White Guilt (5 page)

Let's call this situation a crucible—or an absurd bind that forever denies one the opportunities to meet adequately the burden of responsibility one must carry, and that suppresses one's higher aspirations almost altogether. It was the psychic tension of this crucible that made my friend and me so grateful for our bus-driving jobs. In this crucible blacks were literally oppressed and punished
with
responsibility. Common human responsibilities—getting an education, owning a home, raising a family—were very often touched by futility, defeat, and pathos. Segregation tried to take all the reward and possibility out of responsibility so that all that remained was its weight of worry and its burden of struggle. Thus, a heavy and often futile responsibility was the primary
experience
of racial oppression. If many whites, too, struggled in poverty under heavier burdens of responsibility than they could bear, there was still more freedom
and possibility open to them. For blacks, this Sisyphean struggle with responsibility was the condition of oppression itself into which all the other indignities—discrimination, intimidation, humiliation—were absorbed.

In high school—as if serving an apprenticeship in segregation's crucible—I was turned down for a lowly stock boy's job at JCPenney, for a fast-food job at one of the first McDonald's, for paper routes in white neighborhoods, for caddying jobs on golf courses, for busboy work in restaurants, for any work that was either clean or reasonably well paid. I saw my white peers step into and out of these same jobs as whim and the need for pocket money dictated. Because this kind of segregation made it so much harder for me to meet my responsibilities, it also made it easy for me to confuse responsibility itself with racial injustice, to
experience
them as one and the same. When I was in the fields picking tomatoes and onions on the truck farms just south of Chicago rather than caddying at Olympia Fields golf course, the
experience
of being responsible was in fact an experience of injustice. And it was no doubt all the emotions generated by life inside this sort of crucible—some acknowledged, some not—that must have set me up for what happened in that hot church as Dick Gregory spoke. At the time it felt like an epiphany, a sudden new knowledge. But it wasn't a new knowledge at all. It was something that I had always known, only then it exploded numinously to life.

Somewhere toward the middle of Gregory's long riff I was overcome by a feeling of utter relief. It was as if some old and grinding worry—one I had considered permanent, as inevitable as nature—had simply passed away. I felt exhilarated, wildly
happy—this despite the fact that Gregory was clearly pulling for the era's all-purpose emotion: black anger.

But there was another meaning within his words. He was also saying that a racist society had inflicted responsibility on us while denying us the freedom to do much with it. In other words, he was describing the crucible in which responsibility was a tool of oppression. And his clear implication was that responsibility was therefore
illegitimate
where blacks were concerned. Responsibility made fools of us. Worse, it made us complicit in our own oppression. As we labored away with the odds fixed against us, we only reinforced the racist social order that oppressed us. Ever the sneering, smiling hipster, he created a rube character for our derision—the “good Negro.” Here was the honest, hardworking black man laboring to make a decent life for himself and his family, and by doing so reinforcing segregation as a perfectly commendable social order. Gregory was talking about men like my father, and this bothered me. But he softened his point by universalizing it. We were all honorable fools; all “good Negroes” unwittingly bolstering the forces that kept us down. Here we could all laugh at ourselves. We were suffering inside a crucible not because we were bad or lazy but because we were
responsible.
Responsibility was our tether to oppression.

But why did all this fill me with such relief? Why did it make me feel happy?

Though I could not have said it at the time, this was the moment—listening to Gregory go on about “good Negroes”—when I realized that the civil rights movement had truly won. Dick Gregory and all the other new militant leaders were really just being redundant. America had already agreed with them.
Two years before this night President Johnson had launched the Great Society in his famous Howard University speech by saying: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say ‘You are free to compete with all the others.'”

Here the president of United States had virtually described the crucible blacks had endured, saying for all the world that blacks had been “hobbled” by that old oppressive formula—full responsibility with little freedom—so they had never been allowed to become competitive. Johnson clearly realized that full responsibility had been an unfair and oppressive burden on blacks. His Great Society was, among other things, a
redistribution
plan for responsibility by which he asked white America to assume considerable responsibility for black advancement. Thus, by implication, the president of the United States had agreed with the new militants that it was morally wrong—given what blacks had been through—to ask them to be fully responsible for pulling themselves up.

So suddenly in American life the matter of responsibility was qualified by a new social morality. If you were black, and thus a victim of racial oppression, this new morality of social justice meant you could not be expected to carry the same responsibilities as others. The point was that the American society no longer had the moral authority to enforce a single standard of responsibility for everyone because—by its own admission—it had not treated everyone the same.

