White Guilt (11 page)

Clearly the man who introduced himself to me as an “architect” of the Great Society saw nothing cynical in what he and his fellow architects had done in the sixties. He was quite proud of the effort they had made. “And I'll tell you something else,” he said, his fierce black eyes boring into me, “we just needed to keep at it. We were learning new things all the time, but then the war took all the money away, and, you're right, things did sort of go to hell after that, but…”

“What kind of things did you learn that would have helped all those programs do better?”

“Look,” he said irritably, “
only
—and I mean
only
—the government can get to that kind of poverty, that entrenched, deep poverty. And I don't care what you say. If this country was decent, it would let the government try again.”

“But what did you learn from all those programs and all that money spent?”

But then he only wanted to tell stories—a trip he had taken
to the Mississippi Delta, the gratitude of the people for a local VISTA program, the “new hope” they had taken from seeing their government caring about them. I told him I had heard the same gratitude countless times in the programs I had worked in, but there were tough questions to be asked. If so many people were grateful and newly hopeful, why didn't they build on what they had been given and continue to improve themselves after the programs dried up? Why did so many just hold out for welfare or merely plod along as before? Why wasn't there a better use of the public schools, a demand that they teach at a higher level? Why not private schools in basements and churches? Why not simple credit unions to provide capital? (My own father had started one in the segregated neighborhood where I grew up. My mother had organized a free baby clinic.) Why inertia instead of an energized focus on all the new possibilities that the civil rights victories had opened up? And finally, if the Great Society was so good, why did black America produce its first true underclass
after
it was over?

“Damn it, we
saved
this country!” he all but shouted. “This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend.”

“That's my point,” I said. “The Negroes you met in the Mississippi Delta were a means to your end.”

“They were no goddamn means to any end. I will never forget those people. If the government had stayed there, we would have saved them.”

I tried to explain about white guilt, moral authority, and legitimacy, but it was no use. Exasperated, he turned sharply and
walked away; then he turned again and came back. His anger had given way to a cold contempt, and his black eyes were dull now, almost gray. “I'm telling you, we saved this country and you need to appreciate that.”

I had met a few others like him, men who had been in on the ground floor of important racial policies back in the sixties and seventies, like school busing, various Great Society programs, and affirmative action. They were a touchy lot, and I could understand why. For one thing, they were victims of what historians call “presentism”—having their past innovations constantly judged in the light of present-day standards and with all the smugness of hindsight. Policies that had once seemed destined to deliver America from centuries of racial shame were now seen through the prism of decades of failure and cultural divisiveness. 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.

One such man that I knew wrote eloquently on what America was like back then, on how racial discrimination—an entrenched practice that gave millions of unskilled whites an economic advantage over blacks—had still prevailed everywhere in America in the late sixties, and on how his innovative policies had broken up many of these enclaves of white privilege. His subtext was that he had done a good thing, and if the policy he had created to breach white privilege had turned out to be disastrous over time and in other contexts, then that in no way mitigated the good he had done. It must also be added to the credit of such men that they had often faced down open racists,
as President Johnson himself had done in his negotiations over the 1964 Civil Rights Bill when he told his old friend and mentor, Sam Rayburn, that things were going to change.

And yet these men were also victims of another, far more common human problem: they did not entirely know themselves (like most of us), which often left them blind to their actual motivations. Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations. In the age of racism, whites said blacks were inferior so as not to
see
their own desire to exploit them, their true motivation. In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.

The theme of white blindness is one of the most persistent themes in twentieth-century writing by black Americans—blindness toward others but, more important, toward the self. The essence of this theme is that whites have always had to nurture a certain blindness toward themselves in order to preserve their moral character in a racist society that favors them, and that this nurtured blindness is a part of the American culture, a part of what it means to be white in America. Thus, the blindness of whites to their true motivations in racial matters is a rather timeless feature of American life, as visible in today's university president rationalizing affirmative action as it was in Thomas Jefferson's last rationalizations for the continuance of slavery. In both cases, a white man argues out of a humanity that is aloof and God-graced for a race-based system that will utterly define black life, but that he himself will never be subject to. That whites can devise and support such systems while being blind to
their true motivations is a special terror in black life, one that is explored in the work of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and many other black writers. It is always the black who pays the price for white self-delusion. And it is always blacks who will have to seek out their opportunities—like Odysseus against the Cyclops—within the blindness of whites. Whites, on the other hand—today's college president, yesterday's Thomas Jefferson—not only will never suffer from the systems they devise, but will be forever celebrated for their good intentions, their courage in confronting such an intractable problem.

