White Guilt and Black Power

Shelby Steele’s new book, White Guilt, unmasks liberal social policies and reveals them as little more than white America’s attempt to reclaim lost moral authority.

Early civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used non-violence to expose white America’s moral hypocrisy; “what could America think of itself when passive freedom riders were beaten or when a little black girl in crinoline and pigtails ... had to be escorted into school past a screaming mob?” Steele argues the collapse of white supremacy in the face of the civil rights movement precipitated a loss of moral legitimacy for mainstream white America. White institutions—courts, public schools, universities, and the government itself—were exposed and condemned as racist.

Since societies depend on the legitimacy of their institutions, America approached a breaking point in the late 1960s. White leaders and institutions could no longer act authoritatively to enforce traditional values because the history of white racism had stripped away their integrity. Steele describes the relationship between racism and moral authority in this way: “Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on.” This void of authority is the essence of white guilt.

In the face of this crisis, Steele argues white liberals forged a new relationship with blacks to recover this lost authority. By assuming responsibility for black people’s social welfare—instead of pushing for equality under law and an expansion of democratic principles—white liberals dissociated themselves from white supremacy and installed themselves as benefactors of the black race. This pernicious arrangement allowed white institutions to perpetuate all manner of ill-conceived welfare programs and affirmative action campaigns without regard for their actual impact on black individuals. The appearance of compassion, rather than true black empowerment, was the goal.

Steele claims a new generation of black civil rights leaders, emerging in the late 1960s, turned to an expression of black rage to leverage white guilt and gain political power. Whereas previous black leaders such as Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King had believed blacks capable of achieving the American dream, these new black leaders believed in neither their people nor the American dream. “To up the ante on white guilt this new black consciousness led blacks into a great mistake; to talk ourselves out of the individual freedom we had just won for no purpose whatsoever except to trigger white obligation.” So much for escaping the suffocating confines of race-as-identity.

Ironically, black leaders, obsessed with the new phenomenon of structural racism, unwittingly perpetrated the same falsehood as white supremacists: Race is destiny. The new black leaders eschewed all responsibility for black progress—after all, to be black was to be hopelessly disadvantaged—and made whites responsible for black advancement even as they clamored for “black power.”

The dirty secret of the black power movement was that it actually furthered the cause of white power. By insisting that blacks could not advance on their own merits, the black power crowd kept blacks dependent upon white benevolence. “But this humiliating plea for white intervention only projected whites as powerful and blacks as helpless.” President Johnson’s Great Society Programs epitomized condescending benevolence, and America’s black inner-cities are still suffering the consequences. By relieving blacks of their responsibility for self-advancement, liberal social programs have broken down the black family, destroyed black schools, and fostered a general feeling of helplessness among the black underclass.

As Steele points out toward the end of his book, white guilt, and the social policies it has spawned, will not bring about the advancement and equality black people seek. Compelled by white guilt, white institutions merely use blacks to dissociate themselves from their racist past. Leveraging white guilt is therefore a losing proposition for blacks.

Rather than ordering blacks to reject affirmative action, corporate diversity training, political correctness, and the welfare state, Steele leads by example. Although he never sought out the “black conservative” label, he has chosen to stop living the schizophrenic life imposed on blacks by contemporary liberalism. “I don’t have to ‘protect’ blacks or any other group by pretending that certain self-serving lies (‘systemic’ racism remains a barrier) are true. That kind of thing almost smothered my life as a free man. ... I am quite free now. And it is the rare black who gets to live without the world expecting him to pretend.”

Steele’s roadmap to freedom may be his most valuable contribution to the discussion of race in America. There are many blacks who undoubtedly share Steele’s loathing for self-betrayal (the majority of blacks, for instance, describe themselves as socially conservative yet are compelled to vote for candidates who disdain and undermine their social values) and are ready to claim their freedom.

As evidenced by Steele’s own story, however, it requires courage to finally break from the crowd and assert oneself as an individual. One hopes this type of courage will be contagious.

Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of several other books, including The Content of Our Character and A Dream Deferred. Steele is also a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and has contributed articles to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Newsweek, and the Washington Post.

Robert Dunn (dunn@newcoalition.org) is assistant to the president for The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change.