White Guilt Read online

  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.

  6

  THE NEW CONSCIOUSNESS

  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 doo
r 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 t
han 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.