The majority decision of the Supreme Court in the recent University of Michigan affirmative-action case is an especially insensitive example of white blindness, every bit as chilling and bizarre as the contorted mathematical calculations by which Thomas Jefferson tried to figure out the number of years it would take to ship all slaves back to Africa—calculations which so defeated him that he finally ended his lifelong wrestling with the slavery issue by ceding the problem to future generations. The odd reasoning of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion in the Michigan case has the same myopic and abstracted quality as Jefferson's machinations. In a borrowed psuedoscientific doublespeak—“learning outcomes,” “soft variables,” “selection index,” “nuanced judgments,” “critical mass,” and “holistic reading”—O'Connor piles one social-science banality on top of another, hoping against hope that we buy her tall tale of “diversity” as so “compelling” a state interest that it justifies racial preferences. Her opaque language is a textbook illustration of George Orwell's famous critique of political language as words used to “obscure” and hide reality rather than to illuminate it.
So in thrall is she to a soulless and undefined “diversity” that she ignores the most basic legal issues in the case: the constitutionality of preferring one race over another, as well as the court's careful precedents on racial preferences—“narrow tailoring” and “strict construction.”

But more important, Justice O'Connor shows no interest in
seeing
the real causes of racial inequality in college admissions. She never identifies an actual problem that black students are having in college admissions that might be remedied by racial preferences. As always with white blindness, blacks and other minorities are invisible
as human beings.
So O'Connor never matches a problem that minorities are experiencing as human beings with a remedy.

This points to the shocking irony that defines her decision and renders it absurd: she applies a remedy to something that is not a problem—diversity. Diversity, of course, is not unfairness, discrimination, or a systemic bias that disproportionately hurts minorities. To the contrary, diversity is put forth as a social good, something on the positive side of the ledger. So O'Connor is saying that it is perfectly constitutional to have a remedy that remediates nothing, a race-based remedy that does not remediate racial discrimination; and that this is so even when that remedy is literally executed through programmatic racial discrimination.

But why is this an example of white blindness? And what specifically is white blindness? It is a blindness to the
human
reality of minorities that occurs when whites look at racial issues but see only the contingency they must meet to restore their own moral authority. White blindness is an unconscious self-
absorption by which whites see racial issues—and even interracial encounters—as opportunities to dissociate from historic racism. Thus, encountering the black face is more an opportunity to dissociate than to see a human being like oneself. This is blindness because it confuses the mere dissociation from racism with sight, with seeing the human reality of racially different people. The two are not the same. To see humanity across racial lines one must see frankly how people of other races live as human beings, not as members of a race.

As mentioned earlier, over one hundred American institutions—universities, corporations, the military, state and local governments—submitted briefs to the Supreme Court in the Michigan case supporting racial preferences. Yet, despite all this commitment to diversity and racial preferences, I am not aware of a single institution that based its call for preferences on a careful analysis of why so many minorities were not competitive enough to win places in their institutions unaided by racial preferences. Again, if we can't specifically name the problems that make so many minorities noncompetitive, how can we argue that racial preferences are a remedy?

But, of course, these institutions are not interested in the reasons for minority noncompetitiveness; they are interested only in the
fact
that this persistent weakness means they must use preferences to rope in enough minorities. And what is enough minorities? Enough is just enough to clearly
dissociate
the institution from America's old racist patterns. Without preferences it would be utterly impossible to admit enough minorities for a convincing dissociation. 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.

Most Ivy League universities want their freshmen classes to be roughly 8 percent black. This works as dissociation because they would be no more than 1 or 2 percent black without racial preferences. Eight percent verifies proactive effort because, at the very least, it quadruples the number of blacks that would otherwise be there. This, really, is the meaning of the infamous terms “quotas” and “quota system,” terms that can be understood only in the language of white guilt. A “quota” is simply the percentage of minorities required to verify proactive minority recruitment in a given institution—minority recruitment at a level that sacrifices the institution's integrity, its timeless standards, and its fairness to whites and Asians. Lower standards and collateral discrimination—these are the tests of dissociation. And once dissociated, the institution goes about its business without worrying why minorities do so poorly within it.

