<p>Continued from above</p>
<p>Steele believes that iconographic policies came into prominence in the 1960s as a
way for white people to fend off the stigma and shame that came to be associated with
being white as a result of the success of the civil rights and black power movement of the
period. As a result of the civil rights victories of the sixties, Steele writes, whites
“became identified with the shame of white racism that the nation had finally
acknowledged, and they fell under a kind of suspicion that amounted to a stigma.” (156)
Whites underwent during this period a kind of “archetypical Fall,” Steele explains, as
they "were confronted for more than a decade with their willingness to participate in, or
comply with, the oppression of blacks, their indifference to human suffering and
denigration, their capacity to abide evil for their own benefit and in the defiance of their
own sacred principles."31(498) This Fall, says Steele, added a new burden to white life
in America – henceforth whites had to prove that they were not racists “in order to
establish their human decency.”
It was this new burden of guilt and the need to prove their non-racist decency,
according to Steele, that was “the most powerful, yet unspoken, element in America’s
social-policy making process” of the 1960s and beyond. (498) This guilt- and expiationdriven
policy process, he says, sometimes wound up producing genuine advances for
African Americans, among which Steele would include the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But
the process just as often led to harmful public policies particularly in the form of racial
preferences and racial entitlements, which undermined black initiative and reinforced the
worst kind of negative stereotypes concerning black competence and character. “White
guilt,” says Steele, too often had the effect of “bending social policies in the wrong
direction.” (499) This guilt, which “springs from a knowledge of ill-gotten advantage,”
helped to shape American social policies in regard to blacks “in ways that may deliver the
look of innocence to society and its institutions but that do very little actually to uplift
blacks.” (498) The effect of whites’ hidden need for racial redemption “has been to bend
social policy more toward reparation for black oppression than toward the much harder
and more mundane work of black uplift and development.” (498)
46
The kind of white guilt that has driven much of American social policy over the
last three decades, Steele believes, must be seen not only as socially harmful but as
ultimately narcissistic and self-preoccupied. “Guilt makes us afraid for ourselves,” he
writes, “and thus generates as much self-preoccupation as concern for others. The nature
of this preoccupation is always the redemption of innocence, the reestablishment of good
feelings about oneself
. and [it] can lead us to put our own need for innocence above
our concern for the problem that made us feel guilt in the first place.” (500-501) The
moral corruption here is to be seen in the fact that when the selfishly guilty put their own
need for a restoration of innocence above the true needs of those they claim to want to
help, they often wind up doing great harm while feeling good about what they do. And in
their self-preoccupied desire to feel morally cleansed and uplifted, they develop a willful
blindness or indifference to the actual consequences of their actions.
The elite universities in America, Steele believes, have been the arenas where this
destructive, self-preoccupied white guilt has had some of its worst and most enduring
consequences. “Black student demands,” he writes, “pull administrators into the
paradigm of self-preoccupied white guilt, whereby they seek a quick redemption by
offering special entitlements that go beyond fairness.” (503) These special entitlements –
above all affirmative action preferences – are part of a condescending white paternalism,
Steele believes, “that makes it difficult for blacks to find their true mettle or to develop a
faith in their own capacity to run as fast as others.” (505) Such policies encourage in
blacks a dependency both on special entitlements and on the white guilt which produces
them. An arrangement of this kind is always degrading for all parties involved, though
especially for the blacks, Steele believes, since it encourages whites to see blacks
“exclusively along the dimension of their victimization.” Blacks become “‘different’
people with whom whites can negotiate entitlements but never fully see as people like
themselves.” (503) “The selfishly guilty white person,” Steele concludes, “is drawn to
what blacks least like in themselves – their suffering, victimization, and dependency.
This is no good for anyone – black or white.” (506)
It is hard to improve upon Steele’s analysis here. It fails to address, however, the
situation with Hispanics. In a curious development, Mexican-Americans, and later all the
Spanish-language ethic groups, were successfully able to piggy-back their way onto the
60s-era black struggle and acquire in the minds of privileged whites a similar status as
pity-and-guilt-evoking “people of color.” Henceforth all people of Spanish heritage,
including millions of recent immigrants, would be viewed through the lens of the struggle
to right the wrongs historically done to African Americans (a fact which many blacks to
this day deeply resent). In the eyes of the guilty whites, Hispanics, while they weren’t
exactly black, certainly weren’t white, and they would go on to acquire a position in the
iconography of post-60s white liberalism much like their later position in the academic
arena – i.e. between blacks and whites but much closer to the blacks. In the eyes of the
guilty whites Hispanics would become a kind of African-American Lite.
What happened to the Asians in this post-60s development was even more
curious. While they certainly weren’t either white or European, and the older generations
47
had certainly endured more than a little white hostility and discrimination, they
nevertheless were too successful – too good in school and at making money – to be
eligible for special consideration within the white-created preference regime. Hence they
would acquire in the minds of the white penitents something of the status of “honorary
whites.” In view of their newly acquired honorary status, the guilty whites could in good
conscience discriminate against Asians in favor of blacks and Hispanics, just as they
discriminated against the members of their own guilty race. Asians, however, were
accorded one modest consolation. Since their honorary white status did not entail
culpability for the whites’ racist past, Asian protests against the preference regime were at
least treated with a degree of sympathy and respect by the guilty whites which they
would never accord to similar protests from the members of their own race. White
protests against quotas were often seen to partake of an unseemly lack of shame and
contrition (when not motivated by white racism). Similar protests by Asians were seen
by the white penitents as at least understandable, though not, of course, justified.
If white guilt really is at the heart of much of the enduring support we see for
affirmative action, it suggests that at the elite universities where white guilt is so much in
evidence the policy will be with us for many years to come regardless of the verdict of
social science research. A “catharsis for white guilt about slavery, segregation, and acts
of racism” is not likely to be undone by a regression analysis. For those of us who have
long contended against affirmative action policy, the one hope on the horizon is longterm.
As generations pass and those whose views on race relations were forged by the
upheavals of the 1960s increasingly retire and pass from the academic scene, the
experience of the “archetypical Fall” and the white guilt it produced will fade into ever
more distant memory. Blacks will increasingly be viewed by a new generation of whites,
Asians, Mideasterners and others, simply as people, not as pitiable victims or objects of
expiatory atonement for guilty whites. As Asians assume a more prominent place at elite
colleges and universities, the pull of the meritocratic ideal will become increasingly
strong. And in time affirmative action will come to be viewed as a policy, not a crusade.
And as a policy it will be judged by its merits – and found deeply wanting.</p>