White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (P.S.)

“Freedom, then, is not a state-imposed vision of the social good (say, a classless society); rather, it is the absence of any imposed vision that would infringe on the rights and freedom of individuals. In a true democracy freedom is a higher priority than the social good.”

Steele vehemently opposes social programs aimed at achieving racial parity, such as affirmative action. He argues that no matter how well-intentioned, any imposed vision of society—including one whose social policies aim to end racial imbalances—infringes on freedom and therefore betrays the principles of democracy.

“My parents believed with all their hearts in the moral power of turning the other cheek, but by 1968 this strategy was passé and Dr. King himself was a bit of an anachronism. My generation had a new and different mandate. Our job was not to persuade; it was to replace passivism with militancy.”

The generational divide is a key concept in Steele’s book. This quotation addresses the replacement of passivism with Black militancy, which arose among second-wave Black activists in response to White guilt.

“To my great regret today, many of those unfortunate demands were later implemented in one form or another.” 

Steele’s book occasionally reads like a memoir, with memories, personal impressions, and anecdotes interweaving the chapters. In Chapter 4, he describes storming into the office of the president of his university with a list of demands. This quotation addresses his later change of heart. As a young man, Steele fully embraced Black militancy. After decades of seeing the impact of White guilt on Black communities, he rejected liberalism and became a conservative.

“Paradoxically, the black identity today involves a degree of nostalgia for some of the certainties that were the unintended consequences of racial oppression—the security of an enforced group identity and group unity, the fellow feeling of a shared fate, the comfort of an imposed brotherhood and sisterhood, the idea of an atavistic, God-given group destiny. But freedom has disrupted all this.” 

Steele makes the controversial claims that Black people are nostalgic for the unity imposed on them by slavery and segregation. The end of racial oppression cost Black people their group identity. He points to race-based organizations, such as Black student groups, Black churches, and Black caucuses to support his theory of nostalgia and to argue that Black Americans self-segregated after the end of legal segregation in the US.

“An achievement of the civil rights movement was to make the point that multiracial democracies require a moral consciousness that rejects race—and, for that matter, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation—as a barrier to individual rights. So this social morality was meant to be the finishing touch for the American democracy, a concept of the social good that would make democracy truly democratic and, thus, legitimate.” 

Steele’s book sheds light on the shift in morality that occurred in the aftermath of the civil rights era. Although rejecting racism and other forms of discrimination aligns with the democratic principles and values civil rights activists promote, the rise of social morality ultimately served White Americans and harmed people of color. Social morality restored legitimacy to White people and their institutions, making up for the loss of morality that came with acknowledging racism. By contrast, the social programs born out of the new social morality created dependency in minorities.

“The race card works by the mechanism of global racism: even a hint of racism proves the rule of systemic racism. So these corporations never pay to the measure of any actual racism; they pay to the measure of racism’s hyped-up and bloated reputation in the age of White guilt.” 

This quotation addresses the inflation of racism into a systemic problem. Steele describes racism as a bifurcated phenomenon comprising racial bigotry on the one hand and global racism on the other. The former diminished in the 1960s. By contrast, the latter was inflated into systemic power, expanding both White obligation and Black entitlement. According to Steele, the concept of global racism is harmful because it presents people of color as automatically oppressed and victimized, while also calibrating racism to the scale of White guilt rather than actual racism.

“I learned to remake the world around the central truth of global racism. To do this I took on the notion—as hipness itself—that man, loosely speaking, was a cipher, a non-individuated creature, who was pushed and abutted by forces much larger than himself.”

Steele’s personal transformation from the “good man” to Black militant to conservative is central to his book. This quotation refers to his adoption of a key concept of Black militancy: global racism, which stresses group identity over individuality.

“Standing there in that church I realized that no one—least of all the government—had the moral authority to tell me to be responsible for much of anything.”

