White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

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Overview

In 1955 the murderers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly because they were white. Forty years later, O. J. Simpson, whom many thought would be charged with murder by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. Clearly, a sea change had taken place in American culture, but how had it happened? In this important new work, distinguished race relations scholar Shelby Steele argues that the age of white supremacy has given way to an age of white guilt -- and neither has been good for African Americans.

As the civil rights victories of the 1960s ...

See more details below

More About This Book

Overview

In 1955 the murderers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly because they were white. Forty years later, O. J. Simpson, whom many thought would be charged with murder by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. Clearly, a sea change had taken place in American culture, but how had it happened? In this important new work, distinguished race relations scholar Shelby Steele argues that the age of white supremacy has given way to an age of white guilt -- and neither has been good for African Americans.

As the civil rights victories of the 1960s dealt a blow to racial discrimination, American institutions started acknowledging their injustices, and white Americans -- who held the power in those institutions -- began to lose their moral authority. Since then, our governments and universities, eager to reclaim legitimacy and avoid charges of racism, have made a show of taking responsibility for the problems of black Americans. In doing so, Steele asserts, they have only further exploited blacks, viewing them always as victims, never as equals. This phenomenon, which he calls white guilt, is a way for whites to keep up appearances, to feel righteous, and to acquire an easy moral authority -- all without addressing the real underlying problems of African Americans. Steele argues that calls for diversity and programs of affirmative action serve only to stigmatize minorities, portraying them not as capable individuals but as people defined by their membership in a group for which exceptions must be made.

Through his articulate analysis and engrossing recollectionsof the last half-century of American race relations, Steele calls for a new culture of personal responsibility, a commitment to principles that can fill the moral void created by white guilt. White leaders must stop using minorities as a means to establish their moral authority -- and black leaders must stop indulging them. As White Guilt eloquently concludes, the alternative is a dangerous ethical relativism that extends beyond race relations into all parts of American life.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
In the past half century, says, Shelby Steele, America has moved from the age of white supremacy to the age of white guilt. The National Book Critics Circle Award winner argues that this sea change still leaves blacks and whites in unenviable positions. He asserts that such demoralizing guilt must be replaced by a new culture of personal responsibility and a commitment to moral principles. An eloquent view of contemporary race relations.
Publishers Weekly
Speaking the language of moralism, individual freedom and responsibility, contrarian cultural critic Steele builds on ideas he earlier articulated in his National Book Critics Circle Award-winner The Content of Our Character (1990). Today's problem, Steele forcefully argues, is not black oppression, but white guilt, a loose term that encompasses both an attempt by whites to regain the moral authority they lost after the Civil Rights Movement, and black contempt toward "Uncle Tom" complicity with white hegemony, resulting in a shirking of personal accountability. Steele makes a passionate case against the "Faustian bargain" he perceives on the left: "we'll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you'll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for `helping' you." But progressive readers will object to his assertion that systemic racism is a thing of the past-and to his praise of the Bush administration's philosophy on poverty, education and race. Though Steele takes a hard, critical look at affirmative action, self-serving white liberals and self-victimizing black leaders, he stops short of offering real-world solutions. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
Prize-winning author Steele (research fellow, Hoover Inst., Stanford Univ.; A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America) mixes reminiscences with observations on race relations since the 1950s to argue that America has tragically veered from a quest for civil rights to the defining of blacks as victims, an approach that does not treat them as equals. The United States, he says, has abandoned the moral authority that had cast the faulty ideological truth of white supremacy with that of legal racial segregation as disgraceful conditions both at home and abroad. A failure to face redistributed responsibilities has reenslaved blacks and the nation in manipulated political identities lacking any authority, Steele argues. White guilt, white blindness, black self-destruction, and dissociation have eroded the moral authority at America's core. Consequently, minorities have fallen into a vacuum as social morality battles to reestablish its ascendancy in a deepening culture war. As a means of reimagining black-white relations, collections on contemporary U.S. society or race relations may find Steele's essay on personal and national moral evolution a thought-provoking contrast to Manning Marable's recommended Living Black History. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/06.]-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780060578626
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 5/2/2006
  • Pages: 192
  • Product dimensions: 8.48 (w) x 10.62 (h) x 0.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of The Content of Our Character, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and A Dream Deferred. He is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, and his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Newsweek, and the Washington Post, among many other publications. For his work on the PBS television documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst, he was recognized with both an Emmy Award and a Writers Guild Award. In 2004 President George W. Bush, citing Steele's "learned examinations of race relations and cultural issues," honored him with the National Humanities Medal. He lives in California.

