White Guilt (12 page)

I always come away from arguments like the one with the “architect” of the Great Society feeling empty and frustrated. But these are only the polite feelings. Beneath them is always a palpable anger, potentially more intense even than any I felt back in the sixties when confronted by open racists. It is a sharp, bristling, and ego-fueled anger that, on the level of metaphor, would annihilate the offending party. It is triggered by encountering someone who cannot see you, even as he stands before you, because of all the presumptions he has made about you. Such a person has metaphorically annihilated you. He doesn't hit you; he simply doesn't see you, out of a conviction that there is nothing of you worth seeing beyond his own thin preconception of you. So you cease to exist in your own right and exist, instead, as a figment of his imagination. And this, of course, burns you up. You want to return fire, to employ a terrible violence—something, again on the metaphorical level, with the intimacy of, say, a switchblade or a tiny pistol. “Now
you see me, don't you,” you hiss into his ear as the blade goes in or the pistol pops.

This sort of rage is the human ego defending itself, and, thankfully, it very rarely plays out on the literal level because we are so conditioned to fear and suppress it. Also, as we age and the brickbats of life batter the ego down to size, as they say, there is less ego territory to defend, and in any case, there is less energy to waste on such defense. That said, this kind of anger is archetypal. It is always at work in the world.

 

People who are in the grip of white blindness, and thus unaware of their true motivations, always miss the human being inside the black skin, and so provoke this kind of anger. Your color represents you in the mind of such people. They will have built a large part of their moral identity and, possibly, their politics around how they respond to your color. Thus, a part of them—the moral part—is invested not in you but in some idea of what your color means. And when they see you—the individual—they instantly call to mind this investment and determine, once again, to honor it. They are very likely proud of the way they have learned to relate to your color, proud of the moral magnanimity it gives them an opportunity to express. So, in meeting you, they actually meet only a well-rehearsed and “better” part of themselves. Of course, if they are unapologetically racist, they would meet a well-rehearsed “superior” part of themselves. In either case, rage is likely to be your response.

 

Invisible Man
opens with an extraordinary image of this rage. The invisible man is bumped by a white man on a dark street
one night, and the man—“a tall blond”—calls him an insulting name. The invisible man grabs the white man by the lapels and demands that he apologize. He refuses, and the invisible man pulls the man's chin “down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and blood gush out.” The man still refuses to apologize, and the invisible man butts him again, and again, until he finally goes down. And once the white man is on the ground, the invisible man kicks him “repeatedly,” yet the man continues to utter insults, though his mouth is now “frothy with blood.” Finally, when the man is utterly helpless, the invisible man pulls out his knife, opens it with his teeth, and prepares to slit the man's throat. But at that instant, with the knife “slicing the air,” the invisible man has an epiphany: “it occurred to me that the man had not
seen
me.”

This is the point at which the invisible man begins to understand that he is invisible and that the man, a white everyman, is blind. Instantly—and luckily for the white man—he is overcome by the irony that blindness and invisibility impose on the situation. “Something in this man's thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life.” In the man's head there was a “phantom,” the idea of a nigger, an inferior being whom a white could insult at will and without consequence. This “phantom,” rather than the individual human being he had bumped into, was all the white man could ever see; and so this phantom of his own making, this nigger, is what had leaped out of the darkness and beaten him nearly to death. The invisible man laughs at the irony of his “crazy discovery.”

Yet, despite its great drama, I have never found this scene
entirely convincing. We are asked to believe that the invisible man's sudden insight into blindness and invisibility, his almost literary comprehension of the moment's irony, is sufficient not only to dispel his anger but also to enable him to feel “sincere compassion” for this “poor blind fool.” But can a murderous rage really be swept away by cool insight? Ellison's themes of invisibility and blindness would have stood even if he had allowed his young protagonist to kill the white man. But then the invisible man would have been a different sort of protagonist, one capable of rageful murder like Richard Wright's hero, Cross Damon, in
The Outsider. Invisible Man
required a more naive, even innocent, hero-narrator, so Ellison could not allow that knife to find its mark. Then, too, in 1953 when the novel was published, there would have been the practical matter of allowing a young black hero to kill a white man on the second page of the novel. So Ellison, unconvincingly, allows insight—epiphany—to still his hero's rage and save the “blind fool's” life.