By far the best literary depiction of white blindness ever written has to be the “Mr. Norton” episode in Ralph Ellison's classic 1953 novel,
Invisible Man.
This episode is a virtual allegory of white blindness in which the invisible man—the novel's young black protagonist—ends up being kicked out of college because he lacks the time-honored black skill of manipulating white blindness. Dr. Bledsoe, the president of this college based on the real Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, tells him just before sending him away, “Every nigger in the cotton patch knows you're suppose to lie to a white man.” And this is precisely what the invisible man failed to do as he toured the pompous and self-absorbed Mr. Norton around the campus. Norton is a wealthy white philanthropist from the North who contributes lavishly to this small black college in response to the soaring rhetoric of Dr. Bledsoe—a man who has crafted his “lies” to the white
man into a perfect moneymaking mask. In his sermons Bledsoe essentially presents the striving black race as an opportunity for white transcendence. By contributing to his college, whites can dissociate from the devastation racism has wrought on blacks. They can tell themselves that their contributions so improve the lives of blacks that they are effectively rendering racism benign. So Bledsoe, making his way in an openly racist society, sells whites a kind of absolution, a renewed sense of moral authority as they live out lives that are unavoidably complicit with racism.

But the invisible man threatens to crack Bledsoe's carefully constructed mask when he unthinkingly allows Norton to meet the rough-hewn black sharecropper Trueblood, who has—to the outrage of both black and white communities—impregnated both his wife and his daughter. Trueblood (a name symbolizing the unvarnished lower-class Negro) represents precisely the dark, messy, and fallen
human
reality of black life that Bledsoe labors so hard to keep hidden. Bledsoe offers up his people as innocents, as simple, almost childlike people who, without guile or resentment toward their oppressors, strive to live by an American ethic of hard, honorable work and humble hope. It is a vision of the Negro as a kind of pet, a figure of sweet and harmless inferiority to whom one gives out of the largesse of one's superiority. So Bledsoe throws the invisible man out of his college for being “dangerous,” for allowing a white man
with money
to look behind the black mask and see the human frailty, and even Oedipal complexity, of black people—and all the more dangerous because Norton has unknowingly revealed an unnatural obsession with his own daughter.

Bledsoe's panicky fear is that the Trueblood encounter will
give
sight
to Norton, an ability to see past the delusion of race and into the human reality of blacks—and perhaps even to experience a human brotherhood with them. This possibility is simply too dangerous for Bledsoe even to contemplate, because he has predicated all his advantage on white blindness, on the easy gratification he can offer whites by giving them the opportunity to help inferiors, people who will be forever beneath them.

Norton's own unacknowledged incestuous impulse is a
human
—not a racial—link to Trueblood. It is only Norton's blindness to blacks as human beings—despite all the money he gives to their cause—that saves him from seeing himself in Trueblood. And this blindness allows him to experience vicariously the sin of incest in scintillating detail by getting Trueblood to recount vividly the terrible cold night when he made love to his daughter as his wife slept beside them. If Norton consciously saw anything of himself in Trueblood, he would fall outside the framework of white supremacy and black inferiority, and he would no longer be a great white redeemer. He would simply be a lecherous old man little different from the “nigger” whose taboo-breaking intrigues him. This sort of racial equality, grounded in common humanity, is precisely what Bledsoe cannot abide. His appeal is to the vanity and largesse of white supremacy. Racial equality—the idea that people are the same under the skin—is Bledsoe's private terror.

So he kicks the invisible man out of his college for putting Norton's white blindness at risk, for situating Norton precariously close to an experience of human commonality with an ignorant black sharecropper and, thus, close to an experience of something like both human vision and racial equality. Bledsoe—like such contemporary black leaders as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Julian
Bond, and the entire civil rights establishment—essentially sells a “Sambo” image of his own people, an image of black weakness and inferiority offered in
trade
to blind whites looking to buy an easy moral authority.

This points to a sad irony at the core of black-white relations in America. The price blacks pay for the mere illusion of recompense for past injustice
always
requires them—literally as well as metaphorically—to be “Sambo-ized,” to be merchandised to whites as inferiors and victims. The Sambo doll, as an image of grotesque black inferiority sold to whites in homage to their superiority, is an ominous and recurring image in
Invisible Man,
a novel set in the era of segregation. Yet, even today, when people argue for diversity and, thus, for racial preferences, black students are effectively Sambo-ized. They are assigned an inferiority so intractable that nothing overcomes it, not even good schools and high family incomes.

When you give a racial preference to the child of two black professionals with advanced degrees and six-figure incomes—as entrée to a university that has not discriminated against blacks in more than sixty years—then you are clearly implying an inherent and irremediable black inferiority. You are saying that even the absence of racism and the fruits of a privileged life do not make it possible for blacks to compete with whites and Asians who may come from fractured homes and underprivileged backgrounds. So even the most gifted and affluent blacks—many of whom
can
compete on their own—must pull on the Sambo mask and reinvent themselves as the sort of inferiors that will trade well with white guilt. Even as opportunity virtually stalks their lives, they must learn to “lie to the white man.”