White Guilt Read online

  This is why one black man being beaten by police in Los Angeles could trigger a massive riot in which some sixty people were killed. By the terms of global racism one racist incident proved the rule of systemic racism. And the rioters themselves, having absorbed global racism as a theme of racial identity, launched a riot to the scale of systemic racism rather than to the of the single racist event—assuming that Rodney King’s beating was in fact motivated by racism. The ominous billows of black smoke rising above Los Angeles—large and thick enough to dim the sun—were also meant to suggest the scale of white obligation. The rioters said, in effect, that the rage which set this city on fire was against a systemic racism that went far beyond the police assault on one man. Systemic racism would have to be answered with systemic redress. Here they served well the national black leadership and affirmative action beneficiaries everywhere. Black students across the country who had never suffered discrimination, much less been beaten by white policemen, would continue to enjoy the systemic redress of affirmative action with a new sense of entitlement.

  People said these rioters were crazy because they burned up their own neighborhoods and killed far more of their own people than the police ever did. But, in fact, they were working a rather sophisticated adaptation to white guilt. Ingeniously, they globalized what was very likely a necessary police beating into an agonized national debate on the state of black America—a debate that invariably expands both white obligation and black entitlement. Certainly they did great injury to their community, but, by their lights, they also reinforced black leverage against white guilt.

  It was social determinism that made global racism possible. Determinism was the idea that moved racism from the level of discriminatory events to the level of “impersonal” and “structural” forces that worked by “invisible hand” to stifle black aspiration even when real racists were nowhere to be seen. When racism is defined as a determinism, then whites and American institutions are part of a cultural pattern (“white privilege”) that automatically oppresses blacks; and blacks are automatically victims of this same pattern. As the Los Angeles rioters instinctively knew, global racism enables blacks to frame racism to the scale of white guilt rather than to the scale of white racism—too weak these days to count for much.

  But the ground had been prepared for the nineties riot by the famous sixties riots (the Watts riot of ’65, the Detroit and Newark riots of ’67, and many others), which established a virtual riot paradigm in which the scale of violence was always far out of proportion to the triggering event, usually a real or rumored instance of polite brutality. Interestingly, these truly devastating riots occurred just at the dawn of the age of white guilt, and not before. They occurred at the precise historical moment when it was clear that white America would see them as authentic expressions of black rage and would respond to them with understanding rather than disregard and withering suppression. And for this newly receptive white audience they were always a lesson in scale. The disproportion between an isolated racist incident and days of chaotic violence that took lives and destroyed vast stretches of property was meant to suggest the disproportion between mere racist events and the much broader structural determinism that kept blacks down. The scale of violence was the true scale of racism, and these sixties riots taught white America—by illustrating this proportion—the scale of its obligation to blacks. Systemic racism would have to be answered with systemic redress.

  What proves that black rioting in the sixties and the nineties has been more a manipulation of white guilt than an honest expression of black rage is that whites themselves have only rarely been the targets of violence. There were no raids into white neighborhoods, no guerrilla warfare against institutions and businesses, no terrorist acts against public works. The damage was always to fellow blacks and within black neighborhoods. No doubt individual rioters felt rageful, but the targets of their rage belie their true goal: to persuade rather than hurt their oppressor, to turn white paternalism from hostility to generosity, and to establish a global racism that would bring global redress.

  When I visit university campuses today, black students often tell me that racism is everywhere around them, that the university is a racist institution. When I ask for specific examples of racist events or acts of discrimination, I invariably get nothing at all or references to some small slight that requires the most labored interpretation to be seen as racist. Global racism allows these students to feel aggrieved by racism even as they live on campuses notorious for almost totalitarian regimes of political correctness—and to feel more aggrieved than black students did forty years ago, before the civil rights victories. This is because their feeling of racial aggrievement is calibrated to the degree of white guilt on university campuses and not to actual racism. When I ask if they feel racially aggrieved away from campus at their summer jobs, they often look surprised, as if the question is not relevant. But then most say they don’t see as much racism at their summer jobs. Global racism prevails precisely where whites and institutions most aggressively search for moral authority around race. Even announcements of a new commitment to “diversity” within an institution will very likely increase feelings of racial aggrievement in minorities. We blacks always experience white guilt as an incentive, almost a command, to somehow exhibit racial woundedness and animus.

  And global racism has given the age of white guilt another of its familiar features: the “race card,” or blackmail by white guilt. Threatened with a stigmatization that can gravely injure businesses and ruin careers, whites can be pressured into treating the merest accusation of racism as virtual proof of global racism. When an executive at Texaco Corporation was overheard making a remark that some thought racist, no one in the company hierarchy had the moral authority to combat the prima facie impression of racism. In flight from stigmatization, Texaco paid $750 million to the corrupt diversity industry even though the “racist” executive was found to have only repeated a nonracist term he picked up at a company-sponsored diversity-training program. Texaco, Coca-Cola, and Toyota are only a few of the corporations that have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid “global” stigmatization as racist.