And it is even more unconvincing because the rage the invisible man feels and the violence he acts out on the white man are quite convincing responses to white blindness. The invisible man's demand for an apology after the white man's first insult is effectively a demand to be seen and treated as a human being. It is born of his desire to be
visible,
a simple enough human desire. But the white man makes it clear that he would rather die than see the invisible man as a human being. Intractably committed to his blindness, this white man becomes a grinning tar baby—the more you hit him with hands and feet, the more you become stuck to him. Worse, each blow you deliver only infuriates
you
more until your own mounting anger finally spirals you into
self-destruction. In the end your hands and feet are stuck to him, and he possesses you, all the while grinning impassively.

Tar babies infuriate and inflame the rages of pride by refusing to see the people who approach them. They assault with invisibility, and you want to annihilate them simply to be seen—perhaps the deepest human longing. But you only end up stuck to them. So Ellison chose the perfect conceit to reveal the effect of white blindness on its victims. Blithely, like an impervious tar baby, white blindness annihilates blacks with invisibility and so dupes us into a rageful pursuit of visibility. But after the rage and even violence, we are left to simmer in futility.

 

Well, this was the kind and quality of rage that I felt after my encounter with the “architect” of the Great Society. By now I have learned to sidestep such rage fairly well, to walk away from the tar baby, as it were. And today, in our age of white guilt, people or institutions in the grip of white blindness truly are tar babies. In the age of racism, white blindness was rooted in hate. Whites did not see you because their own identity—whiteness itself—was literally defined by your being less than human. But as infuriating as this kind of white blindness was, blacks could at least sneer back.

One of the few advantages of belonging to a despised group is that you so clearly owe nothing to your oppressor. In hatred and open oppression you are left, oddly, to possess yourself; behind the invisibility that hatred imposes there is what Ellison called a “margin of freedom” in which the oppressed
autonomously
reinvent themselves, making their own meaning and even culture. In the space of this freedom the oppressed will have
their own mores and measures of character; their own ways of worship, rituals of romance, and music; and especially their own self-mocking absurdist humor. They will know that they are surviving against far greater odds than others, and despite the obvious unfairness of this, they will compose a brotherhood of the strong and assign themselves a broader and deeper humanity than others. Paradoxically, oppression always conveys a sense of superiority along with its abuses. This is why it is so profoundly mistaken to assume that racism and oppression automatically cause low self-esteem in blacks. The opposite is more likely the case.

In the age of racism blacks were not confused by white blindness, precisely because it was so openly antagonistic to us. When the invisible man is insulted by the white man, he does not wonder if the man is a friend or an enemy. He may worry about getting caught beating up a white man, but he has no doubt that he
should
beat him up. Racism forced an outward conformity and obeisance from blacks but not an internal agreement.

However, in the age of white guilt, white blindness has been driven not by racism but by the white need to
dissociate
from racism. Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today not out of bigotry but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority. And when they find a way to dissociate from racism—“diversity,” politically correct language, political liberalism itself—there is little incentive to understand blacks as
human beings.
Dissociation makes
whites
human again.

The white blindness that drives me to rage is, therefore, driven by the rage whites feel at having their humanity made
invisible by the racist stigma. So it is not that whites want to be blind to the human circumstances and needs of blacks; rather, it is that they are fighting for their human visibility against a stigma, and in the process they become blind to all needs but their own.

The irony is that the “architect” felt rage toward me for precisely the same reason that I felt it toward him. We both felt assaulted by invisibility, and we both seethed at the other's impassive refusal to see past our race's reputation and into our individual humanity. We were each the other's tar baby. He was enraged with me because I was leaving him to languish in invisibility behind the racist stigma as if he were no better than the common run of whites, white Americans who had never lifted a finger to repair all the injustices done to blacks. His rage was that I would not
see
the goodness in his individual human heart. And he stood before me as the invisible man stood before his tormentor, trying to bully me into an acknowledgment of his humanity.