Hearing Gregory speak at a Black power rally in 1967 marked a turning point for Steele, setting him on the path to militancy. Gregory fueled Black anger by presenting responsibility as a tool of oppression. Steele embraced this idea, as did most second-wave civil rights activists. The country’s lack of moral authority excused Black people of certain responsibilities, moral constraints, and even laws.

“If a young black boy cannot dribble well when he comes out to play basketball, no one will cast his problem as an injustice. No one will worry about his single-parent home, the legacy of slavery that still touches his life, or the inherent racial bias in a game invented by a White man. His deficiency will be allowed to be what it is—poor dribbling.” 

Steele asserts liberals employ the concept of global racism in contradictory ways. They blame systemic inequalities for the Black-white education gap, but they do not make similar excuses when Black people are bad at sports. Steele presents the idea that hard work and personal responsibility are key to Black advancement, arguing that Black excellence in sports and other areas disproves the existence of systemic racial barriers.

“Young whites politely accepted that blacks would have to run their own movement, and then raced to the cause of the Vietnam war. In time, many other causes—particularly feminism and environmentalism—became themes of this new youth consciousness, which ultimately became known as the ‘counterculture.’” 

This passage describes an important development in activism: racial divergence. During the civil rights era, activists of different races worked together to end racial oppression. As militancy grew, Black activists expelled White people from their ranks. These activists turned their attention to other causes, such as the Vietnam war, feminism, and environmentalism, leaving racial justice to their Black counterparts. The nascent youth consciousness of the 1960s gave birth to a counterculture that eventually became the new establishment.

“[T]he mere act of rebellion at that late sixties moment not only gained him an association with the great social issues of the day but also positioned him as a man of progressive sympathies, a man on the moral side of important issues.” 

This quotation addresses the impact of the synchronicity of adolescent rebellion and White guilt. It relates to John, a college acquaintance of Steele’s. Steele describes John’s transformation from conservative to hippie as a personal rebellion against his father. However, the concurrence of John’s rebellion, the advent of White guilt, and the emergence of counterculture imbued this personal act with sociopolitical meaning.

“White guilt is essentially a historical force that follows naturally from a moral evolution in a specific society. Thus, it is implacable. It remakes the world as profoundly, and as awkwardly, as the immorality it overthrows once did.” 

This passage calls attention to the transformative power of White guilt. Like racism, which generated a wide range of social customs and laws, White guilt gave rise to a series of changes, redefining how institutions function, producing new laws, and reorienting national politics. It also altered ideas of virtue. White supremacy was redefined as an evil that demanded condemnation, while a new social morality became ascendant. White guilt, however, perpetuated several old problems, as well as producing new ones. For instance, it maintained the old racial hierarchy by making Black people dependent on Whites for advancement. It also discouraged personal responsibility, resulting in the growth of poverty and violence in Black communities. 

“The whole point of racism (and sexism, anti-Semitism, etc.) is to seize authority illicitly at the expense of another race.” 

Discrimination of any sort is an exercise of power. In the case of racism, the dominant makes claims of innate superiority over those they dominate, thereby casting them as innately inferior. As Steele points out, however, superior power does not equate innate superiority. White supremacists justified their racist views with reference to religion, claiming that their domination of inferiors was part of god’s plan. Their claims of superiority masked their true motivations: the desire to exploit people of color for forced, free labor.

“When White supremacy was delegitimized so that common decency required Americans to treat it as a great evil, all whites lost the right to any racial self-consciousness. In other words, they lost the right to a White identity.” 

Steele claims the only White identity allowed to exist is one based on White guilt. White people cannot celebrate their race without aligning themselves with White supremacy. Their racial identity is characterized by shame, contrition, and deference to minorities. White guilt cost White people the authority to take pride in the values and ideas that made Western civilization great, despite its undisputed evils.

“In mythology journeys always end in epiphany or knowledge or resonant meaning.” 

This quote draws a connection between physical and intellectual journeys. Steele first reflected on White guilt during a road trip from Los Angeles to northern California, a journey that opens and closes his book, in addition to reappearing in several chapters. Just as mythological journeys end in epiphanies, Steele’s road trip ended with his decision to write this book. The reference to mythological journeys also relates to Steele’s background as an English PhD.

