White Guilt and black anger

I’m reading Shelby Steele’s new book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era... Remember, Steele is writing about a time when America actually was still a racist country 50 years ago. And yet, black leaders were not as angry then as today's liberal white-appointed "leaders... Steele’s book is in part the story of how, in a span of just 40 years, America could go from being a place where the murderers of Emmett Till could go free because they were white, to a place where O.J. Simpson could go free because he’s black. And it all revolves around how the civil rights movement, at the very moment it succeeded in achieving its goals, cynically betrayed its own ideals and became just another industry, an industry revolving around the exploitation of white guilt.

White guilt is the key, because in Steele’s formulation dysfunctional “black anger” varies directly with the guilt-ridden white liberal establishment that indulges it. In a truly oppressed people, this kind of anger would be unthinkable. There were no displays of “Russian anger” in the USSR, nor is there “Muslim anger” directed at the totalitarian states that oppress them. Just like black anger, Muslim anger is directed at a target that will indulge it: America or Israel. If Palestinians were truly an oppressed people we wouldn’t even know about it, because Israel would have driven them out and eliminated them long ago. The Palestinians' angry and dysfunctional existence revolves around the world’s indulgence of it.

Steele notes that the exploitation of white guilt leads to a perversion of character, wherein the victim can elevate himself above the guilty oppressor, thus creating “an empowering feeling of license.” He writes from the personal experience of having been a militant radical in the 1960’s, “the feeling that being black released me from the usual obligation to common decency and decorum.... I was licensed to live in a spirit of disregard toward my own country.”

Suddenly, with the perception of white guilt, Steele realized “I could use America’s fully acknowledged history of racism just as whites had always used their race--as a racial authority and privilege that excused me from certain responsibilities, moral constraints, and even the law.” It was “an abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me--a power of privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin,” capable of muscling “concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization...” Every black problem could be magically explained away “because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems.” posted by Gagdad Bob at 7:22 AM 7 comments