The “White Guilt” chapter from The Content of Our Character

I don't remember hearing the phrase "white guilt" very much before the mid-sixties. Growing up black in the fifties, I never had the impression that whites were much disturbed by guilt when it came to blacks. When I would stray into the wrong restaurant in pursuit of a hamburger, it didn't occur to me that the waitress was unduly troubled by guilt when she asked me to leave. I can see now that possibly she was, but then all I saw was her irritability at having to carry out so unpleasant a task. If there was guilt, it was mine for having made an imposition of myself. Frankly, I can remember feeling a certain sympathy for such people, as if / was victimizing them by drawing them out of an innocent anonymity into the unasked-for role of racial policemen. Occasionally, they came right out and asked me to feel sorry for them. A caddy master at a country club told my brother and me that he was doing us a favor by not letting us caddy at this white club, and that we should try to understand his position, "put yourselves in my shoes." Our color had brought this man anguish and, if a part of that anguish was guilt, it was not as immediate lo me as my own guilt. I smiled at the man to let him know he shouldn't feel bad and then began the long walk home. Certainly, I also judged him a coward, but in that era his cowardice was something I had to absorb.

In the sixties, particularly the black-is-beautiful late six-ties, this sort of absorption was no longer necessary. The lines of moral power, like plates in the earth, had shifted. White guilt became so palpable you could see it on people. At the time, what it looked like to my eyes was a remarkable loss of authority. And what whites lost in authority, blacks gained. You cannot feel guilty toward anyone without giving away power to them. So, suddenly, this huge vulnerability opened up in whites and, as a black, you had the power to step right into it. In fact, black power all but demanded that you do so. What shocked me in the late sixties, after the helplessness I had felt in the fifties, was that guilt had changed the nature of the white man's burden from the administration of inferiors to the uplift of equals, from the obligations of dominance to the urgencies of repentance.

I think what made the difference between the fifties and sixties, as far as white guilt was concerned, was that whites in the sixties underwent an archetypal Fall. Because of the immense turmoil of the civil rights movement, and later the black power movement, whites were confronted for more than a decade with their willingness to participate in or comply with the oppression of blacks, their indifference to human suffering and denigration, their capacity to abide evil for their own benefit, and in defiance of their own sacred principles.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act that bestowed equality under the law on blacks was also, in a certain sense, an admission of white guilt. Had white society not been wrong, there would have been no need for such an act. In this act, the nation acknowledged its fallen state, its lack of racial innocence, and confronted the incriminating self-knowledge that it had rationalized flagrant injustice. Denial is a common way of handling guilt, but in the sixties there was little will left for denial except in the most recalcitrant whites. And with this defense lost, there was really only one road back to innocence-through actions and policies that would bring redemption.

I believe that in the sixties the need for white redemption from racial guilt became the most powerful, yet unspoken, element in America's social-policy-making process, first giving rise to the Great Society and then to a series of programs, policies, and laws that sought to make black equality and restitution a national mission. Once America could no longer deny guilt, it went after redemption, or at least the look of redemption, with a vengeance. Yet today, some twenty years later, study after study tells us that, by many measures, the gap between blacks and whites is widening rather than narrowing. A University of Chicago study indicates that segregation is more entrenched in American cities today than ever imagined. A National Research Council study says the "status of blacks relative to whites (in housing and education) has stagnated or regressed since the early seventies." A follow-up to the famous Kerner Commission Report says we are as much at risk today of becoming a "nation within a nation" as we were twenty years ago when the original report was made.

I think the white need for redemption has contributed to this tragic situation by shaping our policies regarding blacks in ways that might deliver the look of innocence to society and its institutions, but that do very little to actually uplift blacks. Specifically, the effect of this hidden need has been to bend social policy more toward reparation for black oppression than toward the much harder and more mundane work of black uplift and development. Rather than facilitate the development of blacks to parity with whites, these programs and policies-affirmative action is a good example-have tended to give blacks special entitlements that in many cases are of no use because we lack the development that would put us in a position to take advantage of them. I think the reason there has been more entitlement than development is (along with black power) the unacknowledged white need for redemption —not true redemption, which would have focused policy on black development, but the appearance of redemption which requires only that society, in the name of development, seem to be paying back its former victims with preferences. One of the effects of entitlements, I believe, has been to encourage in blacks a dependency both on the entitlements and on the white guilt that generates them. Even when it serves ideal justice, bounty from another man's guilt weakens. This is not the only factor in black "stagnation" and "regression," but I do believe it is one factor.

