White guilt is a short but interesting read. Steele recounts his own story of growing up in a classical civil rights world where he fought open discrimination in little league baseball to the militant college campus where the new brand of “civil rights”, white guilt, had “the narcotic effect.. that would lead me to spill cigarette ashes on Dr. McCabe’s fine carpet.”
Steele is a liberal arts academic and it shows. Where Sowell talks empiricism, Steel talks narrative: still, I found it effective. White Guilt can be summarized by stating that modern racial tension is a form of collusion (my words not his) [Link to Arbringer institute]. Blacks and Whites have an implicit agreement that white people are Guilty of “systemic racism”. What’s in it for blacks? “Now I could shame and silence whites at will. With this moral authority there was the power to better defend myself against racism, but there was also a new, abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me—a power of racial privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin. This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new “black power.”
Generally speaking, “this great infusion of moral authority gave blacks the power to imprint the national consciousness with a profound new edict, an unwritten law more enforceable than many actual laws: that no black problem—whether high crime rates, poor academic performance, or high illegitimacy rates—could be defined as largely a black responsibility because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems. To do so would be to “blame the victim,” thereby repeating his victimization.”
Why would White America go along with this? “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.”
For steel, “reverse racism” isn’t so much against Whites as it is against Blacks. He tells one story of how later in life he was sitting on a committee discussing whether or not to include a new course on BIPOC authors. When it was his turn to speak, the woman who proposed the course indicated steel didn’t need to speak because he was obviously in favor of the course. (It is this “White Blindness”, refusing to see blacks as individuals rather than as avatars for their “group” that steel think inspires black rage.) Steele explained that he was against the course because it put black authors in a different league instead of allowing them to compete with all authors on their own merits. conceptually, this is the same problem he suffered from as a boy in a segregated baseball league”
Steel paints an alternative picture of what blacks could be if they were agents instead of objects. “People wrongly dismiss black achievement in these areas for reasons that can be ascribed only to racism—that our compelling excellence follows from a mere genetic advantage. The fact is that we are good at sports and music because we subject ourselves to unforgiving standards of excellence and then work ferociously to meet those standards. Ruthlessly, we allow absolutely no excuses.”
Steel’s message to White America is simple. Get out of my (not our) way. Robin diAngelo would do well to pay attention.
My biggest problem with the book is what I referenced earlier, “white blindness”. I don’t think this blindness is white at all, I think the inability to see people as humans is basically human blindness. I’m sick and tired of being treated as an avatar of my “groups” I think we all are.
I’d recommend this book to sincere liberals thinking about the racial problem in America. Conservatives would probably do better with sowells “Black rednecks and white liberal [insert link]”.
Here are a few more incisive thoughts from Steele.
“For black leaders in the age of white guilt, the problem was how to seize all they could get from White guilt without having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer. With it, the smallest racial incident proved the “global truth” of systemic racism.”
“Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations. In the age of racism, whites said blacks were inferior so as not to see their own desire to exploit them, their true motivation. In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.”
Moral authority comes to institutions only when they relieve minorities of responsibility (lowered standards, racial preferences). In this age of white guilt responsibility is synonymous with oppression where blacks are concerned. So whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism. This is the formula that locks many whites into publicly supporting affirmative action even as they privately dislike it.