White Guilt (3 page)

Anger is acted out by the oppressed only when real weakness is perceived in the oppressor. So anger is never automatic or even inevitable for the oppressed; it is
chosen
when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind. Anger in the oppressed is a response to
perceived opportunity, not to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with
less
injustice.

Wounds and injustices create only the potential for anger, but weakness in the oppressor calls out anger
even when there is no wound or injustice
. In both the best and the worst sense of the word, black rage is always a kind of opportunism.

On the way home from my batboy humiliation, I knew only that all protest would be futile. Racism was not
racism
to me then. It was not an outrage but an impersonal and immutable feature of the world, like snow in winter or rain in spring. I was not going to be a batboy, and anger was not relevant to me, because there was no ambivalence about this in the larger society for anger to work on. I never even bothered to tell my civil rights–obsessed parents, because they would only have brought me more humiliation by protesting something that simply wasn't going to change. I was quite calm by the time I got home, certainly not happy but not especially sad either. By midmorning I was on to other things.

But ten years later I was nurturing anger as the central feature of my racial identity. I was bringing imagination and even a certain work ethic to the expression of black anger. What had changed in those ten years? The broad answer is that America had moved out of its long age of white racism and into a new age of white guilt. A moral ambivalence and guilt around race had opened in white America that could be worked on by black anger. By 1968 black anger and militancy had replaced the passivism of the King era as the best means to opportunity and power for blacks.

If the president of my college, Dr. Joseph McCabe, was rattled when this gang of black students burst into his office, there was no sign of it as he came smiling from behind his desk to greet us. This was well before the era of the pained and solicitous college president, and his smile was meant only to suggest a certain largesse and command. He would handle us like any other intrusion on his business day, unflappably, and with grace and dispatch.

I began to read the list of demands as he moved back behind his desk and sat down. I read slowly, looking for a tone and rhythm of just suppressed anger. He had seen my cigarette by this time, and as I got to about the fourth demand, I could see that it was all becoming too much for him. This was the age of housemothers, jacket-and-tie Sunday dinners, and professors who lopped off a full letter grade for each grammatical error. There was no precedent for this sort of assault on authority, no administrative manual on how to handle it. I saw something like real anger come over his face, and he grabbed the arms of his chair as if to spring himself
up. Here, finally, was the assertion of authority I had expected. I girded myself, determined to give back as good as I got.

But his arms never delivered him from his seat. I will never know what thought held him back. I remember only that his look turned suddenly inward as if he were remembering something profound, something that made it impossible for him to rise up. Then it was clear that the cigarette would be overlooked, and that he would not seriously challenge us in any way. In that instant we witnessed his transformation from a figure of implacable authority to a negotiator empathetic with the cause of those who challenged him—from a traditional to a modern college president.

He said that he knew there was something to our protest and that the college, too, wanted to make things better. For appearances' sake, he said he wasn't entirely happy with the term “nonnegotiable demand”; still, he promised to give serious consideration to each demand. And he did. To my great regret today, many of those unfortunate demands were later implemented in one form or another. On that day we ended on an almost collegial note with handshakes all around and promises to quickly follow through. By then my cigarette had burned down to the filter and simply gone out. On the way out I slipped the dead butt into my pocket.

I know two things about Dr. McCabe that help explain his transformation before our eyes into a modern college president: he was a man of considerable integrity, and he did not deny or minimize the injustice of racism. He had personally contributed money to Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference when this was not typical of college presidents. Thus, on some level—and in a way that may have caught him
by surprise—he would have known that behind our outrageous behavior was a far greater American outrage.

And in this intransigent piece of knowledge was the very essence of what I have called white guilt. Dr. McCabe simply came to a place where his own knowledge of American racism—knowledge his personal integrity prevented him from denying—opened a vacuum of moral authority within him. He was not suddenly stricken with pangs of guilt over American racism. He simply found himself without the moral authority to reprimand us for our disruptive behavior. He knew that we had a point, that our behavior was in some way connected to centuries of indisputable injustice. So he was trumped by his
knowledge
of this, not by his remorse over it, though he may have felt such remorse. Our outrage at racism simply had far greater moral authority than his outrage over our breach of decorum. And had he actually risen to challenge us, I was prepared to say that we would worry about our behavior when he and the college started worrying about the racism we encountered everywhere, including on his campus.