It is easy enough to say that white guilt too often has the effect of bending social policies in the wrong direction. But what exactly is this guilt, and how does it work in American life?

I think that white guilt, in its broad sense, springs from a knowledge of ill-gotten advantage. More precisely, it comes from the juxtaposition of this knowledge with the inevitable gratitude one feels for being white rather than black in America. Given the moral instincts of human beings, it is all but impossible to enjoy an ill-gotten advantage, much less to feel at least secretly grateful for it, without consciously or unconsciously experiencing guilt. If, as Kierkegaard says, "innocence is ignorance," then guilt must always involve knowledge. White Americans know that their historical advantage comes from the subjugation of an entire people. So, even for whites today for whom racism is anathema, there is no escape from the knowledge that makes for guilt. Racial guilt simply accompanies the condition of being white in America.

I do not believe that this guilt is a crushing anguish for most whites, but I do believe it constitutes an ongoing racial vulnerability, an openness to racial culpability, that is a thread in white life, sometimes felt, sometimes not, but ever present as a potential feeling. In the late sixties almost any black could charge this thread with enough current for a white to feel it. I had a friend who developed this activity into a sort of specialty. I don't think he meant to be mean, though certainly he was mean. I think he was, in that hyperbolic era, exhilarated by the discovery that his race, which had long been a liability, now gave him a certain edge-that white guilt was black power. To feel this power he would sometimes set up what he called "race experiments." Once I watched him stop a white businessman in a large hotel men's room and convince him to increase his tip to the black attendant from one to twenty dollars.

My friend's tact in this was very simple, even corny. Out of the attendant's earshot he asked the man to simply look at the attendant, a frail, elderly, and very dark man in a starched white smock that made the skin on his neck and face look as leathery as a turtle's. He sat listlessly, pathetically, on a straight-backed chair next to a small table on which sat a stack of hand towels and a silver plate for tips. Since he offered no service beyond the handing out of towels, one could only conclude the hotel management offered his lowly presence as flattery to their patrons, as an opportunity for that easy noblesse oblige that could reassure even the harried, wrung-out traveling salesman of his superior station.

My friend was quick to make this point to the businessman and to say that no white man would do in this job. But when the businessman put the single back in his wallet and took out a five, my friend only sneered. Did he understand the tragedy of a life spent this way, of what it must be like to earn one's paltry living as a symbol of inferiority? And did he realize that his privilege as an affluent white businessman (ironically, he had just spent the day trying to sell a printing press to the Black Muslims for their newspaper Muhammad Speaks) was connected to the deprivation of this man and others like him?

But then my friend made a mistake that ended the game. In the heat of argument, which until then had only been playfully challenging, he inadvertently mentioned his father. This stopped him cold and his eyes turned inward. "What about your father?" the businessman asked. "He had a hard life, that's all." "How did he have a hard life?" Now my friend was on the defensive. I knew he did not get along with his father, a bitter man who worked nights in a factory and demanded that the house be dark and silent all day. My friend blamed his father's bitterness on racism, but I knew he had not meant to exploit his own pain in this silly "experiment." Things had gotten too close to home, but he didn't know how to get out of the situation without losing face. Now, caught in his own trap, he did what he least wanted to do. He gave forth the rage he truly felt to a white stranger in a public men's room. "My father never had a chance," he said with the kind of anger that could easily turn to tears. "He never had a fuckin' chance. Your father had all the goddamn chances, and you know he did. You sell printing presses to black people and make thousands and your father probably lives down in Fat City, Florida, somewhere, all because you're white." On and on he went in this vein, using—against all that was honorable in him—his own profound racial pain to extract a flash of guilt from a white man he didn't even know.

He got more than a flash. The businessman was touched. His eyes became mournful and finally he simply said, "You're right. Your people got a raw deal." He took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, then walked over and dropped it in the old man's tip plate. When he was gone my friend and I could not look at the old man, nor could we look at each other.

It is obvious that this was a rather shameful encounter for all concerned—my friend and I as his silent accomplice— trading on our racial pain, tampering with a stranger for no reason, and the stranger then buying his way out of the situation for twenty dollars, a sum that was generous by one count and cheap by another. It was not an encounter of people but of historical grudges and guilts. Yet, when I think about it now, twenty years later, I see that it had all the elements of a paradigm that I believe has been very much at the heart of racial policy-making in America since the sixties.

