White Guilt (6 page)

Black achievement in music and sports should never be dismissed; rather, it should point the way to black achievement in all other areas. Here is the self-possession, the assumption of full responsibility, the refusal to trade on one's plight, the engagement with the broader American mainstream, the insistence on excellence as the currency of advancement—all of which makes blacks utterly irrepressible in these areas. And then, in concert with this, come the hard work, imagination, discipline, sacrifice, relentless effort, and—most important—
openness
to competition with
all
others that gave us our Ellingtons, Ellisons, and Kings.

 

If a young black boy cannot dribble well when he comes out to play basketball, no one will cast his problem as an injustice. No one will worry about his single-parent home, the legacy of slavery that still touches his life, or the inherent racial bias in a game invented by a white man. His deficiency will be allowed to be what it is—poor dribbling. And he will be told to “tighten his game,” which simply means to practice more. Very likely his peers will taunt him mercilessly, and even adults will give him no hugs to assuage his self-esteem. Very likely he will live through all this without the consultations of a father. Moreover, the standard of excellence for dribbling will be so high that many will not reach it and nothing less than virtuosity will satisfy it. When and if he meets this standard, he will be told “You bad” even by his competitors. This expression, of course, means its literal opposite: that he has at last earned entrée into a fraternity of nothing other than excellence. Surely he will feel proud of himself as a result.

But if this boy's problem is reading or writing rather than basketball, white guilt will certainly prevent even a modified version of this natural human process from occurring. Career-hungry academics will appear in his little world, and they will argue that his weaknesses reflect the circuitous workings of racism. His reading and writing problems will be seen to follow from countless racial and psychological determinisms that make it impossible to ask that he and his family be fully responsible for overcoming these problems.

The boy will not be asked to truly work harder, nor will he be guided in the mastery of sentence structure, parts of speech, and verb tenses. No one will righteously insist that he speak correctly
(as certain people once did for me). Yet he will be an object of abstract compassion for everyone. And permeating his classroom, like a stalled weather pattern, will be a foggy academic relativism in which scholastic excellence is associated with elitism, and rote skill development with repression. Yet just beyond the window of his classroom, on the pockmarked basketball court with the netless and bent hoop, another weather pattern prevails. On that court almost nothing is forgiven, and he will be “blamed” and held entirely responsible for all his deficiencies. And all through the torpor of a day structured to spare his feelings around reading, writing, and arithmetic, he will long to be on the other side of that window, where
everything
is asked of him.

 

The greatest black problem in America today is freedom. All underdeveloped, formerly oppressed groups first experience new freedom as a shock and a humiliation because freedom shows them their underdevelopment and their inability to
compete
as equals. Freedom seems to confirm all the ugly stereotypes about the group—especially the charge of inferiority—and yet the group no longer has the excuse of oppression. Without oppression—and it must be acknowledged that blacks are no longer oppressed in America—the group itself becomes automatically responsible for its inferiority and noncompetitiveness. So freedom not only comes as a humiliation but also as an overwhelming burden of responsibility. Thus, inevitably, there is a retreat from freedom. No group that has been oppressed to the point of inferiority is going to face the realities of new freedom without flinching.
Almost always, oppressed groups enter freedom by denying that they are in fact free, this as a way of avoiding the daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes.

Freedom becomes a great problem for an emerging group because of all the illusions the group falls prey to as it buffers itself from the humiliations and burdens of freedom. Instead of taking
full
responsibility for our underdevelopment, we convince ourselves that we should pursue social justice and that this will agent us into a competitive equality with whites. We avoid the terrifying level of responsibility that freedom imposes by arguing that
whites
should be responsible for our development. We even define full black responsibility as an intolerable injustice. Our understandable fear of freedom has led us to bank our fate on an absurdity: that we can develop by taking
less
responsibility for ourselves. We have defined freedom as a kind of heaven in which the inhabitants are forgiven responsibility. Thus, we have conspired to throw away the greatest power we have:
complete
responsibility for our own development, an opportunity that we finally have the freedom to assume.

How could a people that has survived centuries of slavery and segregation—through ingenuity, imagination, and great courage—get this confused, this alienated from man's most elemental power: responsibility? Because freedom scared the hell out of us—our first true fall, our first true loss of innocence—and because there was nothing less than a locomotive of white guilt coming our way and hungering to prop us up in our every illusion. White guilt has wanted nothing more than to confuse our relationship to responsibility, to have us feel responsibility as an injustice, a continuation of our oppression. It exploited
our terror of freedom in precisely the same way that plantation owners once exploited our labor. Whites needed responsibility for our problems in order to gain their own moral authority and legitimacy. So they set about—once again—to exploit us, to encourage and even nurture our illusions, to steal responsibility from us, to take advantage of our backwardness just as slave traders had once done on the west coast of Africa. Suddenly, in the age of white guilt, we were gold again.