And this is when I first really saw white guilt in action. Now I know it to be something very specific: the
vacuum of moral authority
that comes from simply
knowing
that one's race is associated with racism. Whites (and American institutions) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on. They step into a void of vulnerability. The authority they lose transfers to the “victims” of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why white guilt is quite literally the same thing as black power.

It was thirty years later, in 1998, when I pulled into San Luis Obispo for a bite to eat and noted that I had no need to find a black person. This was a college town, and I wondered what a black student would do if I swerved in to the curb, hopped out of the car, and shouted, “Say, chief. Is there a house where I can spend the night?” Today you meet another black and neither of you has much specialized racial knowledge to share. Segregation generated that sort of knowledge, and without segregation you can get good information from almost anyone. Maybe the self-segregation of blacks on college campuses and in some workplaces at least partly involves a longing for that old racial bond—the chance to concretely help and be helped by each other. But bonds that came automatically under oppression now require a self-consciously politicized racial identity that insists on a bond when there is no concrete need for one.

Paradoxically, the black identity today involves a degree of nostalgia for some of the certainties that were the unintended consequences of racial oppression—the security of an enforced
group identity and group unity, the fellow feeling of a shared fate, the comfort of an imposed brotherhood and sisterhood, the idea of an atavistic, God-given group destiny. But freedom has disrupted all this. As fervently as black America always longed for freedom—envisioning it as God's promised land—the actual experience of freedom has involved a sense of loss. Today there is much talk of “community” among blacks just as America has ceased to impose community on us. And in this talk there is a looking backward for that lost Eden when segregation made racial interdependence our only option. Today it is fashionable among blacks to say that integration was a failure, which is to imply that our true strength is in separatism. Today you can witness blacks everywhere enforcing on themselves the very separatism and community that segregation so recently imposed—black churches, civil rights confabs that are far more social than political, “state of black America” gatherings as if we still share a singular destiny, black professional associations by the hundreds, black student associations of every variety, even a congressional black caucus, not to mention black caucuses in many state legislatures. Now in the promised land of freedom we reach for the lost Eden of separatism. If we can just get together, squeeze ourselves into some sort of “unity,” we can overcome. But racial unity is politically self-defeating in freedom, since it leaves the nicely unified race to be taken for granted by power. Freedom can be seized only by individuals. And the fact is that we blacks
are
free.

 

It was of course white guilt that
enforced
greater freedom for blacks. In the thirty years since I had seen it so clearly on Dr.
McCabe's face, white guilt had generated a new social morality in America that made racial prejudice utterly illegitimate. And it would take a powerful phenomenon like white guilt—as opposed to simple goodwill—to accomplish so difficult a task.

Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions
contingent
on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise. Stigma is behind the now clichéd white disclaimer: “Some of my best friends are…,” which is a way of saying, “I might be white, but I am not a racist, because I have friends who are black.” Whites know on some level that they are stigmatized by their skin color alone, that the black people they meet may suspect them of being racist simply because they are white. And American institutions, from political parties and corporations to art museums and private schools, not only declare their devotion to diversity but also use racial preferences to increase the visibility of minorities so as to refute the racist stigma. Surely genuine goodwill may also be a part of such efforts. But the larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for moral choice; it does not depend on the goodwill or the genuine decency of people. It depends on their fear of stigmatization, their fear of being called a racist. Thus, white guilt is nothing less than a social imperative that all whites, from far-left socialists to Republican presidents, are accountable to.

So I was able to walk through downtown San Luis Obispo without fear of racial insult because white guilt has given America a new social morality in which white racism is seen as disgraceful.
Moreover, this social morality is not a dissident point of view urged on society by reformers; it is the establishment morality in America. It defines propriety in American life so that even those who harbor racist views must conform to a code of decency that defines those views as shameful.

