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

This two-page chapter presents fidelity as the foundation for legitimacy in democratic societies. Institutions and governments are only legitimate when they adhere to democratic principles; among these are freedom for the individual, equal rights for all individuals, equality under law, equal opportunity, and the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness described in the US Declaration of Independence.

Steele defines freedom not as something imposed by the state, but rather, as the absence of any imposed vision. In contrast to totalitarian and feudal societies—where moral authority stems from god or an ideological truth—the legitimacy of democratic governments rests on the struggle for freedom. Societies lose their freedom when they stray from democratic principles.

In the US, the centuries-long assumption that White people are superior to nonwhite people not only denied freedom to people of color, but also led to an erosion of the legitimacy and moral authority of American democracy. One of the outcomes of the civil rights movement was to discipline America with democratic principles by establishing that race was not a determinant of individual rights. In democratic societies, moral authority comes from people—not god nor ideology—and can only be earned through fidelity to democratic principles.

Chapter 3 focuses on infidelity to democratic principles. Steele presents segregation as the paradigm of institutionalized infidelity. He describes generational differences in the fight for racial equality. Civil rights activists in the age of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. struggled against open and unapologetic racism. Their protests took the form of persuasion in a society that held White supremacy as an obvious truth. Nonviolent resistance underscored the immorality of racism, while simultaneously allowing civil rights activists to claim the moral high ground. These moral witnesses displayed courage by passively facing racist mobs.

Militancy, however, soon replaced the strategy of nonviolent resistance. Black power no longer stemmed from being better than White people, but from not being better. Anger and insolence characterize this militancy. According to Steele, the anger fueling the new generation of activists did not automatically result from oppression. Wounds inflicted by racism do not inevitably lead to Black rage; rather, when the oppressed perceive weakness in the oppressor, they choose anger. In other words, anger is a response to opportunity—not to injustice—and as such, it escalates when there is less injustice, not the reverse. According to Steele, Black Americans capitalized on White weakness—namely, their moral ambivalence around race—replacing passivism with militancy.

This three-page chapter centers on the essence of White guilt, that is, the knowledge that racism exists, which leads to a lack of moral authority. Steele uses an anecdote from his college days: He describes storming into the president of the university’s office alongside other activists, cigarette and list of demands in hand. The president reacted not in a traditionally authoritative manner, but rather with modern empathy. According to Steele, this shift had entirely to do with White guilt. The president’s knowledge of racism—his inability to deny its existence—stripped him of his moral authority. Although acknowledging historical racism is key to reconciliation, it also costs White people their moral authority in areas of race, equality, and social justice. This authority is transferred to victims of racism, becoming their source of power. White guilt, then, is equivalent to Black power.

Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of loss. Emancipation for Black people resulted in the loss of group identity and shared destiny. Steele describes a nostalgia for the cohesiveness that came with slavery and segregation. Today, many Black people characterize integration as a failure. Consequently, they self-impose a separatism mirroring segregation, as evidenced by the existence of race-based organizations, such as Black churches, Black student associations, and Black caucuses. Forced racial unity, however, is politically self-defeating as it opens large groups of Black people to exploitation by those in power.

Steele segues into a discussion of White guilt, arguing that it enforced freedom for Black people in the post-civil rights era. White guilt led to the creation of a new social morality by deeming racial prejudice illegitimate. In the age of White guilt, moral authority and legitimacy rest on a negative: White people and institutions are racist until they prove otherwise. White guilt forces individuals and institutions to declare their commitment to diversity even if they lack morality, good will, and genuine decency. It depends on the fear and stigma of being called racist. Even those who hold racist views must conform to the new social codes. Social morality brought moral authority and legitimacy to a society with an acknowledged history of racism.

Chapter 6 addresses the emergence of a new consciousness in the civil rights era, resulting in the birth of counterculture. In 1967, black militant activist Dick Gregory popularized the phrase “raise your consciousness” at a Black power rally. The Marxist-derived phrase was associated with “hipness.” To wield power, Black people had to “be hip” or aware of the world as it really was. Building on his discussion of Marx, Steele argues that the philosopher’s emphasis on structures and substructures underpinned racial debates in the US for three decades, laying the foundation for notions of structural racism.

Social determinism, the theory that social interactions and constructs alone—rather than biology or other factors—determine individual behavior, was a common refrain long before the civil rights era; however, only after the strongest antidiscrimination laws were passed in the mid-sixties did Black leaders argue that racism was a determinant, and not just a barrier. What they were responding to was not actual oppression, but White guilt. Racism became valuable to Black people. It served as evidence of White wrongdoing and White obligation.

Conversely, White people needed the moral authority only Black people could give them. Racism thus became a valuable currency for Black Americans and, lacking other forms of capital, they embraced it as a form of power. Racism became a bifurcated phenomenon comprising racial bigotry on the one hand and globalized racism on the other. While the former diminished in the 1960s, the latter was inflated into structural, systemic, and deterministic power, expanding both White obligation and Black entitlement. According to Steele, 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.

