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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-11

Part 2, Chapters 12-16

Part 3, Chapters 17-24

Part 4, Chapters 25-26

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 4, Chapters 25-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “Dissociation and Culture”

Chapter 25 Summary: “The Counterculture Establishment”

This short chapter returns to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, presenting the outcome in light of the counterculture of the late 1960s. Steele repeats his theory of moral relativism, arguing the president survived the sex scandal, but would not have survived charges of racism.

Steele also reiterates his idea that White guilt placed more value on social morality than individual morality. Clinton’s personal moral failings were deemed unimportant compared to societal evils. The prioritization of social morality gave the president license to disregard his individual morality. What mattered was human equality and feeding the poor—not an extramarital affair. The decreasing importance of individual morality after the civil rights era helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1970s and the new age of social morality. Indeed, White guilt allowed people to feel virtuous even as they broke sexual taboos. By the time of Clinton’s presidency, the counterculture had become the establishment.

Chapter 26 Summary: “A Culture War”

Chapter 26 addresses the chasm between American liberals and conservatives. The culture war began when leftists responded to the crisis of White guilt by defining social virtue as dissociation. Dissociation can only be achieved at the expense of the “culture of principle”—democratic principles and demanding values rooted in individual responsibility and fairness. Dissociation stresses social engineering, deference, and moral relativism. Starting in the 1960s, two political and moral cultures coexisted: one rooted in principles and values, the other in dissociation. These two cultures now correspond to the political right and left respectively.

Steele identifies a contradiction at the center of the culture war, namely, that America’s new racial progressiveness led to cultural decline. The left abandoned the principles it needed to realize its goals, while the right lacked the moral authority to enforce them. The decline is apparent in a variety of areas—notably education and poverty. The left allows social problems to persist by addressing them solely by dissociation. By contrast, the right is now ascendant because it promotes the democratic principles and values of individual freedom and responsibility that “made America a great nation” (177). Contemporary conservatism is a reaction to the cultural decline caused by dissociation. It is a historical corrective that aims to reassert principle as reform. Reformist conservatism, however, remains highly stigmatized because of its historical failure to dissociate from racism.

Part 4, Chapters 25-26 Analysis

In Part 4, the shortest of the book, Steele revisits key themes and arguments from earlier sections, while also breaking new ground. Chapter 25 repeats the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Closing with the scandal that opens Chapter 1 lends symmetry to Steele’s narrative, in addition to emphasizing the event that prompted him to write it in the first place. For Steele, it is the ascendancy of counterculture in the decades following the civil rights era that allowed Clinton to retain the presidency. By the 1990s, counterculture was the new establishment and lust was no longer an unpardonable sin. Like other baby boomers, Clinton was adept at capitalizing on the moral shift he had a hand in creating: “[T]his was the generation that invented the practice of using social morality as a license to disregard individual morality” (169).

While Chapter 24 treads familiar ground, Chapter 25 offers new insights by focusing on the culture war between the political left and right (democrats and conservatives). The personal once again serves as Steele’s point of departure. He describes struggling with his political identity during young adulthood, when the expectation was that Black people should automatically hold leftist views. He revisits the incident with Betty, who assumed he would support her new course on ethnic literature simply because he was Black. The pressure to adopt a leftist identity negatively impacted Steele, drawing him into “a corrupting falseness—and an inner duplicity—that [grew] more and more rigid with the years” (172). An early mantra of the civil rights movement, “I am a man” (173), captures his desire to be seen as an individual rather than illegitimate attempts to fit into specific political and racial molds. Steele changed political allegiances in the 1980s, when his beliefs no longer allowed him to maintain a false leftist identity. He no longer pretends to believe in self-serving lies, such as the existence of systemic racism, which “almost smothered [his] life as a free man” (180). Steele boldly proclaims he is free before ending where he began: on the road home, with a final reference to the Chautauqua.