  The race card works by the mechanism of global racism: even a hint of racism proves the rule of systemic racism. So these corporations never pay to the measure of any actual racism; they pay to the measure of racism’s hyped-up and bloated reputation in the age of white guilt.

  In the O. J. Simpson murder trial, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran used the fact that Detective Mark Fuhrman lied on the witness stand about having ever used the N word to assert that the entire mountain of evidence pointing to Simpson’s guilt was likely contaminated with racism. Here again was the disproportion that global racism always seeks. From a man who lied to conceal an embarrassment, Fuhrman was transformed into someone who could very likely be a craven racist, a person capable of malice aforethought who might prowl Simpson’s property planting evidence against him everywhere. So powerful was global racism in the case that even the possibility that this implausible caricature might be true was given more weight than solid DNA evidence linking Simpson to the murders. The mere suggestion of racism proved the rule of virulent racism. What this meant in this court was that the bar for “reasonable doubt” was completely defined by global racism. And the court itself—like most American institutions in this age of white guilt—was so bereft of moral authority in racial matters that it could not restore proportionality to the proceedings. It could not stop the Fuhrman caricature from carrying the day. Racism was allowed to become a kind of contaminating ether that wafted through and dispelled even the hardest evidence.

  Johnnie Cochran succeeded in making the trial a contest between the empirical evidence and global racism, between fact and the reputation of racism for distorting and manipulating fact. What he gambled on was that the court—on television before the world—would have to show itself, above all else, deferential to racism’s distorting power. Though this black lawyer s
aw racism everywhere, he did not gamble his case on the court’s being racist; he gambled it on the court’s being obsessed with showing its utter freedom from racial bias, its determination to let even a hint of racism disqualify sound evidence. Johnnie Cochran instinctively understood that the court—an American institution in the age of white guilt—was infinitely more concerned with its own moral authority and legitimacy than with the truth. He knew the court would allow global racism to be the standard for “reasonable doubt” not because it was a reasonable standard but because it gave the court—in this trial of a famous black man—much-needed legitimacy where race was concerned. In sum, he knew that the court would essentially forgo the evidence against Simpson simply to prove that it was not biased against Simpson.

  Of course, Cochran could not have invented global racism just for use in this trial. It had to have existed already in American culture, and it had to have a self-evident plausibility and power that he could pit against the plausibility of empirical fact. In the age of racism, racism itself had been such a power. White supremacy had been a higher and more sacred law than the law of the courtroom, so that whites who murdered blacks rarely even went to trial or, if they did, walked free no matter the evidence against them.

  In 1955 the conviction of the white murderers of Emmet Till (the black teenager famously murdered for looking at a white woman in Mississippi) would have fractured the social order of the segregated South, so the facts in the case meant nothing and the murderers walked. White supremacy had to be served, just as white guilt was served in the Simpson case. Both Till’s killers and Simpson enjoyed a “race card.” Both invoked their race to gain immunity from the law. (Interestingly, in today’s age of white guilt, there is even talk of reopening the Till case.)

  Does the historical symmetry of all this amount to historical justice—Simpson’s black race card evening the score with the Till killers’ white race card? I don’t think so. It only makes the point that we have not yet achieved an America in which race cannot suspend the law.

  7

  RACE AS DESTINY

  Dick Gregory had been preparing the ground for the Simpson trial on that long-ago, hot August night on the South Side of Chicago. Simpson, I believe, would never have gone free in 1967. Neither white guilt nor the concept of global racism that blossomed to exploit it was fully developed at that time. White guilt was just beginning back then as a naive exhilaration over all that might be done by the Great Society. America still thought it could roll up its sleeves and plunge into its redemption with the same pragmatic zeal that had lifted the country out of depression, won world wars, and rebuilt Europe and Japan—redemption by good ol’ American can-doism.

  But race was not a war to fight or a depressed economy to overcome. It was a tangled ugliness of the human heart and a very complex symbiosis between two kinds of Americans and two American experiences. More simply, it was—as set against the principles of democracy and the Judeo-Christian ethos—a portal to evil, but an evil that was seemingly as hardwired into the human psyche as the simple human need for hierarchy, for the idea of a God-intended pecking order of colors.

  In 1967 America had only just acknowledged actual racism. There would have been no idea of global racism to rescue an O. J. Simpson. It fell to people like Dick Gregory and the new generation of militant black leaders to up the ante on white guilt by “hipping” us to the concept of racism as a determinism, as opposed to racism as a mere event. It fell to them, in other words, to invoke a new black consciousness. Our centuries-long symbiotic relationship to white America had evolved, yet again, this time with the advent of white guilt. And our group consciousness needed a strategic update. How to be black in a world of white guilt? Where did strategic advantage lie? And on that hot night on the South Side—and on countless later occasions—my consciousness was, in fact, raised to meet the new opportunity that was white guilt.