And this social morality—born of white guilt—became the establishment morality because it answered the problem of white guilt. It brought moral authority and legitimacy to a society that had acknowledged its history of racism. The American democracy simply could not move forward after the civil rights era without adding to its great democratic principles an explicit
social morality
based on the insight that racism is immoral. An achievement of the civil rights movement was to make the point that multiracial democracies require a moral consciousness that rejects race—and, for that matter, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation—as a barrier to individual rights. So this social morality was meant to be the finishing touch for the American democracy, a concept of the social good that would make democracy truly democratic and, thus, legitimate.

Back in the pre–civil rights era—the age of racism—racial bigotry itself was part of the moral establishment, an element of propriety. Back then the baseball coach who rejected me was only reinforcing a social order that saw racism as essential to common decency. Blacks, of themselves, constituted an indecency in many public places. And this coach was only carrying out the civic duty of “avoiding trouble” by barring me from traveling with the team. So, again, one has to be grateful to white guilt for bringing about possibly the greatest social transformation in American history.

Going north on Highway 101, out of San Luis Obispo just past Paso Robles, you pass through one of those stretches of the West where the landscape seems to exist as a frame for vastness itself. You see a rim of low mountains to the east that slope down westward to a rather desolate plain of dry riverbeds, scrub growth, and the occasional dinosaur-necked oil rig—all making a great space that turns the driver inward. And until I pass into the powerful KGO radio signal from San Francisco, I am even without the Clinton row on the radio. Still, only a month after the wagging finger, it is hard not to have tangential Clinton thoughts even in this void. What comes to mind is how important the word “consciousness” was back in the sixties.

Behind the moral evolution that allowed President Clinton to survive what would surely have destroyed President Eisenhower, there was also an evolution of “consciousness.” In the sixties this was almost a wastebasket term with many meanings and themes: racial and gender liberation, Eastern spirituality, baby-boomer
grandiosity, the Dionysianism of “sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll,” antiwar and antiestablishment sentiment, revolutionary politics, and then the loose popularizations of Marx and Freud through which most of all this was filtered. But the unity of these themes—what made them all elements of a single consciousness—was their common challenge to traditional American authority in virtually all its forms.

By the mid-sixties—after America's acknowledgment of racial hypocrisy and the beginning of the age of white guilt—“consciousness” began to function like adolescent rebellion, as an almost petulant alienation from traditional authority that set off a rebellious search for new authority and identity. The so-called counterculture, born of this consciousness, reflected both this crisis in traditional authority and the search for new sources of authority. Vietnam and the emergence of feminism only further radicalized this process, so that by the late sixties “consciousness” began in a faith that something was deeply and intractably wrong at the core of American life.

In the vastness between Paso Robles and King City, where the world is both profoundly present and profoundly absent, it seems clear that this “consciousness” is what transformed President Clinton's sin from something immutable into something relative. It seems to be making marital infidelity, so condemned by traditional authority, into something rather slight relative to the infidelity that leads to racial inequality. And it seems to make traditional authority itself look the spinster—alarmed over sex but indifferent to oppression.

This “consciousness” has transformed the moral character of America. Where did it come from?

 

I remember first hearing the admonition to “raise your consciousness” at a black power rally in the summer of 1967. The rally was held at night in a small church on the South Side of Chicago, and despite the sweltering August heat, the overflow crowd was restless. People lined the walls and clogged the front door in blatant violation of fire codes, yet there were no policemen to be seen. This was the era of race riots, and the mere sight of a policeman's uniform would have seemed a provocation. The crowd was especially large because word had gotten around that the comedian Dick Gregory would be speaking. Already famous as a comedian, Gregory had recently gained new fame within the black community for openly expressing his racial militancy despite his very lucrative nightclub career. Such was the magic of the new mania for blackness that it could inspire selflessness in a man with much to lose. And that night it was Gregory who made a mantra of the phrase “raise your consciousness.”

