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

Steele argues that the civil rights era marked the beginning of a profound shift in American morality. This shift helps explain the outcome of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. If Clinton had governed in the time of Eisenhower, he would have lost the presidency and earned universal censure. Moral codes in the 1950s were simply different than those of the 1990s. During the former, a sexual transgression was a serious moral lapse, while racism was widely accepted. The reverse holds for the latter.

The counterculture that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement fundamentally altered morality in the US. Young White rebels rejected racism, sexism, imperialism, conformity, greed, materialism, superficiality, indifference to environmental destruction, and other past evils. They sought freedom from all things associated with adults (those responsible for the evil past), including bourgeois sexual repression. This shift ushered in the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Counterculture associated sexual repression with the societal sins of old America. Consequently, sexual openness came to signify social virtue.

Changing attitudes toward sex help explain Clinton’s retention of the presidency. However, social morality played an equally important role in keeping him in office. White America’s acknowledgment of racism during the civil rights era resulted in the loss of moral authority.