The documentary White Guilt by filmmaker Eli Steele and his father professor Shelby Steele is premiering this week at Arizona State University. Below is a repost, from July 13, 2020, of my discussion of Dr. Steele’s book of the same title. I urge everyone to see the film when it becomes available in your area (and to read the book). Trailer can be seen at whiteguiltfilm.com, and you can subscribe there for updates. Additional information is available at manofsteelproductions.com.
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.