My friend did two things that made this businessman vulnerable to his guilt, that brought his guilt into the situation as a force. First, he put this man in touch with his own knowledge of his ill-gotten advantage as a white. The effect of this was to disallow the man any pretense of racial innocence, to let him know that even if he was not the sort of white who used the word nigger around the dinner table, he still had reason to feel racial guilt. But as disarming as this might have been, it was too abstract to do much more than crack open his vulnerability, to expose him to the logic of white guilt. This was the five-dollar intellectual sort of guilt. The twenty dollars required something more visceral. In achieving this, the second thing my friend did was something that he had not intended to do, something that ultimately brought him as much shame as he was passing out. He made a display of his own racial pain and anger. (What brought him shame was not the pain and anger but his trading on them for what turned out to be a mere twenty bucks.) The effect of this display was to reinforce the man's knowledge of ill-gotten advantage, to give credibility and solidity to it by putting a face on it. Here was human testimony, a young black beside himself at the thought of his father's racially constricted life. The pain of one man evidenced the knowledge of the other. When the businessman listened to my friend's pain, his racial guilt—normally one guilt lying dormant among others—was called out like a neglected debt he would finally have to settle. An ill-gotten advantage is not hard to bear—it can be marked up to fate—until it touches the human pain it brought into the world. This is the pain that hardens guilty knowledge.

Such knowledge is a powerful pressure when it becomes conscious. And what makes it so powerful is the element of fear that guilt always carries, fear of what the guilty knowledge says about us. Guilt makes us afraid for ourselves and so generates as much sell-preoccupation as concern for others. The nature of this preoccupation is always the redemption of innocence, the reestablishment of good feeling about oneself.

In this sense, the fear for the self that is buried in all guilt is a pressure toward selfishness. It can lead us to put our own need for innocence above our concern for the problem that made us feel guilt in the first place. But this fear for the self not only inspires selfishness; it also becomes a pressure to escape the guilt-inducing situation. When selfishness and escapism are at work, we are no longer interested in the source of our guilt and, therefore, no longer concerned with an authentic redemption from it. Now we only want the look of redemption, the gesture of concern that will give us the appearance of innocence and escape from the situation. Ob-viously, the businessman did not put twenty dollars in the tip plate because he thought it would go to the uplift of black Americans. He did it selfishly for the appearance of concern and for the escape it afforded him.

This is not to say that guilt is never the right motive for doing good works or showing concern, only that it is a very dangerous one because of its tendency to draw us into self-preoccupation and escapism. Guilt is a civilizing emotion when the fear for the self it carries is contained—a containment that allows guilt to be more selfless and that makes genuine concern possible. I think this was the kind of guilt that, along with other forces, made the 1964 Civil Rights Act possible. But, since then, I believe too many of our social policies related to race have been shaped by the fearful underside of guilt.

Black power evoked white guilt and made it a force in American institutions, just as my friend brought it to life in the businessman. Not many volunteer for guilt. Usually, it is others that make us feel it. It was the expression of black anger and pain that hardened the guilty knowledge of white ill-gotten advantage. And black power—whether from militant fringe groups, the civil rights establishment, or big city political campaigns-knew exactly the kind of white guilt it was after. It wanted to trigger the kind of white guilt in which whites fear for their own decency and innocence; it wanted the guilt of white self-preoccupation and escapism. Always at the heart of black power, in whatever form, there has been a profound anger at what was done to blacks and an equally profound feeling that there should be reparations. But a sober white guilt in which fear for the self is contained is only good for strict fairness—the 1964 Civil Rights Act that guaranteed equality under the law. It is of little value when one is after more than fairness. So black power made it its mission to have whites fear for their innocence, to feel a visceral guilt from which they would have to seek a more profound redemption. In such redemption was the possibility of black reparation. Black power upped the ante on white guilt.

With black power, all the elements of the hidden paradigm that shapes America's race-related social policy were in place. Knowledge of ill-gotten advantage could now be evidenced and deepened by black power into the sort of guilt from which institutions could redeem themselves only by offering more than fairness—by offering forms of reparation and compensation for past injustice. I believe this was the paradigm that bent our policies toward racial entitlements at the expense of racial development. In 1964, one of the assurances that Senator Hubert Humphrey and other politicians had to give Congress in order to get the landmark Civil Rights Bill passed was that the bill would not in any way require employers to use racial preferences to rectify racial imbalances. But this was before the explosion of black power in the late sixties, before the hidden paradigm was set in motion. After black power, racial preferences became the order of the day.

