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

Chapter 1 opens with the event that prompted Steele to write this book: the 1998 Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Steele assumed the scandal would end with the president’s swift removal from office. A month later, while listening to a talk show on the topic during a long drive from Los Angeles to northern California, Steele realized Clinton would remain in power. He surmised the situation would have ended differently in the time of Eisenhower, attributing the shift to a fundamental transformation in American morality. In the 1950s, a president having an affair with a White House intern would have been deemed morally unfit to hold power. By contrast, many argued that Clinton’s private indiscretions had no bearing on his ability to do his job. The reverse would be true if the situation had involved the use of a racial slur: Clinton would have faced censure, while Eisenhower would have gotten off scot-free.

This anecdote exemplifies moral relativism, the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to a particular standpoint, such as the historical period in which an incident occurs. Steele posits that America’s racial history radically altered the culture around morality.