Read an Excerpt

White Guilt

How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
By Shelby Steele

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Shelby Steele
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060578629

Chapter One

A Dilemma


Sometimes it is a banality -- something a little sad and laughable -- that makes you aware of a deep cultural change. On some level you already knew it, so that when the awareness comes, there is more recognition than surprise. Yes, of course, things have changed.

So it was not long after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal began that it occurred to me that race had dramatically changed the terms by which political power is won and held in America. When I woke on that January morning to the sight of President Clinton wagging his finger on the morning news and saying "I never had sex with that woman," I thought two things: that he was lying and that he would be out of office within two weeks. It was a month later that I realized not only that he might survive his entire term but also that his survival, even for a month, already spoke volumes about the moral criterion for holding power in the United States.

I came to this realization on a drive back to northern California from Los Angeles with the scandal keeping me company on the car radio. A commentator said that President Eisenhower would not have survived a single day had hebeen caught in circumstances similar to President Clinton's. Having grown up in the fifties, I thought this was probably true, and this is when the deep cultural shift became clear.

I seemed to remember -- in the way that one vaguely remembers gossip about the famous -- someone once telling me that Eisenhower occasionally used the word "nigger" on the golf course. Maybe he did; maybe he didn't. In that era we blacks fully assumed that whites in all stations of life used this word at least in private. However, I cannot imagine that a reporter in that era, overhearing Eisenhower speak in this way, would have seen it as anything more than jocular bad taste. Certainly no one would have questioned his fitness to hold office. Yet, if an affair with a young female intern had exploded in the national media, with details of secret retreats off the Oval Office, thongs, cigars, etc., there is little doubt that 1950s America would have judged him morally unfit to hold power. It was taken for granted in that gray-flannel era that public trust had to be reciprocated by a rigorous decorum around sexual matters, even if that decorum was the very face of hypocrisy.

Yet, on that long drive talk-show callers passionately argued that private indiscretions were no bar to public trust, that what Clinton did in his private life had no bearing on his ability to run the country. It was unapologetic moral relativism -- the idea that sexual morality is relative only to the consent of the individuals involved, and that there is no other authority or moral code larger than their choice. In the voices of many callers you could hear this expressed as a kind of pride. Relativism spares us from far worse sins, they seemed to be saying, those greatest of all sins for my baby-boomer generation -- judgmentalism and hypocrisy.

All this drew me back to my college days in the sixties when we would sit around in the student union, smoking French cigarettes and arguing that monogamy was a passe bourgeois convention. Of course it was an adolescent argument of perfectly transparent wishful thinking, since beneath all the big ideas -- at least for us boys -- was the fervent hope that the girls would actually believe it. There was a lot of lust in this kind of thinking -- lust everywhere in baby-boomer thinking -- and over time it became part of the generational license that opened the way for a sexual revolution. But it was jarring these many decades later -- so deep now into adult life -- to hear such thinking hauled out in defense of the president of the United States.