“[F]or me the Great Society had been more a dark age than a golden one.” 

Throughout the book, Steele draws from his personal experiences. This quotation refers to his time teaching in East St. Louis in a Great Society program. President Johnson’s legislation aimed to usher in a period of American prosperity. However, the declining state of education and rising poverty and crime in East St. Louis made Steele critical of the program. 

“The innovators themselves—men who once heroically challenged America’s moral inertia around race—found themselves now associated with all this failure rather than with the glory of past good intentions.” 

This passage exemplifies presentism, that is, judging past acts considering current standards. Those charged with reshaping the country under the aegis of the Great Society are now remembered for their failures, not their good intentions.

“Dissociation requires evidence of a proactive effort, a self-conscious and highly visible display of minority recruitment that shows the institution to be actively at war with its racist past. Thus, to conspicuously dissociate, it should be clear that preferences were used.”

Steele strongly opposes affirmative action, not just because it casts Black people as irremediably inferior, but also because it promotes dissociation. Schools with affirmative action admission policies gain by dissociating from racism. However, they do not examine why minority students cannot meet their admission standards, nor do they help these students after they are admitted. What matters is a strong display of minority recruitment to dissociate from racism, not promoting minority advancement. 

“Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today not out of bigotry but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority. And when they find a way to dissociate from racism—'diversity,’ politically correct language, political liberalism itself—there is little incentive to understand blacks as human beings.” 

Steele draws several parallels between the age of racism (the pre-civil rights era) and the current age of White guilt. In this passage, he stresses the dehumanizing results of White blindness, which are comparable to the dehumanization of Black people by White supremacists. In the time of slavery, people of color were viewed as commodities, not as humans. During segregation, they were seen as inferiors who had to be kept separate from whites. This dehumanization continues because of the White need to dissociate from racism. Dissociation prevents White people from seeing beyond their preconceptions, blinding them to the humanity of Blacks.

“Justice Thomas’s scathing rejection of racial preferences sends Maureen Dowd—here standing in for White liberals everywhere—into an invisibility rage of her own. Clearly she feels metaphorically annihilated by the Thomas dissent, by his utter refusal to give liberals even the slightest moral credit for their support of preferences. He simply will not see people like Dowd as socially moral human beings just because they are aligned with ‘diversity’; thus, he effectively assaults them with invisibility.” 

This passage exemplifies Steele’s tendency to use an individual as an exemplar for an entire group. Dowd represents “white liberals everywhere,” just as John stood in for young, apolitical White rebels hellbent on rejecting their parents, and Betty for the liberal teachers ruining American education by privileging social virtue over academic excellence.

“Dissociation is inherently elitist. Automatically, it creates a new kind of American, one who is better than most Americans because he has conspicuously dissociated from the litany of American sins.” 

The charge of elitism is one conservatives often level at liberals. For Steele, this elitism rests on dissociation. Liberals position themselves as “new men.” In contrast to unreconstructed White Americans (conservatives), the new man is conspicuously free of racism, sexism, and militarism, making him a bearer of moral authority and legitimacy.

“On social issues blacks tend to poll more conservatively than whites. One poll even had 88 percent of blacks opposing racial preferences.” 

Steele’s theory of White guilt rests primarily on his personal experiences, impressions, and anecdotes. The poll in this quotation is a rare example of external research in the narrative. However, Steele does not specify what organization took the poll, how many subjects were involved, or when it was taken, making it impossible to assess its validity.

“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.” 

The prioritization of social morality over individual morality in the age of White guilt is a key part of Steele’s argument. Indeed, Clinton’s conspicuous display of social morality through his commitment to diversity and support of social programs allowed him to retain the presidency, despite his personal moral failings. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal prompted Steele to contemplate the state of morality in the US. This passage, then, directly speaks to the origin of the book.