It is true that Muhammad Ali lost his heavyweight boxing crown when he refused the military draft—a universal responsibility for American males at the time—but it is also
true that he only added to his legend by doing so. When he said, “I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong,” even his enemies understood his point. Where was the moral authority to ask this black man, raised in segregation, to fulfill his responsibility to the draft by fighting in a war against a poor Asian country?

Standing there in that church I realized that no one—least of all the government—had the
moral
authority to tell me to be responsible for much of anything. And this realization, blooming in the mind of a twenty-one-year-old after a hard day's work, was like winning my own private revolution. I could hardly stand still.

And the moral authority that America suddenly lacked passed into me as pure moral power.
Suddenly I could use America's fully acknowledged history of racism just as whites had always used their race—as a racial authority and privilege that excused me from certain responsibilities, moral constraints, and even the law.

Up to this point I, like my father before me, had lived like a citizen in a totalitarian state. But what happens when an authority that was totalitarian—against which you had no recourse—admits that it was wrong, that it violated and dehumanized you? For one thing, you lose a degree of fear. I knew, of course, that America was going to continue holding blacks accountable to its basic laws. But I also felt a new fearlessness in showing my disdain for whatever the country might hold me accountable to. Not only was this totalitarian power broken, but now I was the one—as a victim—who possessed an almost reckless moral authority. Now I could shame and silence whites at will. With this moral authority there was the power to better defend
myself against racism, but there was also a new, abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me—a power of racial privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin. This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new “black power.” Then, as this power supported the next generation of civil rights leaders, it evolved into what we call today “the race card.” But back on that hot August night I only felt a weight drop from my shoulders as I began to understand that my country was now repentant before me. I now possessed a separate power that it could only appeal to, appease, or placate. Now America had to prove itself to me.

I have already discussed the narcotic effect of all this. This was the inflation that, months later, would lead me to spill cigarette ashes on Dr. McCabe's fine carpet. But far more important, this great infusion of moral authority gave blacks the power to imprint the national consciousness with a profound new edict, an unwritten law more enforceable than many actual laws: that no black problem—whether high crime rates, poor academic performance, or high illegitimacy rates—could be defined as largely a black responsibility, because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems. To do so would be to “blame the victim,” thereby repeating his victimization. Thus, in the national consciousness after the sixties, individual responsibility became synonymous with injustice when applied to blacks.

When America acknowledged its racism, it effectively made blacks into the nation's official and, seemingly, permanent victims—citizen-victims, as it were, for whom demands of
responsibility are verboten lest the larger nation seem to be oppressing them all over again. If President Johnson's Howard University speech meticulously spelled out white America's responsibility for black uplift, there was not a single reference to black responsibility. Even though the president was about to spend billions of dollars on blacks, he still lacked the moral authority to spell out the ways blacks needed to be responsible for their own advancement. It was a classic white-guilt speech, implying that racial inequities are overcome solely by the efforts of whites and American institutions. (Today's college presidents routinely make such speeches when they stand to proclaim their institution's commitment to “diversity.”) The speech insistently and conspicuously refused to imagine blacks outside a framework of victimization. And no president since Johnson has done any better.

President Roosevelt's New Deal had frankly asked for sacrifice and hard work from the average American because it was clear that whatever the government did had to be met by the responsibility of the citizens. But Roosevelt was seeking prosperity, not redemption. It is nothing less than stunning that in the four decades of racial reform since the sixties, and amid constant racial debate, there has not been a single articulation by an American president of how blacks might so much as even share responsibility for their own advancement.

But I couldn't have known any of this as I stood listening to Dick Gregory. I just felt greatly relieved that the burden of responsibility I had always known was suddenly without moral authority. I remember thinking a little nervously of my father. Would he buy Gregory's implication that responsibility was a “trick bag” for blacks, a submission to white authority that extended our oppression? I could not imagine it. Responsibility was his great faith; he would never see the logic in thinking of it as something that “blamed the victim.”

But this thought gave me only brief pause. I was convinced that we were in a new era of civil rights. Even whites as high as the president now agreed that responsibility had been oppression itself for blacks. So here, I thought—with the arrogance my generation was famous for—was a case of age having no advantage over youth. My father had no more experience of this new era than I had.

And if, in the long run, time proved me wrong, in the short run it proved me right. By the night of my encounter with Dick Gregory the goal of the civil rights movement had escalated from a simple demand for equal rights to a demand for the redistribution of responsibility for black advancement from black to white America, from the “victims” to the “guilty.” This marked a profound—and I believe tragic—turning point in the long struggle of black Americans for a better life.

Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion's share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late sixties—and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next four decades—grew out of black America's complete embrace of the latter option.

Racial militancy and anger are, of course, easy emotions to feel when your country finally admits to having oppressed you for no reason other than the color of your skin. But if blacks had left America in the mid-sixties for a land of their own where no whites dwelled, this militancy and anger would have been beside the point. Without whites it would have had no object, no point. And instead of the interminable preoccupation with race and social justice that we blacks developed after our civil rights victories, there would have been only the hard work of making the group competitive with other groups and societies.
But we did not leave America in the sixties. We remained inside the same society that had wronged us, a society that suddenly needed to show great concern for us on pain of its own moral authority. Why not look to this society to take responsibility for what it had done to us? America had been responsible for our suffering, why not for our uplift?

Black militancy, then, was not inevitable in the late sixties. It came into existence
solely
to exploit white guilt as a pressure on white America to take more responsibility for black advancement. Effectively, black militancy and white guilt are two sides of the same coin. Neither exists but that the other exists. Together and separately their goal is always to redistribute responsibility for black uplift from blacks themselves to American institutions. So black militancy, for all its bluster of black pride and its rhetoric of self-determination, is a mask worn always and only for the benefit of whites.

Authentic black militancy, of the sort that Malcolm X at times seemed capable of, always embraced responsibility as power itself. It demanded only the freedom and equal treatment under the law that would allow responsibility to be the same fount of hope, power, and advancement in blacks that it was for others. If Malcolm X railed ferociously against white America, he never called for a redistribution of responsibility for black uplift to whites or American institutions. His was a self-help black militancy that was naturally skeptical about what others would actually do for blacks. You might call it “hard-work” militancy, since it was built around the difficult principles of self-sacrifice, delayed gratification, family unity, individual initiative, entrepreneurialism, and so on. If it carried an ugly theme of
separatism, it more importantly focused on racial redemption through human development and nation building. What made this militancy authentic was that it truly sought to restore an oppressed people to human dignity through real development and without an enmeshment with or dependency on the guilt of whites.

But the black militancy that actually emerged in the sixties—what might be called “white-guilt” militancy—was the opposite of this. Because it was really a strategy to redistribute responsibility to American institutions, it literally argued that blacks could not be fully responsible for their own advancement—this simply to make the point that whites had to be more responsible for it. Thus, since the sixties, black leaders have made one overriding argument: that blacks cannot achieve equality without white America taking primary responsibility for it. Black militancy became, in fact, a militant belief in white power and a correspondingly militant denial of black power.

Black leader after black leader argued that we could not pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, because we “don't have any bootstraps.” But this humiliating plea for white intervention only projected whites as powerful and blacks as helpless. So, finally, we embraced a black militancy that argued nothing more strongly than our own perpetual weakness—or, put another way, our inferiority. To be a proud and militant black after the sixties, you screamed black power in order to induce the application of white power. And you lived by an ethic that still sees full responsibility as oppression, if not racism, when applied to blacks. Still today, the best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement.

This is a black militancy of inferiority that assumes the
continuing
inferiority of the people it tries to speak for. And this is where it again meshes so perfectly with white guilt, which always assumes a nearly intractable black inferiority. Because American institutions stand in such pressing need of moral authority, they cannot wait for blacks to develop a true equality of competence out of which they could win entrée on merit. Therefore, since President Johnson's Howard University speech, racial reform has focused on what Johnson called equality “as a result.”

The corruption of “results”-oriented racial reform is that it separates racial reform from all accountability to the actual development of excellence and merit in black Americans. The inferiority imposed on blacks by four centuries of oppression is ignored as institutions shoehorn minorities into their midst (by lowering standards) simply to get the “result” that shows the institution to be beyond racism. Preferential affirmative action, the classic “results”-oriented racial reform, tells minorities quite explicitly that they will not have to compete on the same standards as whites precisely so they can be included in American institutions
without
in fact achieving the same level of excellence as whites. The true concern of “results” reform is the moral authority of the institution. Minority development is sacrificed to the magnanimity of the institution.

Neither black militancy nor white guilt has ever been at all accountable for overcoming—or even moderating—the terrible underdevelopment that oppression imposed on blacks. But the “results” reform that these two forces generate
does
redistribute responsibility for black advancement to American society. This redistribution has been the all-defining centerpiece
of racial reform since the sixties. Moral authority comes to institutions only when they relieve minorities of responsibility (lowered standards, racial preferences). In this age of white guilt responsibility is synonymous with oppression where blacks are concerned. So whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism. This is the formula that locks many whites into publicly supporting affirmative action even as they privately dislike it.

