White Guilt (13 page)

This “new man” is essentially the liberal identity that came out of the great acknowledgment of the sixties. Social and political movements that want to redeem a country in some way often generate the idea of a “new man” who broadly embodies the movement's aspirations for the society. In many communist movements there was an ideal “comrade” whose character embodied the selflessness and common struggle that communism aspired to. Nationalist movements across the Third World have had “new men” who stood in sharp contrast to the subjugated colonial past by embracing not only independence but also the uniqueness of the national culture. Certainly the most diabolical “new man” of the twentieth century was Hitler's Aryan man, whose blue eyes, blond hair, and erect bearing embodied the supremacy of the Aryan race—a myth that hoped to redeem Germany's shame after its defeat in World War I. But the American liberal “new man” that emerged in the sixties also hoped to redeem through supremacy. He was superior to all
previous Americans because he was without the great American shames of racism, sexism, militarism, and materialism.

But liberalism back in the age of racism had not produced a “new man.” This was classic Jeffersonian liberalism, grounded in timeless democratic principles and a commitment to individual freedom. Its argument was only that America had betrayed its great principles. And the civil rights victory of the mid-sixties was seen as a victory of principles rather than of a “new man” who embodied the nation's redemption.

But, then, the white guilt that followed gave America an entirely new political and cultural liberalism—a liberalism of
dissociation.
In the age of white guilt the American struggle was no longer over betrayed principles; rather, it was a struggle for moral authority. So by the late sixties American liberalism had begun to shift from its time-honored focus on principles and individual freedom to a new focus on dissociation. Suddenly there was a need for a “new man,” or more accurately a “dissociated man,” someone so conspicuously cleansed of racism, sexism, and militarism that he would be a carrier of moral authority and legitimacy.

You could already see this liberal “new man” on campuses in the late sixties among both faculty and students. And even then you could sense that he had fallen into a kind of trap. Dissociation is inherently elitist. Automatically, it creates a new kind of American, one who is
better
than most Americans because he has conspicuously dissociated from the litany of American sins. Thus, elitism, in itself, became a form of dissociation, a way to become a “new man,” to show oneself better than most Americans and, thus, worthy of moral authority. And, of course, one
wanted
to be better than most Americans had been in racial
matters. One wanted a moral elitism in relation to the nation's bigotries and bigots. But over time, as elitism became more entrenched as dissociation, a new American archetype emerged: the unreconstructed white American, the white who has failed to dissociate from the country's racist past. Such whites may or may not actually be racist, but their failure to dissociate in this age of white guilt means they carry no moral authority, and add nothing to the legitimacy of the institutions they are a part of.

This is how postsixties liberalism—grounded in dissociation and therefore elitism—has divided the country. And since the sixties, these divisions have only deepened, giving us today a nation divided into so-called red and blue states. Blue states are more dissociational and elitist; red states tend to prefer a liberalism of principle more than dissociation. But it was white guilt, this yawning vacuum of authority, that set the forces in play that would leave us divided.

 

Because dissociation is a
claim
of superiority, it generates a kind of collective narcissism—an irrational yet utterly certain belief in the moral superiority of postsixties, dissociational liberalism. In this liberalism one does not argue by logic or principle; ones argues by dissociation. Only in dissociation are authority, legitimacy, and power available. This grounding in dissociation, with its assertion of moral superiority, is what gives today's liberalism its narcissistic quality.

And then a perfect coming together: a white, middle-class, baby-boomer generation—already rather inflated by postwar prosperity and high parental expectations—with a political and cultural liberalism that grants moral superiority on top of everything else.

This, I sense, has much to do with the narcissistic inflation that was so obvious in Maureen Dowd as she railed away at Justice Thomas. She came from that generation whose parents were tainted (stigmatized) by their link to America's racist and militaristic past—people who likely supported the military intervention in Vietnam, and who preferred blacks to “go slow” in their push for freedom. Such parents could be easily condescended to (as unreconstructed whites) by their children, who saw themselves as smarter, more sophisticated, and certainly more aligned with moral truth. The liberalism that boomers like Dowd embraced finished off a sense of generational superiority. Now, added to the blessings of prosperity and opportunity, was an easy road to moral character as well: dissociation.

