White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (P.S.)

“Neither racism in the fifties nor womanizing in the nineties was a profound enough sin to undermine completely the moral authority of a president. So it was the good luck of each president to sin into the moral relativism of his era rather than into its puritanism. And, interestingly, the moral relativism of one era was the puritanism of the other. Race simply replaced sex as the primary focus of America’s moral seriousness.” 

Moral relativism prominently features in Steele’s book, as evidenced by his repetition of the Clinton-Lewinsky anecdote. For Eisenhower’s generation, a sexual transgression was an unforgivable sin, while racism was widely accepted. The reverse was true in Clinton’s era, pointing to a major shift in American moral codes. 

“Freedom, then, is not a state-imposed vision of the social good (say, a classless society); rather, it is the absence of any imposed vision that would infringe on the rights and freedom of individuals. In a true democracy freedom is a higher priority than the social good.”

Steele vehemently opposes social programs aimed at achieving racial parity, such as affirmative action. He argues that no matter how well-intentioned, any imposed vision of society—including one whose social policies aim to end racial imbalances—infringes on freedom and therefore betrays the principles of democracy.

“My parents believed with all their hearts in the moral power of turning the other cheek, but by 1968 this strategy was passé and Dr. King himself was a bit of an anachronism. My generation had a new and different mandate. Our job was not to persuade; it was to replace passivism with militancy.”

The generational divide is a key concept in Steele’s book. This quotation addresses the replacement of passivism with Black militancy, which arose among second-wave Black activists in response to White guilt.