It is also the formula that keeps black America underdeveloped even as we enjoy new freedom and a proliferation of opportunity. No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement. Of course white guilt—this voracious vacuum of authority—more than wants the responsibility that black militancy is determined to give it. It needs and demands it. But this sad symbiosis overlooks an important feature of human nature: human beings, individually or collectively, cannot transform or uplift themselves without taking
full
responsibility for doing so. This is a law of nature. Once full responsibility is accepted, others can assist as long as it is understood that they cannot be responsible. But no group in human history has been lifted into excellence or competitiveness by another group. No group has even benefited from the assistance of others without already having taken complete responsibility itself—complete to the point of saying that we appreciate your desire to help, but the help itself is unwelcome for the weakness it breeds. This is precisely the leap of faith that transforms people from slaves into their own masters.

All this was especially ironic, since we had just won the great battle for our civil rights by taking mastery over our own fate. Others joined our struggle, but clearly we did not allow the movement to be contingent on what others did. We also have never allowed our performance in sports, music, literature, or entertainment to be contingent on whether or not others helped us.

 

These last points are important because they illustrate a pattern. Wherever and whenever there is white guilt, a terrible illusion prevails: that social justice is not a condition but an agent. In this illusion social justice procures an entirely better life for people apart from their own efforts. Therefore it makes sense for minorities to make social justice a priority over their individual pursuit of education and wealth. (There will always be time for development when social justice is won, goes one rationalization. Another argues that a lack of social justice still stymies individual ambition despite the fact that blacks now live in freedom and are surrounded by opportunity.) The reason for this illusion is that white guilt
wants no obligation to minority development.
It needs only the
display
of social justice to win moral authority. It gets no credit when blacks independently develop themselves.

So white liberals and American institutions (along with a corrupt black leadership) keep seducing blacks with social justice as though it were also
developmental.
When universities bring in black students with SAT scores 300 points below the student average, the illusion is that by arranging this diverse “result” they will magically develop black students until this 300-point gap disappears. But, of course, there is no evidence that this gap ever disappears or even shrinks. Nevertheless, institutions win their
moral authority around race. This is why white guilt generates only “results,” affirmative action–style reform—reform that brings moral authority to whites without the bother and expense of minority development. And to achieve this corruption white guilt commits another one: it constantly portrays problems of minority underdevelopment as problems of injustice.

Since the sixties, black educational weakness has been treated primarily as a problem of racial injustice rather than as a problem of blacks rejecting or avoiding
full
responsibility for raising their performance levels. Thus we got remedies pitched at injustices rather than at black academic excellence—school busing, black role models as teachers, black history courses, “diverse” reading lists, “Ebonics,” multiculturalism, culturally “inclusive” classes, standardized tests corrected for racial bias, and so on. All this but no demand for parental responsibility, for harder work on reading, writing, and arithmetic.

When there is no white guilt vying for responsibility over minority struggles, there is no incentive to distort these problems into instances of injustice. We blacks, then, remain entirely responsible for them whether or not we get help from others. In music, literature, sports, and entertainment our deficiencies are, thus, simply deficiencies that we overcome in the way all people overcome deficiencies: through skill development, innovation, and relentless practice.

People wrongly dismiss black achievement in these areas for reasons that can be ascribed only to racism—that our compelling excellence follows from a mere genetic advantage. The fact is that we are good at sports and music because we subject ourselves to unforgiving standards of excellence and then work ferociously
to meet those standards. Ruthlessly, we allow absolutely no excuses. The same poverty and deprivation that afflict us as we walk to school in the morning afflict us later in the same day on the playground or in the tenement basement where we practice obsessively on a cheap electric keyboard. The difference is that white guilt makes no appearance on that playground or in that basement. There is no carnivorous white need standing between us and the pursuit of excellence. No pity. Thus, excellence is allowed to entice us with its own intrinsic joys and rewards; and we come in thrall to it. Suppose Marvin Gaye or Duke Ellington or Richard Wright or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Condoleezza Rice or millions of others (all people from humble beginnings born in the age of open racism) had let their pursuit of excellence be somehow contingent on the ministrations of white guilt, on the spiritually withering interventions of needy, morally selfish white people betting on the cliché of black inferiority rather than on the natural
human
longing for excellence that resides in us all?