And so, once again severed from responsibility and in service to white need, we became—as if by some cruel karmic principle—slaves again, our fate the responsibility of others. Always in slavery and segregation our genius went into the pathetic task of adapting to the needs of a master, of fashioning a face for survival under his power. And so it is that the terrors of freedom have only deepened our slave mentality, our belief in the mask that manipulates the master. For us, group pride does not come from our capacity to stand our ground and compete equally with all others; it still, tragically, comes from our genius for shape-shifting, for working over the master for the rube that he is.

When Dick Gregory finally ended his monologue, the crowd was exhilarated, a little manic. It was nearly midnight, but as we spilled out into the muggy night there was a morninglike energy, as if we had skipped past the night and run straight into the new day. My friend and I should have gone straight home to grab a few hours of sleep before work the next day, but there was too much to talk about. Sleep was unthinkable. So in my '54 Chevy, with its slipping clutch and leaking oil, we drove to the Robin's Nest on Stony Island and talked frenetically over the jazz until closing time. Then, near Sixty-third Street, we found a blues club that took us almost to dawn. By the time we turned onto the Dan Ryan Expressway southward toward home, the sun was up and the new day was already hot.

After only a few miles I pulled off the expressway and found a phone booth. Without giving myself time to think, I called the dispatcher at the Seventy-fifth Street bus barn and quit the best job I had ever had. I was scared and my voice was a little weak,
but I did the deed. I quit. I walked back to the car with a proud if nervous smile, and admonished myself—against a sudden “bourgeois” anxiety over what my father would say—to stay strong. I knew it was an irresponsible and even futile gesture, since the job was scheduled to end in three weeks anyway. Still, it meant something to me, and I was glad I had done it.

Since well before this night I had been struggling within myself to undo the strict civil rights conditioning of my youth, especially the Gandhian propriety of humility and nonviolence by which a demeanor of quiet dignity highlighted the outrages of segregation. This conditioning required an
acceptance
of American moral authority, a faith that America was good and great in every way except for its racism. Thus, we blacks—like Martin Luther King—should
conform
to every code of common American decency so that our dress, speech, and graces shamed the racist notion of our inferiority. This is not to say that the dignity so many blacks displayed in that era was only an act. It was not. Still, there was an unspoken admonition that we must behave better than whites—show ourselves more morally civilized—in the hope that they would find their guilt and end segregation.

But if all this dignity was not an act, it was also not self-referential. It was aimed, as an instrument of social revolution, at whites. And this is what—after America's great acknowledgment of racial wrongdoing—made it so intolerable to me. In the age of white guilt, long-suffering dignity in blacks was an Uncle Tomish redundancy. White guilt had triggered a racial role reversal. Suddenly whites had to prove their broader humanity by displaying a human dignity that was above racism. And blacks,
now validated as fully human by America's acknowledgment of racism, were all but commanded to show the indignation and outrage of full human beings—thus the new militancy, the rageful new black consciousness.

The point is that we blacks organize our political identity—our consciousness of ourselves as blacks—around those themes that most effectively manipulate white America. And the stoic “Rosa Parks” black identity of the civil rights era had actually worked. This was the identity that morally “manipulated” white America into an open acknowledgment of its racism and, thus, ushered in the age of white guilt. Dick Gregory was simply a part of my personal white-guilt reeducation program. He, along with the new generation of militant leaders, was schooling blacks in the best identity for this new age. Ideas like social determinism and the rejection of responsibility by blacks inspired precisely the angry and petulant black identity that best coerced white guilt.

This leadership did not want to rely on ideas, ideologies, or careful historical analyses. It wanted blacks to act reflexively out of identity itself. So militance toward whites became a litmus test of “blackness.” Even if you felt no such militance, you developed a militant posture simply to secure your black identity. This was an ingenious use of
identity as power
because it enabled these leaders to base their power on something deeper and more reliable than ideas. The litmus test for
being black
required one to accept racial victimization not as an occasional event in one's life but as an ongoing identity. When victimization is identity, then the victim's passionate anger can be called out even when there is no actual victimization. In other words, the victim's anger can be relied on as a political force. The remarkable achievement of
the sixties black militants was to create a substantial political power for themselves out of the identity of their people. This identity, of course, was not power in itself. White guilt was the power, and this identity was the leverage militant leaders used to access that power.