What was so striking about Dowd's invisibility rage was that it also seemed to be narcissistic rage. Affirmative action exists solely for the purpose of white dissociation. And when Justice Thomas attacked it, he cut to the heart of Dowd's moral vanity. He made it clear that she was not a “new man,” that her elitist conception of herself as someone of greater moral sensibility than unreconstructed whites was a delusion. By implication, he attacked dissociation itself as a false morality. This was annihilation of the most complete kind because it took from her a kind of beauty—a look of moral superiority that served her in the world like a pretty face.

So there was woundedness in her rage. And in her hurt, she became a “redneck,” an unreconstructed white. She made Thomas into an inferior who owed her “gratitude.”

 

In the 2004 presidential election John Kerry ran as the “new man” candidate against an unreconstructed George Bush. As with Dowd and Thomas, here was a classic battle between the
elitist culture of dissociation and the unreconstructed culture of principle and traditional values. Kerry was the elitist liberal, like Dowd, all the way down to a personal narcissism—two-hundred-dollar haircuts, rumors of Botox. He would fight the same war as Bush, but he would fight a “more sensitive” war. In other words, he had mastered the craft of dissociation. He would bring Europe on board, respect the UN. He would
dissociate
America from its image as an imperialistic power.

Kerry seemed completely defined as a candidate by the mechanisms of white guilt. Even invisibility rage was exploited to win votes. “Bush hating”—a kind of collective invisibility rage—had much to do with the refusal of this unreconstructed white man from Texas to see and honor the elitism of the left. Bush infuriated the left not because his positions were vastly different from theirs—both candidates supported the war—but because he seemed unreconstructed by dissociation and therefore blind to the higher humanity they had achieved through dissociation. Even though Kerry also supported the war, he hoped his dissociation from America's imperialist image would win him the following of Bush haters who were clearly against the war.

But Kerry's loss to Bush makes an important point. Unreconstructed whites in America are not so unreconstructed anymore. Racism and imperial ambition no longer characterize the attitudes of most Americans. So there is less and less desperation in the society for the palliative of dissociation. Whatever most Americans may think about President Bush and his policies, they simply do not believe that he is a racist and an imperialist. The larger public, unlike the nation's institutions and its liberal elite, feels less and less need for dissociation.

For some time now the American political culture has labeled people like myself “black conservatives.” I remember well how shocked and resentful I was when I first began to hear myself spoken of in this way. And I remember fierce arguments, outraged denials. Who wants to be reduced to a label? Then, slowly, I began to realize that resistance was futile, that something much bigger than I was at work. The political culture had somehow, out of some special squeeze of forces, created a new, if minor, archetype—the black conservative—and my fate had been sealed before I knew it. It was as if a totalitarian government had given me a tiny house to live in and said I would have to live in it the rest of my life. Not much to do but move in and try to make myself comfortable.

But what were the forces that created this archetype? Certainly there had always been black Republicans, and many of the values that we refer to today as conservative were quite prominent in the black community I grew up in. On social issues
blacks tend to poll more conservatively than whites. One poll even had 88 percent of blacks opposing racial preferences. So why this new prejudice that when “black conservative” is not an oxymoron it is a novelty?

I think the answer begins in the idea that has defined American liberalism since the sixties: that dissociation is virtue. Because this liberalism was a response to white guilt, dissociation from racism and other American shames was always its overriding obsession. The liberal “new man” embraced dissociation as the virtue that brought legitimacy to his other virtues. After all, what would it matter that he had integrity in business if he was a racist? So, above all else, the liberal new man practiced dissociation. And it was such a new man—though actually a woman, a colleague—who inadvertently gave me a first glimpse of this new archetype, the black conservative.

One day back in the early eighties I sat in a curriculum meeting listening as a colleague—I will call her Betty—pitched a proposal for a new course in “ethnic literature.” In those days English departments like mine were still vaguely divided between the “graybeards” and the baby boomers, the former being traditionalists—usually older white men—and the latter being junior faculty looking for a career path in race and gender studies, deconstructionism, the new historicism, postmodernism, and so on. Though I was a baby boomer by age, I identified more with the traditionalism of the graybeards. The new isms seemed nihilistic and a little fraudulent to me, and they attracted a rather slippery group of self-promoting and self-important spokesmen who seemed more dissemblers than real thinkers. And I was especially suspicious of any course outside the Anthropology
Department with the word “ethnic” in its title. What could it possibly mean? If it was simply literature by nonwhites, then why not say so? If it referred to culture, wouldn't French and English writers qualify? If not, why not? What unifying concepts were at work in the term “ethnic literature”? And who might be an ethnic writer? Philip Roth? V. S. Naipaul?