But I knew that he had simply made theater of his good intentions, hoping that money thrown at blameless poverty would win moral authority. That he was right in this, that he could win moral authority without ever seeing blacks as human beings like himself, is what tripped my rage. Effectively, he wanted me to give him credit for saving whites at the expense of blacks. So there we were, two Americans, a black and a white, caught in a kind of pas de deux of rage because we both perceived the other as blind to our humanity.

But I don't believe there was a genuine equivalency between us. I
saw
his humanity. I
saw
that he had behaved like most human
beings when they are at first stigmatized. He had looked for the quickest and easiest way to live again without stigma. And, in his desperation, he had forgotten that blacks are human beings. It was precisely because I saw him as human that I understood the source of his blindness. And by continuing to see him as a human being, I could also understand his rage. My rage was that, forty-some years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he was utterly incapable of seeing the source of mine.

After the Supreme Court came down with its decision in the University of Michigan affirmative-action case, the
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd responded with one of the most vile columns I have ever seen in print. It was a screed, a public tantrum, a display of apoplectic and racist anger directed at Justice Clarence Thomas, who had written a powerful dissenting opinion in the case. But the invisibility rage that was so clearly behind Dowd's anger did not begin with her. It began in the flood of legal briefs submitted to the Court from over one hundred American institutions demanding that race preferences be kept alive. In other words, it began in white blindness, in that almost grim determination in whites to win dissociation from racism at virtually any cost. These institutions were fighting for their own visibility as fair and legitimate institutions open to all people. And Justice O'Connor's decision, built on the logic of all their briefs, is certainly one of the most unequivocal examples of white blindness ever written, more so—given
America's moral evolution since the nineteenth century—even than
Plessy v. Ferguson.
Without the slightest self-awareness, and writing largely in reference to unexamined social science clichés, O'Connor jerry-rigged a majority decision that had no real purpose beyond enabling America's institutions to dissociate themselves from racism. So here was a white justice, like my “architect,” rather self-satisfied as she validated a policy
in the name of blacks
that served primarily white institutions.

But then Justice O'Connor was, herself, fighting for her visibility and moral authority against the racist stigma—a stigma that threatened to “annihilate” her legitimacy as a decent human being, not to mention as a sage Supreme Court justice. Especially as the Court's first woman she was under terrible, if unspoken, pressure not to be the justice who ended affirmative action. These are the pressures, I believe, that redirected her vision away from legitimate questions of racial discrimination and the law and toward the utterly artificial matter of diversity. “Diversity” is no more than code for white dissociation, and once O'Connor was in its thrall, she rendered herself utterly blind both to blacks as human beings and to the question of whether racial preferences were constitutional. And blind in this way, she wrote a decision that both assaulted and insulted black Americans with human invisibility.

Is it any wonder, then, that Justice Thomas's dissent in this same case is, above all else, a fiery and indignant demand that blacks be seen and understood first of all as human beings? Rare in Justice Thomas's legal writing, this dissent offers the human details of his own experience in the Ivy League and elsewhere. Just as O'Connor's decision was driven by a terror of human
invisibility (being seen as a racist), Thomas's dissent was likewise driven by the same terror (being seen as no more than a black). Here is a colleague, someone ostensibly of his same philosophical orientation, who allows herself to be terrorized into a blindness toward black humanity, and thus toward
his
humanity. Worse, implied in her decision is a view of blacks as inferiors who simply cannot compete without
twenty-five
more years of white paternalism. Add to this her rather imperial tone and you have a perfect tar baby.

So just beneath the surface of Thomas's dissent there are echoes of the invisible man's rage, a rage that first of all wants visibility, wants the human effects of preferences on blacks to be seen and, failing that, wants to “annihilate” the enemy—not to murder but to annihilate the offending ideas that enthrall the enemy. In this case, the enemy is not only Justice O'Connor but also the archetypal white liberal, that blind, blithe, and infuriating figure whose social morality is nothing more than dissociation. In the end Thomas's dissent does “annihilate” these white liberals—and the entire canon of ideas that define them—by giving them no credit whatsoever for being on the side of good.

