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

This short chapter argues that the convergence of adolescent rebellion and White guilt in the 1960s fueled the nascent counterculture. Baby boomers began questioning adult authority at the precise moment their parents began to lose moral authority. Adolescent rebellion typically aims at achieving autonomy—not at defeating one’s parents. However, adults in the 1960s were broadly assailed as racist, sexist, militaristic, and repressed, which stripped them of moral authority. The generation gap became a credibility gap. Witnessing the collapse of moral authority forced young people to reject the past and all its failings. Reformation was not possible, only revolution. Thus, baby boomers were charged not just with redeeming the country, but also with reinventing its morality.

Steele discusses an encounter at a party shortly after John’s reappearance at college. John reputedly told Steele that if he cared about civil rights, he should travel to California: “He said something about big things happening in the East Bay, as if I would certainly know where the East Bay was and what was happening there. I didn’t know” (92). The East Bay refers to Oakland, home of the Black Panthers.

Even after acknowledging that John’s awareness of the Black Panther hub in Oakland surpasses him, Steele continues to question John’s political and social consciousness: “I would have been surprised if John even knew that there was a student civil rights group on our campus. Certainly racial injustice had nothing to do with the grand rebellion he was staging” (92).

Chapter 14 addresses the transfer of moral authority and power from adults to youths. Adults found themselves on the wrong side of issues—such as racial justice and the Vietnam war—implicating them in social evils. This led to a reversal of traditional roles, with youths becoming authoritative while adults continued to support the discredited status quo. Bereft of moral authority, adults were dismissed even when they were in the right.

To exemplify his point, Steele continues to focus on John’s behaviors, specifically in relation to his father:

Name the issue, and John […] could place his father on the wrong side of it. So whatever there was actually between them […] would metamorphose from the personal to the political, where John could actually have more moral authority than his uptight father, who was implicated in so many social evils. (95-96)

The transfer of moral authority from adults to youths resulted in a transfer of power. Baby boomers stumbled into power by virtue of coming of age in the era of White guilt. Charged with reinventing and redeeming the country, they transformed all institutions associated with injustice, such as the military, schools, and the judiciary. These changes included integrating public schools and transforming the welfare system. People also changed in this period. Whites began to understand the evil of racism, while Blacks were lured into self-destructive dependency. An identity based on entitlement and grievance hobbled Black communities, producing leaders who traded moral authority to whites for racial preferences. White guilt generated new social customs, altered the ways institutions functioned, created new laws, and reoriented politics. It cast White supremacy as an evil that demanded condemnation and required White people to disavow the idea of their own superiority. In short, it subtracted moral authority from White people and imposed racial humility. White guilt remade American society, but the result was as awkward as the immorality it overthrew.

Chapter 15 describes the late 1960s as a time of possibility and as a period that reshaped American society by ushering in the end of White supremacy. Of the various forces driving societal change in the post-civil rights era, White guilt was the most powerful because it replaced White supremacy. White supremacy was once a prime source of moral authority in the US. People accepted it as a moral truth reflecting god’s hierarchy of races, which gave White Americans the authority to exclude minorities from democracy. The superior power and wealth of Whites supported claims of innate White superiority. As Steele points out, however, superior power and innate superiority are not one in the same. White supremacy was delegitimized in the civil rights era, leading to an expansion of White guilt. Rather than innate superiority, White people were presented as having an innate capacity for evil. As a consequence, White America could not present itself as an honest, optimistic, ingenious, and freedom-loving society.

In this short chapter, Steele asserts that the death of White authority cost White people the right to a White identity. White people cannot celebrate their race without being charged with White supremacy. The only permissible White identity is White guilt—that is, an identity based on a lack of moral authority. This identity is inescapable and revolves around contrition and deference to minorities. White supremacy brought cohesiveness and coherence to American society. Although racist and imperialistic, Western societies were centers of greatness. The end of White supremacy cost White people the authority to take pride in the ideas and values that made Western civilization great.

It also denied legitimacy to the character principles or traits that brought about this greatness, including personal responsibility, delayed gratification, hard work, commitment to excellence, competition by merit, individual initiative, and honor in achievement. Before the civil rights era, everyone was held accountable to these principles—even those who were openly oppressed. The delegitimization of White supremacy led to a loss of cultural coherence. By recognizing the worst about itself, America no longer had the moral authority to support what was best.