In Chapter 7, Steele describes internalizing ideas of global racism. For a time, he understood humans to be non-individuated creatures acted upon by forces larger than themselves. He did not entirely deny free will, but nevertheless referred to it as delusional. He believed inequality would only end by overthrowing the structural forces of oppression.

Moreover, he prioritized his group identity as a Black person over his individuality. Steele argues these core beliefs of the militant Black consciousness align perfectly with White supremacist ideas, which see Black people not as individuals but as a unified group to be kept separate from White people. For adherents of the new consciousness and White supremacists, race was destiny. Black consciousness led people of color to deprive themselves of the hard-won individual freedoms of the civil rights era for the sole purpose of triggering White obligation.

Chapter 8 centers on two anecdotes related to personal responsibility. The first is about Steele’s summer job as a Chicago bus driver; the second focuses on Steele’s father, who worked as a non-unionized truck driver in the South. Steele identifies as a good man who went to work even though his job was hard. A “good man” is a working-class individual who always meets deadlines, finishes what he starts, and believes that quality matters; quiet dignity further characterizes the “good man.”

Steele recounts memories of his father, whose unsuccessful attempts to join the Teamsters’ union resulted in low wages and a lack of job security. Despite these hardships, Steele’s father—the paradigmatic good man—restored three houses, which he later rented for income, using discarded materials. By the time he died, however, the houses he worked so hard to rehabilitate were surrounded by blight, leading the family to sign them over to their squatters to avoid liability.

Chapter 9 focuses on the idea that responsibility oppresses people of color. Steele describes rejection for various well-paid jobs during high school, while his White peers easily landed comparable positions. This informal segregation not only made it more difficult for Steele to meet his responsibilities, but also led him to confuse responsibility with injustice. Doing dirty agricultural work for low pay, rather than making good money as a caddy at an exclusive golf course, felt like an injustice. Listening to Gregory speak in person for the first time, Steele realized racism made responsibility a tool of oppression by burdening Black people with responsibility, while denying them the freedom to do much with it. Gregory claimed that by laboring against fixed odds, the “good man” simply reinforced the racist social order. Further, he presented responsibility as something illegitimate and which made Black people complicit in their own oppression.

In a speech at Howard University, President Johnson described the unfair burden of responsibility weighing down people of color when he launched the Great Society—a set of domestic programs aimed at making White Americans assume responsibility for Black advancement. Mirroring the stance of the new Black militants, President Johnson asserted that in consideration of past and present racial injustices, it was immoral to ask Black people to be fully responsible for their own advancement. By acknowledging its racist past, America made Black people its official victim as citizens in need of help and incapable of carrying the same responsibilities as their White compatriots. 

Chapter 10 addresses the redistribution of responsibility for the advancement of Black people away from victims of racial injustice to perpetrators. This redistribution began in the late 1960s, when Black people faced two options: They could capitalize on the hard-won freedoms of the civil rights years and better themselves through education and entrepreneurialism, or they could indirectly strive for betterment by pressuring White America into assuming responsibility for their advancement.

Adherents of the new Black militancy exploited White guilt and embraced the latter option. The “hard-work” militancy of Malcolm X, which called for freedom and equal treatment under the law but not for a redistribution of responsibility, was largely rejected for its separatist agenda and, more importantly, for focusing on Black development and nation-building without dependency on White guilt. The Black militancy that swept the nation stressed the opposite. Dependency became the norm, bolstering the notion that Black people could not achieve equality without help. Black militancy effectively denied Black power by presenting Black people as perpetually weak, inferior, and incapable of taking full responsibility for their advancement.

On the one hand, White America gained by shoehorning people of color into their institutions, thereby proving they were not racist. On the other hand, minorities lost by being held to low standards. The goal of this project was not the advancement of people of color but rather to imbue White America with moral authority.

Chapter 11 describes how militancy swayed Black Americans in the post-civil rights era. A new emphasis on Black identity emerged, becoming a prime source of group power. Gestures of identity—quitting a job, dropping out of school, renouncing Christianity in favor of Islam, and replacing a slave name with an African one—were commonplace. Steele describes quitting his job after hearing Gregory speak for the first time. The gesture was his way of rejecting White authority and eschewing personal responsibility. It made him feel as though he belonged to a world in contradistinction to the corruption of White America. His new Black identity became a source of self-esteem that was in no way contingent on his success in the White world.

Being Black not only made Steele feel morally superior to White people, but also inured him to their judgements. His grades plummeted. He no longer cared what his professors thought of him. Failing in the White world mattered little in the face of a burgeoning group identity. After hearing Gregory speak, Steele pulled off the expressway, called his employers from a payphone, and quit his job. This act held symbolic importance for Steele. It was “a rejection of White authority and personal responsibility in a society where racism made a joke of such responsibility in blacks” (74). By quitting his job, Steele was not only showing contempt for the White world, he was identifying with Black authority, which he deemed morally superior in the nascent age of White guilt.