  I learned to remake the world around the central truth of global racism. To do this I took on the notion—as hipness itself—that man, loosely speaking, was a cipher, a non-individuated creature, who was pushed and abutted by forces much larger than himself. I did not altogether deny free will, and certainly continued to exercise it in my life, but intellectually I took on the sophistication that it was largely a delusion of the common man, a kitschy individualism that Americans liked to flatter themselves with. (One of the delights of Marxian-tinged ideas for the young is the unearned sense of superiority they grant.) Change would not come from selfish individualism and a “fascistic” faith in free will (the roots of inequality); it would come from overthrowing the structural forces that oppressed. Then you had to put good structures in the place of bad ones—the sort that ushered people toward equality.

  And I learned that my group identity as a black was more important than my individuality. After all, I hadn’t been made to live in segregation because of who I was as an individual. And no amount of individuality would slip me past the structural barriers of segregation that held all people of my color back. White racism had made my race the limit of my individuality. But now the new black consciousness I was learning from people like Gregory wanted me to voluntarily, even proudly, do the same thing that racism had done: make my race more important than my individuality. Unwittingly, this new consciousness came into perfect agreement with the first precept of white racism. This meant that Dick Gregory and George Wallace (“segregation forever”) were saying the same thing: that race was destiny—the same axiomatic American truth that the civil rights movement had just won a great victory against. So now, as I was coming into greater individual freedom than I had ever known, the new militant black consciousness wanted me to embrace again my race as my destiny. In the age of racism I had wanted freedom as an individual; in the age of white guilt I was learning to want power as a black.

  To up the ante on white guilt this new black consciousness led blacks into a great mistake: to talk ourselves out of the individual freedom we had just won for no purpose whatsoever except to trigger white obligation.

  8

  RESPONSIBILITY IN THE AGE OF RACISM

  I was twenty-one years old when I heard Dick Gregory speak that night. I had come straight from my summer job as a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus driver to hear him. Working as a lowly substitute for vacationing regular drivers, I had spent a long hot summer driving up and down the main drags of Chicago’s South Side, usually from the late-afternoon to the early-morning hours. It was a very naked encounter with the human condition, and I saw and learned a lot. But the swing-shift hours were killing, and I had gone that night to hear Dick Gregory a little depressed at the thought of three more weeks of hard driving and jagged sleep before deliverance came in the form of my senior year in college.

  It had never entered my mind not to finish those three weeks. This was the best-paying summer job I’d ever had and, after spending the three previous summers in the Chicago stockyards, it was a relatively clean job as well. Moreover, I had been raised around what might be called the “good man” ethic. A good man was the one you turned to when work got really tough, when quality counted, when deadlines had to be met. A good man always finished what he started. Such men were quiet figures of dignity in my working-class neighborhood. And in the name of this ethic I had continuously held some sort of job since my sixth-grade paper route. I had bought my own clothes since the seventh grade, and paid the main portion of my college tuition when the time came.

  It was a neighborhood friend—scrounging, as we all were, for a summer job open to blacks—who put me onto the CTA job. Both of us were so surprised and grateful to be hired that we brought a special intensity to our training. We would be “good men.” So we were quick studies when it came to the complex coordination of wielding a loaded city bus through rush-hour traffic while punching transfers, making change, keeping time, and negotiating the random personalities that appear at urban bus stops. Sad to say, but our sense of possibility was still conditioned by segregation, and in the
back of our minds was the idea that bus driving might have to be more than a summer job. For my friend this turned out to be true.

  But beneath our gratitude was one of those ugly psychic tensions generated by segregation. In slavery blacks were not free, but they were also not entirely responsible for their lives. Slavery was a form of incarceration that dehumanized its victims as much by denying them responsibility for their lives—by providing them with a subsistence existence—as by denying them freedom. Freedom is crucial to a decent life, but only in being responsible for one’s life can one take agency over it. And agency—the sovereignty and will that we have over our individual lives—is what makes us fully human. To its credit, segregation gave us agency over our lives by allowing us to be fully responsible for ourselves. But it also cruelly denied us the freedom to use our agency for much more than subsistence. So segregation was yet another dose of the absurd: you can have responsibility but not much possibility; you can have sovereignty over your life but not enough freedom for it to matter much.

  My father, who was born in the South in 1900, had plenty of responsibility, but he was pushed out of school in the third grade to work in the fields. When I was growing up he worked as a truck driver, but he could not join the Teamsters union, which in turn meant he could not receive a union wage—or union protection on the job. The union in fact wanted his job for its white members. So his race meant that he lived in an insecure nether land with no harbor among either capitalists or socialists. It meant, for example, that he had to hide his home ownership—managed on a subunion wage—from his employer for fear that he would be fired for “getting above himself.” It meant also that he had to dodge the union even as he begged it for membership. He lived like a citizen in a totalitarian society—the agent of his own life yet living within an absurd circumstance where his very humanity, not to mention his aspirations, was deemed subversive to the state.