Of course I knew that Betty's proposal would sail right through that day. The alignment of power was already clearly in the boomers' favor and “ethnic” was a word to conjure with. This was so, I know now, because it was a
dissociational
word, a word that dissociated this writing and the professors who taught it from the presumed racism and bigotry of the great Western literary canon. It was a
dissociational
class that Betty was proposing, and so its appeal was not to literary excellence but to social virtue. Betty did not argue the excellence of the writers she wanted to include; she argued that our student body was “multicultural” and that “these students” deserved to see their cultural experience represented in literature. Here she moved beyond simple dissociation into protest. The class would challenge the hegemony of Western notions of literary excellence. And it would suggest that inclusion was effectively a literary value in its own right, even that race and ethnicity—if they referred to formerly oppressed people of color—also constituted a kind of literary merit.

This was more than Betty said, but not more than she meant. She was a new man. Dissociation was her great truth, and it caused her, finally, to dissociate from literary excellence itself as if from racism. After all, excellence was unforgivingly exclusionary. It cared nothing that minorities were underrepresented in
the canon. So, like liberal new men across academe, Betty was pushed backward by her faith in dissociation into an embrace of mediocrity as a means to social fairness. For her, an openness to mediocrity served dissociation; therefore, it brought a moral authority that real excellence could never bring. And she was supported in this by all the new relativistic literary theory that dissembled literary excellence to the point that comic books became legitimate “texts” for study. She offered a list of writers she would assign in the class, but Nikki Giovanni and Maxine Hong Kingston were the only names I recognized.

 

But it was not until each member of the committee was asked to comment on her proposal that I glimpsed for the first time this new phenomenon, the black conservative. One by one each committee member spoke, and virtually all the comments were unctuously favorable. Betty was thanked for her “foresight,” praised for “meeting this need.” And there were the usual lamentations over how “alienated” our minority students were, and about how few of them ever became English majors. Then it was my turn to say something. I had been sitting there preparing to be the skunk at the picnic, to say frankly why I thought this was a bad idea. My belief was that minority writers should be included in our mainstream literature classes by merit. This would mean two things: that they would be respected for their talent rather than endured for their color and that they would be read by all our students on a regular basis. An ethnic literature class would only create a literary ghetto of mediocre writers, an “affirmative-action” class in which even great writers would be diminished. I would confess my own regret at having taught
a course called “Afro-American Literature.” The good fight, I wanted to say, was for mainstream respect and exposure. All this and more was on the tip of my tongue, but when my turn to speak came, Betty said, “I think we can all agree that it's not necessary to hear from Shelby. He'll be with me.” She spoke as if doing the committee a kindness. My race so obviously signaled my support for her proposal that hearing from me would only waste the committee's time and my energy.

Talk about invisibility rage! I started to explode. My head filled with ugly, even brutal, epithets that I wanted to spit back at her. But instead I gave out a long sigh—“Oh, God”—and contained myself.

“So you think I'm an automatic vote for you because I'm black?”

Betty was no shrinking violet. She could muscle people, and somewhere inside her there was an unassuageable anger. She met my cold gaze without flinching.

“Well, doesn't being black make you an automatic on this?”

“I suppose you don't see anything racist in what you're saying?”

“No I don't. Come on, Shelby. Don't give me a hard time. How in God's name are you going be anything but in favor of an ethnic literature class?”

“Betty, I'm going to vote against your proposal every chance I get. But before I tell you why, I would like an apology.” Now it was my turn to hold her gaze. We could all literally hear the silence in the room.

After many long seconds she said, “All right, I apologize if I took you for granted. But I don't see how a black man can be
against a class like this. Half the writers will be black. You'll be voting against your own people.”

And there it was, my first little glimpse of the new cultural archetype, the black conservative. Years would pass before the term “black conservative” gained common currency, but right there I could see that a new idea of social virtue was so solidly in place that it had already generated a despised devil figure to personify the evil it hoped to eliminate. Before this, a black conservative was simply a black person who was conservative. But this idea of social virtue made any black who opposed it
evil,
so that “black conservative” and “evil” became synonymous. What Betty could never understand was that I had no interest in a social virtue based on nothing more than white people dissociating from the nation's racial shame, though I could not have said it this way at the time. And this was the failing that made me a black conservative. Of course, there were crumbs that would fall to minorities for indulging whites in this way—things precisely like these ill-conceived ethnic literature classes and the weak-paying pickup jobs that minorities would get teaching them. But this is humiliating stuff, a shuffle and a bow for a tossed coin. Still, even back then, it was clear that the deal had already been struck. Easy dissociation for whites and crumbs for blacks would be the
normative
institutional idea of social virtue.

