Systemic White Guilt and Its Groveling, Gutless Conformity

White guilt is an attempt by today’s Progressives to regain the sense of moral authority they once had during the desegregation protests of the 1960s.

This is the gist of Shelby Steele’s psychologically insightful 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.

The guilt, writes Steele, is a secular version of original sin—cloaked variously as structural, systemic, or unconscious racism—that brings out a need for redemption in the eyes of black people.

Such redemption is achieved by apologizing to (including kneeling before) blacks to ask their forgiveness for the racism of white ancestors. More significantly, it has required the implementation of various government programs, such as a “war on poverty,” preferential treatment (affirmative action), diversity, and many other forms of welfare. In return, redemptive actions do not expect or require anything from blacks, particularly hard work and earning one’s own way. That would be racist. Besides, the guilty white gets no moral authority from an accomplished self-made black person.

The formula, says Steele, is simple: “lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism” (p. 62).

A further cause and consequence of the guilt and need for redemption is what Steele calls a “white blindness” to black people that does not see blacks as individual human beings, but as a class or group of victims who de facto are also still inferiors.

The blindness, of course, existed under slavery where owners viewed their slaves as fundamentally inferior, giving them only a subsistence living; no freedom, no responsibility. Under segregation, blacks had control over their lives, responsibility, and in some cases thriving free-market communities, but their freedom was severely restricted outside their segregated areas. And they were still marked as inferior.

Today, since the 1960s, the psychological effect of guilty white Progressives has been to expect no responsibility or competence from black people, only entitlement and grievance—a mutual codependence, it would seem. The result has been the near-total collapse of slum neighborhoods into poverty, illiteracy, drugs, crime and gang warfare, fatherless homes, and unwed mothers. But “good intention” is what gives moral authority to the guilty white. That is all that matters because “they’ve tried hard.” (Implied premise: to help those who allegedly cannot help themselves and who are therefore inferior.)

The invisibility caused by white blindness, continues Steele, is what also causes rage in blacks that has given us the militant black power movements of the Black Panthers in the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter, both of which organizations are Marxist, segregationist, terrorist, anti-semitic and racist against whites. Rage was present under slavery and segregation but it was only acted out in recent times because of a perceived weakness of the oppressors—the moral vacuum felt by the guilty white (and the permission granted by Marxist premises, I might add).

This is what Steele means when he says “blacks and whites together destroyed the promise of the civil rights era.”

Underlying white guilt, as Steele correctly points out, is Marx’s notion of social or economic determinism. We were born with the sin of racism, so the determinist argument goes, and can do nothing about it. This drives the guilty white in their frantic efforts to assuage guilt by adopting additional notions and behaviors of political correctness, virtue signaling, and identity politics.

Identity politics is collectivism. Its psychology, as I have written before, is dependence.

But racism in America, according to Steele, effectively ended by the mid to late 1960s, achieved largely by the moral authority of Martin Luther King’s peaceful protests and emphasis on seeing black people as individuals, not as a class or group.

Not denying that a minority of people or incidents are still racist, Steele means by this that both then and now, as opposed to the 1950s, he can go to any restaurant or stay in any hotel he can afford, and find a bathroom, which he could not easily do in the years of segregation.

King’s assassination in 1968 was a turning point that brought out not just the rage of black power, but also the guilt of white Progressives. Why? The moral authority used and felt in the marches and protests for desegregation disappeared with integration. Rather than rejecting their underlying Marxist premises and taking up King’s individualism, white Progressives saw their new moral compass in the  march for redemption from “systemic racism.”

What seems transparent (or puzzling) to anyone not suffering such a psychology or holding the Marxist premises is that white Progressives suffer a “structural, systemic, or unconscious guilt” that knocks out and defeats any respect they may have ever held for our country’s founding principles of individualism.

Hence, today’s spectacle of groveling cowardice and conformity combined with blatant intimidation, threats, and violence.