I am so glad I read this book. Originally written in 2006, its thesis had aged well and therefore has the authority of truth.
Steele argues that after whites acknowledged their horrific wrongs vis-a-vis treatment of black fellow citizens, an implicit agreement was made: in exchange for a chance to regain the moral authority lost, whites would work to level the playing field for blacks as well as the outcomes, while blacks need only wait for whites to serve them. This explosive concept, that white guilt motivates whites and indulges and infantilizes blacks, is so radically different from the current narrative that it shocks the conscious. Yet it hold up well as an explanation for our current situation.
Steele weaves his own autobiography of growing up in segregated Chicago into the broader narrative of what went wrong. He saw first-hand his parents struggle in the non-violent protests of Martin Luther King, their stunning victory, the legal reforms, and the inability of many blacks to take their winnings and create successful lives for themselves. The rapidity of whites acknowledgement of their failure simply stunned blacks into a place of not exactly knowing what to do. After you have vanquished the foe, then what? Steele argues that is the time for blacks to take responsibility for their own lives and for whites to treat blacks as autonomous fellow citizens.
The opposite happened.
Steele is a perfect example. In college, after seeing his parents model famously succeed, he turned to radical black power movements. As he analyzes his inappropriate anger, he comes to the conclusion that blacks, fearful of the prospective of finally being able to live free, lashed out. "Anger is acted out by the oppressed only when real weakness is perceived in the oppressor. So anger is never automatic or even inevitable for the oppressed; it is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice." (p. 21) It's too much; Freedom is overwhelming. Worried about not being able to succeed on their own merits, black decided to demand more and more from a guilty nation. When more did not prove enough, rage resulted.
After college, Steele went to work administering the very plans he and his fellow blacks had demanded. It was this experience that convinced him that black success did not lie in whites' hands. You cannot give a person success. He must earn it. He noticed black rejected the help, instead preferring riots and destruction. He saw an almost direct correlation between the amount of white guilt and black's demands. The more white guilt, the less blacks demanded of themselves. This explains why so much of the protests centered on college campuses. The white guilt displayed by the university administration invited protests.
Steele sums up his thesis: "Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that it wronged us into taking the lion's share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late 60s – and that came to the find a strategy for black advancement for the next four decades — grew out of black America‘s complete embrace of the latter option." (p. 58)
Steele tells a hypothetical and yet heart-breaking story of a young black boy. As a student, he is pardoned for poor grades. White racism after all explains his failure. His education is dumbed down and expectations on him plummet. Yet outside the schoolroom window is a basketball court. He knows his failure to prove his bona fides on the court will provoke ridicule and estrangement. Therefore, given the choice between homework or free throw practice, he knows where to put his efforts. He is expected to prove himself through his efforts on the court. He is not expected to prove himself through his efforts in the classroom. As an interesting aside, we can see that where blacks are given the least amounts of hand outs and the most expectation of meritocratic behavior, they will succeed in a dramatic fashion. The black community has proven time and again, that unleashed from white, debilitating "help" they are capable of amazing achievement.
"The greatest black problem in America today is freedom. All underdeveloped, formally oppressed groups first experience new freedom as a shock and humiliation because freedom shows them they’re underdevelopment and their inability to compete as equals. Freedom seems to confirm all the ugly stereotypes about the group – especially the charge of inferiority – and yet the group no longer has the excuse of oppression. Without oppression – and it must be acknowledged the blacks are no longer oppressed in America – the group itself becomes automatically responsible for its inferiority and non-competitiveness. So freedom not only comes as a humiliation but also as an overwhelming burden of responsibility. Thus, inevitably, there is a retreat from freedom." (p. 67)
With crushing accuracy, Steele states, "How could a people that has survived centuries of slavery and segregation — through ingenuity, imagination, and great courage — get this confused, this alienated from man’s most elemental power: responsibility? Because freedom scared the hell out of us – our first true fall, our first true loss of innocence – and because there was nothing less than a locomotive of white guilt coming our way and hungering to prop us up in our every illusion. White guilt has wanted nothing more than to confuse our relationship to responsibility, to have us feel responsibility as an injustice, a continuation of our oppression. It exploited our tear of freedom and precisely the same way that plantation owners once exploited our labor. Whites needed responsibility for our problems in order to gain their own moral authority and legitimacy. So they set about — once again – to exploit us, to encourage and even nurture our illusions, to steal responsibility from us, to take advantage of our backwardness just as slave traders had once done on the west coast of Africa. Suddenly, in the age of white guilt, we were gold again." (p. 69)
Steele analogizes his own coming of age as a teenager to the surrounding cultural circumstances. Like most teenagers, he rebelled against his parents. Although he believes that most rebellious children are secretly safe in the knowledge that their parents are actually right and actually know the best way forward, blacks "came of age" when the "parents" (whites) were actually wrong. When a teenager confronts an actually guilty parent, that will likely result in more teenaged rebellion. After all, by what moral authority does a guilty parent tell a youngster what to do? And not only does the guilt of the parent seem to absolve the child of any moral responsibility for his own life, when the guilty parent indulges the child's rage and entitlement mentality, the teenager will never learn to be responsible. In order to assuage their own guilt, whites were perfectly willing to indulge a recalcitrant black population.