I knew the phrase had a Marxist derivation, but Gregory made it correspond to a much-valued attitude—if not a philosophical stance—in black life: hipness. This attitude comes out of the experience of oppression in which survival requires one to have a
separate knowledge
from that of the oppressor. The world lies constantly to those it oppresses, and to survive oppression one must not only be “hip” to those lies but also nurture a deeper awareness of the world as it really is. This more existential and subversive awareness of the “real” world is hipness. And the hipster is a kind of existential hero who preserves his humanity (amidst his oppression) by seeing through to the irony and absurdity of his situation. The true
hipster is never surprised—is therefore “cool”—because he already knows. That night Dick Gregory was the quintessential hipster offering up the Marxian idea of social determinism as an existential fact of the “real” world that we blacks would have to “be hip to” if we wanted power.

He never actually called it social determinism, but that is what it was. And he used it as a “hip” truth to show us how profound our victimization as blacks actually was. Like others in the new group of “militant” black leaders that was emerging at the time, he used the hipster's knowing posture to “school” us, to suggest that we had deluded ourselves into thinking that our victimization was a slight thing. Here he put himself in respectful opposition to Martin Luther King. For King, and the older civil rights generation, racism was simply a barrier, a tragic aberration in an America that was otherwise essentially open and fair. But Gregory demanded that we “raise our consciousness,” that we “get hip” and understand that racism was not a mere barrier but the all-determining reality in which we lived.

That night was my first encounter with the essentially Marxist vision of American racism that would frame the racial debate for the next three decades. It was a precursor to the now common argument that racism is “systemic,” “structural,” and “institutional.” Of course, this was not formal Marxism (Gregory never used the word); rather, it was a loose conceptual borrowing from Marxism. The point was that ugly human prejudices like racism did not just remain isolated in the hearts of racists. These dark passions worked by an “invisible hand” to generate societal structures that
impersonally
oppressed. As people simply conformed to mundane standards of social decency, they executed bigotry and shaped
society around it without necessarily feeling animus toward minorities. When I met discrimination as a child, the perpetrators often apologized for upholding a custom they did
not
believe in. Many seemed perplexed by what they were doing. They could tell me that they hated racism even as they executed its strictures, and
I
was often invited to feel sorry for
them
.

The Marxian emphasis on structures and substructures gave the new militant leaders of the time an infinitely larger racism to work with, a systemic and sociological racism that was far more “determinative” than the simpler immoral racism of the Martin Luther King era. If whites moved to the suburbs for a better life, black leaders now had a concept of racism large enough to see the diminished inner-city tax base as a systemic injustice to blacks. If blacks were disproportionately drafted to fight in Vietnam because they were disproportionately poor and out of school, then this too could now come under the umbrella of racism.

Of course, social determinism had long been a common idea among black intellectuals. Richard Wright's great 1940 novel,
Native Son,
had made the social determinism of race a feature of literary naturalism. But only in the mid-sixties,
after
the strongest antidiscrimination laws in history had been passed, did a new generation of black leaders begin to argue that racism was a determinism as well as a barrier—and thus a far greater enemy of black freedom than had previously been imagined. Logic would have argued the other way, that the new civil rights legislation meant that blacks were facing a far less deterministic racism. And surely black leaders would have agreed with this logic if they were responding to actual racial oppression. But they weren't. They were responding to white guilt.

Dick Gregory was just the first black leader I encountered in the then brand-new age of white guilt. Martin Luther King had delivered his great speeches in the age of racism to a resistant America still minimizing the human toll of its racism. For King's generation of leaders racism was a barrier in the path to black freedom, and the goal was to remove it. But for this new generation of black leaders, racism existed within a context of white guilt, within a society that suffered a vacuum of moral authority precisely because of its indulgence in racism. Thus, America and all its institutions suddenly needed something from blacks—a people who in the past had been needed for little more than manual labor. By the mid-sixties white guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of black leadership, not selfless men like King who appealed to the nation's moral character but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers, and haranguers—not moralists but specialists in moral indignation—who could set up a trade with white guilt.

