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

Chapter 18 focuses on the concept of blameless poverty, or the separation of impoverishment from the dysfunctions of those who suffer it. Steele broaches the topic through his experiences teaching in East St. Louis in 1968 under the aegis of President Johnson’s Great Society. Poverty, gangs, and gun violence plagued the predominantly Black city. The government’s solution was to infuse money into the area without demanding accountability. Black teachers were hired under the assumption they had special insight into the needs of Black students. These teachers undermined rigorous academic work by focusing on experiential and intuitive learning, valorizing street knowledge over book knowledge, and creating an atmosphere that fostered excuse-making and incompetence.

The program failed, but not before burning through vast government subsidies. Steele attributes this failure to the new concept of blameless poverty, which he claims is entangled in White guilt. White government officials lacked the authority to implement effective policies to improve the plight of people of color, but they nevertheless assumed responsibility for poverty. By avoiding victim-blaming (and thus the appearance of racism), blameless poverty empowered White people. Black people continued to perform poorly in school, fail on the job market, and live in poverty, while whites were imbued with newfound legitimacy.

Chapter 19 centers on White blindness, the notion that White people are blind to their true motivations with regards to race. Before the civil rights movement, White people claimed racial superiority to mask their true motivation—the desire to exploit people of color. In the era of White guilt, White people support various minority advancement policies, including bad ones, not for the betterment of minorities, but to prove that they are free of racism. Steele claims White people have long nurtured their own blindness in order to preserve a sense of themselves as moral beings. It is Black people who pay the price for White blindness.

In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan’s affirmative action undergraduate admission policy. The justices did not question the real causes of racial inequality in college admissions. They never matched a problem with a remedy. According to Steele, no educational institution bases its affirmative action policies on a careful analysis of why minorities are uncompetitive. Their goal is not to solve the real problem, but to dissociate themselves from the racist past via a display of aggressive minority recruitment. Racial quotas are what matter, not why minorities poorly perform before and after they are admitted.

Drawing on Ralph Ellison’s 1953 novel, Invisible Man, this short chapter argues that restitution for past racial injustice requires Black people to be Sambo-ized or sold to Whites as inferiors. Steele argues that current Black leaders sell Sambo images of Black people, much like Dr. Bledsoe sold grotesque Sambo dolls to Whites in Ellison’s novel. Similarly, Black students are effectively Sambo-ized by affirmative action policies. When universities that have not discriminated against minorities in decades give racial preference to privileged, well-educated Black applicants, they imply Black people are irremediably inferior. Such policies communicate that Black people cannot compete even in the absence of racism and even with the privilege of wealth. Gifted Black students are forced to reinvent themselves as inferiors, or to wear a Sambo mask, in order to trade on White guilt.

In Chapter 21, Steele describes his rage at being invisible to White people. Those afflicted by White blindness and unaware of their true motivations do not see real Black people—only their preconceptions. Their politics and moral identity center on how they respond to people of color. Hence, their investment is not in Black individuals, but in ideas of what color means.

Before the civil rights era, Blacks were invisible to whites because they were viewed as subhuman. In the age of White guilt, the need for White people to dissociate from racism inspires White blindness. This blindness to the humanity of Black people is driven by their desire to achieve the dissociation necessary to restore their moral authority. The commitment to diversity, the use of politically correct language, and political liberalism are enough to create dissociation. In other words, there is little incentive to understand Black people as human beings. Dissociation restores White people’s humanity by removing the stigma of racism, which made White people invisible. Both Blacks and whites, then, suffer from rage-inducing invisibility.

Chapter 22 returns to the University of Michigan Supreme Court case, analyzing the response of New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd. Steele excoriates Dowd’s column, calling it “a public tantrum, a display of apoplectic and racist anger” (144) aimed at Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned a dissenting opinion in the case. Steele objects to Dowd’s comment that Justice Thomas should be grateful for affirmative action, interpreting the statement as an attempt to annihilate Thomas and to “put him in his place as an inferior who can advance only through the largesse of superiors like herself” (147).

In Steele’s view, liberal paternalism enables racism by creating a power imbalance between Blacks and Whites. It focuses on Whites as agents for change, locking them into unexamined White supremacy. Post-civil rights era liberalism not only preserves the racist hierarchy of whites over Blacks, but also presents it as virtue. It grants White liberals a new superiority, telling them they are morally superior to non-liberal Whites and intellectually superior to Blacks, who cannot compete without their help. 

Chapter 23 focuses on the concept of the “new man,” a liberal identity emergent in the wake of the civil rights era. The new man embodies the aspirations of the civil rights movement, as well as ideas of supremacy. Unburdened by the shame of racism, sexism, imperialism, and materialism, the new man is superior to all his predecessors. He is dissociated from past evils and thus bears moral authority and legitimacy. The new man is also inherently elitist. Moral elitism began as a positive attribute insofar as it addressed bigotry, but over time it turned into dissociation.

A second archetype emerged alongside the new man—the unreconstructed White American. Due to his failure to dissociate from the country’s racist past, the unreconstructed White American carries no moral authority. The differences between the two archetypes grew over time, dividing the country into liberals and conservatives. According to Steele, the claim of superiority of the new man generates narcissism. Indeed, it is narcissism that prompted Dowd to rail against Justice Thomas in her New York Times column. His dissenting opinion in the University of Michigan Supreme Court case undermined her elitist view of herself as a “new man” with superior moral sensibility. 

Chapter 24 posits that the rejection of excellence in American education is a form of self-destruction. It focuses on an event that occurred in the 1980s when Steele worked as an English professor. At a curriculum meeting, a Black female colleague named Betty attempted to reorient the Western literary canon by introducing a new course on ethnic literature. Steele opposed the proposal, arguing that it prioritized social virtue over literary excellence. Rather than creating new courses featuring non-white writers, Steele favored including minority authors in existing courses based on merit.

Steele raises legitimate objections to Betty’s new course on ethnic literature, such as the lack of a firm definition of the term ethnic. He also presents a sensible alternative to creating a separate course on the topic, namely, the inclusion of non-white authors in existing courses. Despite his objections, the ethnic literature course sailed through the approval process.

Steele extends his argument about mediocrity and dissociation to include all of American higher education:

[I]n the age of White guilt there was a market in dissociation. Universities could no longer afford to devote themselves singularly to excellence. Now they also had to win dissociation. Dissociation had become an institutional imperative. (160)

Steele argues that his department, like many others, viewed excellence and merit oppressive because they were the exclusive domain of privileged White people. The prejudicial attitude toward excellence incentivized mediocrity, while disincentivizing quality. Simply put, school became easier. For Steele, the dumbing down of public education for the purposes of dissociation is a prime example of self-destruction.