But then something occurred to me. I wondered if President Clinton would be defended with relativism if he had done what, according to gossip, Eisenhower was said to have done. Suppose that in a light moment he had slipped into a parody of an old Arkansas buddy from childhood and, to get the voice right, used the word "nigger" a few times. Suppose further that a tape of this came to light so that all day long in the media -- from the unctuous morning shows to the freewheeling late-night shows to the news every half hour on radio -- we would hear the unmistakable presidential voice saying, "Take your average nigger . . . "

Today in America there is no moral relativism around racism, no sophisticated public sentiment that recasts racism as a mere quirk of character. Today America is puritanical rather than relativistic around racism, and if Clinton had been caught in this way, it is very likely that nothing would have saved him. The very legitimacy of the American democracy in this post-civil rights era now requires a rigid, if not repressive, morality of racial equality. A contribution of the civil rights movement was to establish the point that a multiracial society cannot be truly democratic unless social equality itself becomes a matter of personal morality. So a president's "immorality" in this area would pretty much cancel his legitimacy as a democratic leader.

The point is that President Clinton survived what would certainly have destroyed President Eisenhower, and Eisenhower could easily have survived what would almost certainly have destroyed Clinton. Each man, finally, was no more than indiscreet within the moral landscape of his era (again, Eisenhower's indiscretion is hypothetical here for purposes of discussion). Neither racism in the fifties nor womanizing in the nineties was a profound enough sin to undermine completely the moral authority of a president. So it was the good luck of each president to sin into the moral relativism of his era rather than into its puritanism. And, interestingly, the moral relativism of one era was the puritanism of the other. Race simply replaced sex as the primary focus of America's moral seriousness.

Continues...

Excerpted from White Guilt by Shelby Steele Copyright © 2006 by Shelby Steele. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Customer Reviews
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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 8, 2006

    A Must READ For Sociology Students

    As an American citizen I can say that Shelby Steele¿s book `White Guilt¿ has stated what being American is all about. Mr. Steele has articulated in 181 pages what I try to say in semester of lectures, but he goes to right to the heart of the matter. America is built on individual responsibility, motivation and pride. Mr. Steele has said with eloquence and honesty what should have be said long ago in all sociology classes, `you are responsible¿ for your own destiny. As a professor of sociology this book will be a COMPULSORY READER for all my students this fall 2006 for Introduction to Sociology. Mr. Steele it was an honor to have read your book. Dr. Douglas O¿Neill South Dakota State University

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 9, 2011

    Whit Guilt will do. No need for the subtitle

    I just finished and all I could think of was, is it even possible to hate white people more than Shelby Steele? This book is 180 pages of racist rantings. He comes up for air one time around page 100 to acknowledge that maybe white culture might have something noble to offer humanity. Then he dives right back into his bitter, whiny diatribe about how white people are responsible for every challenge black people face or have faced. I'm not gleaning this from the text. That's the theme, from beginning to end. For a guy who decries black victimhood peddlers, he sells it harder than the most shameless race hustler. He has some novel points about human nature and some decent prose but really, this book could have been written by any race baiter with a good vocabulary.

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  • Posted March 7, 2010

    Excellent and still timely

    Although 3 years from publication, this book remains especially timely in view of an African-American President and "progressive" Congress. It is concise, has an easily readable style (including an interesting comparison to the times and vices of Presidents Eisenhower and Clinton), and speaks with the combination of authority and perspective of one who has lived through changing times. White Guilt puts into words many of the vague feelings many whites (and presumably blacks) have -- for example, that a stand for morality and some of the foundations of American culture can be suppressed by charges of racism (and that a political-economic industry exists behind this). I look forward to more insights from this author.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 11, 2008

    A reviewer

    That's all I can say. I can't begin to articulate the brilliant points Steele makes in this book. It's a quick read, only 180 pages. It will be well worth your time if you've ever been puzzled about the state of race relations 'white-black' in a post Civil Rights era USA.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 18, 2006

    Brilliant View.

    It's always important to look at the not so well known outcomes of historical movements. Our care-free attitudes are definately one of the effects of the Civil Rights Era, but with every monumental movement, there are both positive and negative effects. Pinpointing this outcome was great on the author's part.

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    Posted January 18, 2010

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    Posted February 12, 2011

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