And then, with near-perfect predictability, Justice Thomas's scathing rejection of racial preferences sends Maureen Dowd—here standing in for white liberals everywhere—into an invisibility rage of her own. Clearly she feels metaphorically annihilated by the Thomas dissent, by his utter refusal to give liberals even the slightest moral credit for their support of preferences. He simply will not
see
people like Dowd as socially moral human beings just because they are aligned with “diversity”; thus, he effectively assaults them with invisibility. Here was a black man—and
therefore someone with far greater moral authority on racial matters than the white Dowd—making it clear that her support for diversity made her at best a blind fool and at worst a moral fraud.

And this while she likely felt that her position on these policies brought her not only moral esteem but even a certain social and cultural superiority. After all, diversity is a “progressive” idea conceived of by an elite. It did not spring naturally from the American soil, as it were. And to embrace it is, at the very least, to have pretensions toward that elite. So possibly she drew yet more esteem because she supported diversity as a progressive sophistication, a difficult but civilizing idea that would have to be imposed from above on the common run of white Americans, who, after all, didn't even like affirmative action. In this age of white guilt, when dissociation from racism is the first pillar of decency, Dowd's alignment with diversity would have given her, if not a moral complacency, then at least a sense of moral legitimacy and confidence.

And then, in the face of her considerable self-esteem, comes the scathing dissent of Justice Thomas, which implies that, apart from what she might think of herself, she is incapable of seeing blacks as human beings and individuals and fellow citizens. She is incapable of considering the human effects—the stigmatization, the loss of incentives, and the encouragement of a victim-focused group identity—that preferences have on blacks. Between the lines in Thomas's dissent, people like Dowd are seen to make the classic liberal mistake of trying to pass off mere dissociation from racism as selfless virtue and real human empathy. Still, Dowd no doubt feels that diversity is real and that
whatever dissociates her from racism only reflects her expansive and modern humanity.

So Thomas's dissent effectively annihilates Maureen Dowd's conception of herself as a moral and socially responsible person. And this invisibility is simply too much to bear. Suddenly she is in a rage. In her column devoted to excoriating Thomas, she blurts out a word that chills the souls of all blacks. She says that instead of complaining, Clarence Thomas should show “gratitude” for affirmative action. Here, of course, she is trying to “annihilate” him, to put him in his place as an inferior who can advance only through the largesse of superiors like herself. Maureen Dowd, thinking herself quite incapable of racism, effectively calls Justice Thomas a nigger who—given his fundamental inferiority—should show “gratitude” to his white betters. In her rage, this ever so hip baby-boomer liberal invokes white supremacy itself to annihilate Thomas—in reaction to her sense of being annihilated by him. So mired in white blindness, so lost in the liberal orthodoxy that counts mere dissociation from racism as virtue, and so addicted to the easy moral esteem that comes to her from dissociation, Dowd plays the oldest race cards of all—I'm white and you're black, so shut up and be grateful for my magnanimity. It is as though in fighting for her human visibility she is really fighting for her superiority—a superiority that Thomas annihilated and that she now wants back.

 

Dowd illustrates the great internal contradiction of white liberalism: that its paternalism, its focus on whites rather than on blacks as the agents of change, allows white supremacy to slip in the back door and once again define the fundamental
relationship between whites and blacks. So the very structure of the liberal faith—that whites and “society” must facilitate black uplift—locks white liberals into an unexamined white supremacy. They can't really believe in blacks but they
must
believe in whites. Whites are agents; blacks are agented.

So postsixties American liberalism preserves the old racist hierarchy of whites over blacks as virtue itself; and it grants all whites who identify with it a
new
superiority. In effect, it says you are morally superior to other whites and intellectually superior to blacks. The white liberal's reward is this feeling that because he is heir to the knowledge of the West, yet morally enlightened beyond the West's former bigotry, he is really a “new man,” a better man than the world has seen before.