The age of white guilt and the disappearance of the black individual

An amazing 1999 essay by Shelby Steele, a man born to a white mother and a black father, like the President. He's older than the President, and his family was on the forefront of the Civil Rights movement. He believes that today's institutionalized white guilt leads to blacks donning a "mask" of group identity rather than adding strength to their group by developing as individuals. Every phrase in this essay seems well-placed, and I believe it is worth careful study. It is quite long for today's short attention spans, and therefore makes a useful subject for study by students wishing to expand their capacities to follow a line of argument.

One day back in the late fifties, when I was ten or eleven years old, there was a moment when I experienced myself as an individual--as a separate consciousness--for the first time.

He draws several distinctions between life for blacks before and after 1965, and discusses shifts in "black identity" over time.  He discusses his personal experiences with the "corrupting influences" of institutionalized white guilt.

This essay helps to explain a lot of things, like:

• How "liberalism" abandoned classical liberalism to conservatives and libertarians
• Why black activists beat up conservative blacks and set fire to their vehicles
* Why "black leaders" waged a vicious campaign to get Larry Elder kicked off the air
• Why TODAY'S liberals (actually, leftists) demonize the people who disagree with them
• Why Thomas Sowell so resented Francis Fox Pivens' theories
• Why Francis Fox Pivens fought so hard against Thomas Sowell's concerns for personal freedom
• Why so many former participants in the Civil Rights Movement have turned against the Left

Near the end of the essay, Steele writes about a black author who left America during the Age of Racism, returned to America during the Civil Rights Era then returned to Europe again.  I have emphasized points which seem important to me:

James Baldwin once wrote: "What Europe still gives an American is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself." If America now gives this sanction to most citizens, its institutions still fiercely deny it to blacks. And this society will never sanction blacks in this way until it drops all the mechanisms by which it tries to appease white guilt. Guilt can be a very civilizing force, but only when it is simply carried as a kind of knowledge. Efforts to appease or dispel it will only engage the society in new patterns of dehumanization against the same people who inspired guilt in the first place. This will always be true.

Restraint should be the watchword in racial matters. We should help people who need help. There are, in fact, no races that need help; only individuals, citizens.

This essay also shows a little of how Steele's thinking about the future President Obama developed.  He believed that Candidate Obama would become trapped by the need to present different "masks" to his black and white audiences. He hoped that Obama would eventually be able to rise above the "masks" to express his individuality. The two "masks" could be characterized as the "Jesse Jackson model" - demanding compensation from whites who felt guilty - vs. the "Oprah Winfrey model" - offering redemption to whites who felt guilty.   Steele puts it more elegantly, of course. The President surprised Steele by winning the election. But that was not the last of the President's struggles.

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

The President now often seems more comfortable with the symbolism of being President than with the duties of office. He even suggested recently that it would be easier to be President of China.  People are starting to seem him more as an individual than they did during his campaign, and to treat him like "The President" rather than as a symbol.

Hat tips: I tracked down this article via Mickey Kaus, who was writing about consolidation of affirmative action and civil rights bureaucracies. He linked to John Rosenberg, who also wrote an interesting piece on "Diversity" as Tribalism. His latest post links the remarkable Shelby Steele essay discussed above.

If by now you haven’t thought of Shelby Steele and his soul-searching writing about white guilt, you should have. . .

Today whiteness is stigmatized by liberals like Yglesias in much the same fashion that blackness has been stigmatized by white racists. . .

Update: Ideas like affirmative action, quotas, etc. may not have started as as result of the black civil rights movement in the U.S.: "Former NY mayor Ed Koch reveals new evidence of genuine anti-Semitism on the part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:"

The transcript of those discussions, which Dr. Medoff cites, reveals what FDR said about the status of the 330,000 Jews living in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population. . . The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.”

Of course, among the Jews of Europe and the Middle East who had traditionally faced limitations on their rights to hold property, etc., education was one way of surviving (and their religion encouraged education, too).