Unfortunately, all this gave blacks a political identity with no real purpose beyond the manipulation of white guilt. Worse, because this identity was thought to be absolutely essential to black power, it quickly became the most totalitarian and repressive identity that black America has ever known. All dissent became heresy, punishable by excommunication, because anything less than uniform militancy weakened the group's effectiveness with white guilt. Dick Gregory was not just spelling out this new identity; he was also making it clear that our identity—our “blackness”—was contingent on our militance. And failing the litmus test of militancy incurred the Uncle Tom stigma.

I quit my bus-driving job in order to
be black.
My friend understood this and promised to quit in short order himself. Actually he did not quit for over a year and even put off college to continue making the first good money of his life. But on that hot morning we both sincerely believed he would quit within days. In any case, he was my only witness, the only one who, as we said back then, had had his “consciousness raised” along with mine. He understood what I was doing. On the drive back home we constituted a little black avant-garde driving down the Dan Ryan Expressway. We were ahead of our friends, who would at first sneer at our report of the night, but then be impressed and ready for similar nights of their own. Within months every black I knew of my own generation—except for a few bourgeois and a
few Pentecostals—was a militant. And they all came to militancy in the same way that I did, by what might be called a gesture of identification.

When identity is everything because group power derives from it, a mere command of ideas or ideologies is not enough to identify. There must be an actual, if only symbolic, gesture of some kind that expresses militant disregard for the American “system.” A good gesture of identity will show contempt for the “white world” and a corresponding reverence for “blackness”—this is a vaguely spiritual vision of racial redemption through a “blackness” that reverses white racism by projecting black supremacy and white moral inferiority. Quitting my job was a rejection of white authority and personal responsibility in a society where racism made a joke of such responsibility in blacks. This gesture was clearly silly, but at the time it did exactly what a gesture of identification should do: it made me feel that I had a better world to belong to than the racist world I had always lived in, a counterworld that stood in contrast to the corruption of white America. But I had to
do
something to make common cause with that world. So I quit.

Of course, I knew I would continue to have business with America, and three weeks later I was in fact using my chauffeur's license to drive a bus again, this time a school bus back in my college town. But there was something different about this new job. I felt buttressed by my black identity. This identity was suddenly the source of a wonderful new
self-esteem
that was utterly independent of white America. I felt that simply “being black” aligned me with one of the world's great stories of long-suffering innocence, and that this redounded to me as
moral superiority over white Americans and, thus, gave me an immunity from their
judgments
.

All my life I had had ingrained in me the expectations, rules, and values of broader America, but suddenly all this conditioning was suspect. Didn't it represent the internalization of oppression itself? Wasn't the desire to dutifully educate myself little more than complicity with a racist status quo? “Blackness”—automatically and instantly—gave me the self-esteem I would have to work a lifetime for in white America. So I didn't care so much about advancing in American life. Back in college that fall my grades plunged, and though this would have mortified me earlier, now it didn't bother me in the least. I cared nothing for what my professors thought of me, or for what affect all this would have on my prospects for graduate school. With my new esteem I could suddenly
bear failure
in the “white” world that would have been unthinkable before. I didn't know it at the time, but it was my first experience of how group identity can take the place of accomplishment as a source of
individual
esteem.

Quitting my bus-driving job had been a gesture of identification with black
authority
—a morally superior authority in this new age of white guilt that was not offended by the self-destructiveness of quitting a perfectly decent job when there was still college to pay for. Blackness gave me a new esteem that was in no way contingent on performance or success in the white world. In fact, if I failed it would only be an opportunity to better display black victimization in the court of white guilt. So, for the price of a gesture of identification, I got enough esteem to be a little above the world I actually lived in. Like Black Panthers strapped in ammunition belts and storming the California legislature, or
Stokely Carmichael in a dashiki screaming “black power,” I could enjoy a superiority that came to me by birthright alone.

A gesture of identification could be almost any act—quitting a job, dropping out of school, giving up Christianity for Islam, dropping one's “slave name” for a jerry-built African name, buying a weapon and learning to use it—that would show disengagement from white America and loyalty to the new black authority. Actually, the gesture of identification always required at least an element of self-destruction, a flirtation with failure in the white world, which verified black authority as the true source of one's esteem. But this was not understood in the late sixties. Then I knew only that in being black I had come into a kind of privilege.