Not only did whites lose the moral authority granted them by the idea of white supremacy, whites lost the authority to promote any values that might be heralded by whites in general. "Whites also lost a degree of they authority to stand proudly for the values and ideas the had made the West a great civilization despite its many evils." (p. 109) Whites could not demand of blacks the same things they would demand of their own children. It seemed too white to demand responsibility and hard work. Even the Smithsonian has recently stated these timeless values that lead to successful people are vestiges of white supremacy. Therefore blacks were denied the very tools that would help them succeed. And when they failed, as many inevitably did, that was seen a further failure of whites to provide for blacks. Therefore the cycle of poverty began. Whites refused to provide blacks with the tools necessary for success and provided material resources instead. Blacks failed. Whites beat themselves up for their failure and provided more material resources and fewer tools. Not once did whites stop to think that maybe their "help" was actually hurting, because the "help" provided did double duty: it avoided "blaming the victim" and it assuaged white guilt. Win-win.
Yet it is not a win for blacks. It keeps them perpetually at the mercy of the very people said to be oppressing them. Never are blacks told to use their freedom to achieve their own success. Through the exploitation of, and desire to alleviate, white guilt, blacks are kept in a perpetually inferior condition.
"So post 60s American liberalism preserves the old racist hierarchy of whites over blacks as virtue itself; and it grants all white 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 liberals 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." (p. 148) This perfectly aligns with C.S. Lewis' observation, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
The tragedy of this new focus on alleviating white guilt produced an obsession with "disassociation." No longer could whites defend time-honored principles because these were now associated with racism. The "good" white must disassociate himself from all vestiges of the past no matter how proven or principled. We see this today in the tearing down of statues, even of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. We joke they are not sufficiently "woke." In reality, they represent a world of insufficient white guilt. They, in their own fallen and flawed ways, advocated principles, that however virtuous, are tainted by the vices of their spokesmen. Therefore the principles must be thrown out with the people. The more a white person "disassociates" from the past the more virtuous. The actual virtuosity of this "new man" is completely meaningless.
What is Steele's recommendation now? He advocates the hard work of reclaiming timeless values for all men despite the taint given them by imperfect humans. He says we must see each other as individuals and not members of a group. We, in fact, must see each other, really see each other. For too long we have treated each other as means to an end. Whether it's more spoils or more virtue, we have used each other for our own gain. It must end.
However, with the recent spate of racial unrest, the country is moving in exactly the opposite direction. When "Top CEOs Vow to Hire 1 million Black Americans" screams from the headlines, we can see we are treating humans as things to me manipulated. Objects to be moved around at the will of white Americans.
Some, who agree with Steele, see hope for pushback against this mentality. Steele himself says it puts the Right in the enviable position of defending equality and liberty, easy sells. However, I think the forces that push fallen humans to "prove" they are good people apart from Jesus' sacrifice are simply too strong. As long as people can buy cheap grace by offering blacks crumbs, they will jump at the chance. The fact that it keeps blacks infantilized and will never end the "virtue" cycle is irrelevant. As long as whites can convince themselves that they are the good guys, they will continue to oppress and lord over blacks, in the name of helping. The impulses of racism remain. It is just dressed in fancier finery.
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