The most striking irony of the age of white guilt is that racism suddenly became
valuable
to the people who had suffered it. Racism, in the age of racism, had only brought every variety of inhuman treatment, which is why the King generation felt that extinguishing it would bring equality. But in the age of white guilt, racism was also
evidence
of white wrongdoing and, therefore, evidence of white obligation to blacks. King had argued that whites were obligated to morality and democratic principles. But white guilt meant they were obligated to black
people
because they needed the moral authority only black people could bestow. Only the people themselves—meaning of course the black leadership—could vet the white moral redemption, the white deliverance from racism. Thus, white guilt made racism into a valuable currency
for black Americans—a currency that enmeshed whites (and especially American institutions) in obligation
not to principles
but to black people as a class. (Notice that affirmative action explicitly violates many of the same principles—equal protection under the law, meritorious advancement—that the King-era civil rights movement fought for.) Lacking other sources of capital, blacks embraced racism as power itself.

What was new for me on that hot August night was that Dick Gregory was not fighting to end racism as King had always done; he was giving us the ideas we needed to enlarge it. I didn't understand at the time that it was precisely the fact that King had won America's acknowledgment of racism's evil that, in turn, made racism so valuable to blacks. This acknowledgment was simultaneously an acknowledgment of obligation to racism's victims: blacks. Gregory was redefining racism from a barrier to a determinism in order to expand the territory of white obligation. White guilt had inadvertently opened up racism as the single greatest
opportunity
available to blacks from the mid-sixties on—this for a people with no other ready source of capital with which to launch itself into greater freedom.

A fact that has escaped notice in the decades since the civil rights victories is that, after those victories, racism became a bifurcated phenomenon in America, so that we have been left with two kinds of racism. The first is the garden-variety racial bigotry that America has, sadly, always known—the source of racial oppression and discrimination. But the new and second kind of racism is what might be called
globalized
racism. This is racism inflated into a deterministic, structural, and systemic power. Global racism seeks to make every racist event the tip of
an iceberg so that redress will be to the measure of the iceberg rather than to the measure of its tip. It is a reconceptualization of racism designed to capture the fruit of the new and vast need in white America for moral authority in racial matters. True or not, global racism can have no political viability without white guilt. What makes it viable is not its truth but the profound moral need that emerged in mid-sixties white America.

In the age of racism there was very little global racism because there was very little white guilt to appeal to. Also, actual racism was so self-evident that civil rights leaders did not need to put forth inflated estimations. With a simple lunch-counter sit-in they could elicit the most vivid displays of brutal white racism for the TV cameras—ketchup poured on the hair of black students, cigarettes ground out on their backs. But after America entered the age of white guilt in the mid-sixties, racism began to go underground and even diminish. Just as white guilt began to make white racism into an opportunity for blacks—an occasion for “demands”—it became harder to provoke the racist theater that the South had so willingly offered up for early civil rights leaders. For black leaders in the age of white guilt the problem was how to seize all they could get from white guilt
without
having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer. With it, the smallest racial incident proved the “global truth” of systemic racism.

This is why one black man being beaten by police in Los Angeles could trigger a massive riot in which some sixty people were killed. By the terms of global racism one racist incident proved the rule of systemic racism. And the rioters themselves, having absorbed global racism as a theme of racial identity, launched a riot to the scale of systemic racism rather than to the
of the single racist event—assuming that Rodney King's beating was in fact motivated by racism. The ominous billows of black smoke rising above Los Angeles—large and thick enough to dim the sun—were also meant to suggest the scale of white obligation. The rioters said, in effect, that the rage which set this city on fire was against a systemic racism that went far beyond the police assault on one man. Systemic racism would have to be answered with systemic redress. Here they served well the national black leadership and affirmative action beneficiaries everywhere. Black students across the country who had never suffered discrimination, much less been beaten by white policemen, would continue to enjoy the systemic redress of affirmative action with a new sense of entitlement.