with achieving dissociation from their racist past. There is little to no incentive to understand blacks as human beings because achieving this dissociation from racism brings whites moral authority again and essentially makes them seem human. Whites are not necessarily blind by choice, rather they are driven by the feeling that their humanity is being made invisible due to their racist history. It isn't that they are blind to human circumstances, but in fighting to regain their humanity they become blind to everything but their own needs. So whites act in the name of blacks not to improve black well being, but to right the wrongs of America's history of racism and to dissociate themselves from racism. This causes problems because they are not seeing blacks for who they are or what their qualities may be, instead they see them as blacks who should be grateful for all that the white man has done for them.

Steele references Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd

Maureen Bridgid Dowd is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times and best-selling author. During the 1970s and the early 1980s, she worked for Time magazine and the Washington Star, where she covered news as well as sports and wrote feature articles...

's article "Could Thomas be Right?," in which the columnist expressed frustration with Supreme Court Justice

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States are the members of the Supreme Court of the United States other than the Chief Justice of the United States...

Clarance Thomas's dissent in a Supreme Court

Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

ruling allowing affirmative action

Affirmative action

Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination.-Origins:The term...

. Steele says that Dowd is so mired in white blindness that she counts mere dissociation from racism a virtue and that she "plays the oldest race cards of all-I'm white and you're black, so shut up and be grateful for my magnanimity". This post-sixties American liberalism says you are morally superior to other whites and intellectually superior to blacks, making the white liberal

Liberalism

Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...

feel as though he is heir to the knowledge of the West while being morally enlightened beyond the former bigotry of the West making him a "new man". This "new man" was superior to previous Americans he was free of racism, sexism, militarism and materialism and developed an elitist outlook on life and all whites who didn't dissociate carried no moral authority. The "new man" believed that diversity and inclusion were more important than merit and excellence and is the reason our once great public school system is now all but destroyed.

Part Four: Dissociation and Culture

Multicultural societies, where prejudice has been allowed to create inequalities among races require moral balancing. They can't recover their authority and claim legitimacy without a social morality, we could have focused on fairness and human development, but we took the easy route and this was why we got the virtue of dissociation

Dissociation

Dissociation is an altered state of consciousness characterized by partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s normal conscious or psychological functioning. Dissociation is most commonly experienced as a subjective perception of one's consciousness being detached from...

. Our post-sixties society has invented the practice of using social morality to disregard individual morality saying, "What counts is human equality and feeding the poor, not whom I sleep with". To be one of high moral standard all you have to do is associate yourself with dissociation. As a young black man torn between both sides Steele argues that being himself has made him happier than pretending to be who society wanted him to be and no longer does he have to protect any groups by pretending things that aren't true are. Steele says, "It is the rare black who gets to live without the world expecting him to pretend So I don't mind so much that little bit of hot tar the world has poured on my head."

Reviews

Interview with the author. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=2BF3ED77-76C9-45FE-B6E9-D7021CC3E06B

External links

San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/15/DDG5HIR5VC1.DTL
Shelby Steele:The Big Picture http://www.bigpicweblog.com/exp/index.php/weblog/comments/shelby_steele_accusations_of_white_guilt_are_a_fraudulent_attempt_to_gain_p/
White Guilt, War, and Obama http://brianakira.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/shelby-steele-white-guilt-war-hussein-obama/
Preview of Book http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060578633

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