What makes one a black conservative is simply opposing this deal. It is a deal made of what is low and cowardly in both races.

Of course, Betty's proposed class sailed right through that committee over all my objections and straight into the curriculum, where some version of it no doubt remains today.
Moreover, today literature classes amorphously designed around ethnicity are ubiquitous in American universities. I don't know Betty anymore. Our relationship chilled after our little dustup. But my guess is that she is quite happy with this development.

But I suspect that something else was going on with Betty, something that points to a larger corruption. Betty herself did not have an advanced degree like most others in the department, and her poetry was thought unremarkable by many. She was not a particularly good teacher and she did not have tenure. It is not unreasonable to suspect that, on some level, her own mediocrity as a writer and teacher may have pushed her to choose dissociation as an avenue to success in the department over the more traditional path of creative achievement and teaching excellence. If she was not much of a poet or teacher, she would serve the greater good by bringing us the literature of victims, by correcting for the arrogance of the Western canon, and by making the point that “inclusion” was now a literary value in its own right.

In other words, Betty knew instinctively that in the age of white guilt there was a market in dissociation. Universities could no longer afford to devote themselves singularly to excellence. Now they also had to win dissociation. Dissociation had become an institutional imperative. So Betty could argue—with this imperative like a wind at her back—that we didn't need a new undergraduate seminar on Milton or Chaucer when there was no place in the curriculum for “ethnic” writers. In fact, the sacrifice of excellence
was
the display of social virtue that won dissociation.

 

Within my university, and virtually all others across the nation, dissociation became a rich vein of power. People like Betty could build careers by arguing social virtue
at the expense
of excellence. Excellence and merit became “oppressive” terms within the academy because they were deemed the special province of privileged whites—no more than the fruits of an exclusionary, hierarchical, and discriminatory society. They impeded rather than expedited dissociation, and thus they actually
associated
the institution with racism. So here, in this prejudicial attitude toward excellence—this feeling that merit no more than preserves white privilege—there was a clear
incentive
for mediocrity and a
disincentive
for excellence within America's system of higher education. If Betty's ethnic literature class inadvertently championed mediocrity and, worse, identified that mediocrity with minority writers, then this sacrifice of excellence, this stigmatization of minorities, only made for a more dramatic white dissociation from racism.

The silly implication of Betty's argument was that she was simply more anguished by racism than she was excited about exposing students to great literature. After all, universities had taught great literature for centuries and failed to prevent racism. Where was the moral authority of a literary excellence, she essentially argued, that had in no way prevented the plunder of the world's colored peoples? Hadn't Shakespeare preceded colonial empire? And hadn't certain indisputably excellent writers—Kipling, Conrad, Hemingway, Faulkner, and many others—been apologists for white supremacy? Didn't we cringe when the rare black character came shuffling onstage in their works, hat in hand, and giving life to the most prosaic stereotypes? Had
literary genius spared these writers from white blindness in the form of common bigotry? So possibly an angry, if untalented, black writer was not so bad. And the mere racialism and protest in the later work of genuinely talented writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison was not so bad either. If these writers had allowed a misplaced group loyalty—and some mythical idea of “blackness”—to render them trite, their ubiquity on university reading lists showed a
white
openness to the pained “truth” of black anger.

 

I had not understood, at the time of my ruckus with Betty, how vast the vacuum of moral authority at the center of American life really was. Nor had I understood that when a society has a great need like this, when the very legitimacy of its institutions must constantly be proven, power
shifts
to those like Betty who claim to meet that need. White guilt had put a new power into play in American society, and had made a new class of people—the Bettys of the world—powerful. My argument for excellence and merit was supported by a waning power. Even then, in the early eighties, there was no longer enough authority to give excellence priority over things like “diversity” and “inclusion.”

But dissociation is a power that
always
works by eroding the quality of its host institution. It is at war not only with excellence, but also with intellectual difficulty and accountability of any kind. In this age of white guilt, these things have been stigmatized as oppressive and unnecessarily fastidious. Dissociation is to make things easier. And there is no better example of the self-destruction that dissociation brings to institutions than the American public schools. Those who would take power by
making things easier have all but destroyed what was once the greatest public education system in the world. In more liberal states like California, where dissociation has been an orthodoxy if not a religion, the schools are even worse than elsewhere.