If this paradigm brought blacks entitlements, it also brought us the continuation of our most profound problem in American society: our invisibility as a people. The white guilt that this paradigm elicits is the kind of guilt that preoccupies whites with their own innocence and pressures them toward escapism-twenty dollars in the plate and out the door. With this guilt, as opposed to the contained guilt of genuine con-cern, whites tend to see only their own need for quick redemption. Blacks, then, become a means to this redemption and, as such, they must be seen as generally "less than" others. Their needs are "special," "unique," "different." They are seen exclusively along the dimension of their victimization, so they become "different" people with whom whites can negotiate entitlements, but never fully see as people like themselves. Guilt that preoccupies people with their own innocence blinds them to those who make them feel guilty. This, of course, is not racism, and yet it has the same effect as racism since it makes blacks something of a separate species for whom normal standards and values do not automatically apply.

Nowhere is this more evident today than in American universities. At some of America's most elite universities, administrators have granted concessions in response to black student demands (black power) that all but sanction racial separatism on campus-black "theme" dorms, black students unions, black yearbooks, homecoming dances, and so on. I don't believe administrators sincerely believe in these separatist concessions. Most of them are liberals who see racial separatism as wrong. But black student demands pull them into the paradigm of self-preoccupied white guilt whereby they seek a quick redemption by offering special entitlements that go beyond fairness. In this black students become invisible to them. Though blacks have the lowest grade point average of any group in American universities, administrators never sit down with them and "demand" in kind that they bring their grades up to par. The paradigm of white guilt makes the real problems of black students secondary to the need for white redemption. It also cuts these administrators off from their own values, which would most certainly discourage racial separatism and encourage higher black performance. Lastly, it makes for escapist policies; there is little difference between giving black students a separate graduation ceremony or student lounge and leaving twenty dollars in the tip plate on the way out the door.

What demonstrates more than anything the degree to which university administrators (and faculties) have been subdued by this paradigm is their refusal to lead black students, to tell them what they honestly think, to insist that they perform at a higher level, and to ask them to integrate themselves fully into campus life. This marks the difference between self-preoccupied guilt and the guilt of genuine concern, where fear for one's innocence is contained. The former grants entitlements as a means to easy innocence and escape from judgment; the latter refuses the entanglements and blindness of self-concerned guilt and, out of honest concern, demands black development.

Escapist racial policies—policies whereby institutions favor black entitlement over development out of a preoccupation with their own innocence—have, I believe, a dispiriting impact on blacks. Such policies have the effect of transforming whites from victimizers into patrons and keeping blacks where they have always been-dependent on the largesse of whites. This was made evident in a famous statement by President Lyndon Johnson at Howard University in 1965: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You're free to compete with others,' and justly believe that you have been fair."

On its surface this seems to be the most reasonable of statements, but on closer examination we can see how it deflects the emphasis away from black responsibility and toward white responsibility. The actors in this statement—"You [whites] do not take a person [blacks]..."-are whites; blacks are the passive recipients of white action. The former victimizers are challenged now to be patrons, but where is the black challenge? This is really a statement to and about white people, their guilt, their responsibility, and their road to redemption. Not only does it not enunciate a black mis-sion, but it sees blacks only in the dimension of their victimization-"hobbled by chains" —and casts them once again in the role of receivers of white beneficence. Nowhere in this utterance does President Johnson show respect for black resilience, or faith in the capacity of blacks to run fast once they get to the "starting line." This statement, which launched Johnson's Great Society, had the two ever-present signposts of white guilt—white self-preoccupation and black invisibility.

White guilt has pressured many of America's racial policies toward a paternalism that makes it difficult for blacks to find their true mettle or develop a faith in their own capacity to run as fast as others. The most vivid examples of this are the many forms of preferential treatment that come under the heading of affirmative action—an escapist racial policy, I believe, that offers entitlements, rather than development, to blacks. A preference is not a training program; it teaches no skills, instills no values. It only makes a color a passport. But the worst aspect of racial preferences is that they encourage dependency on entitlements rather than on our own initiative, a situation that has already led many blacks to believe that we cannot have fairness without entitlements. And here we fall into an Orwellian double-speak where preference means equality. At the heart of this confusion, I believe, is an unspoken black doubt about our ability to compete that is covered over by a preoccupation with racial discrimination. Since there are laws to protect us against discrimination, preferences only impute a certain helplessness to blacks that diminishes our self-esteem. The self-preoccupied form of white guilt that is behind racial preferences always makes us lower so that we can be lifted up.

Recently, Penn State launched a program that actually pays black students for improving their grades—a C to C + average brings $550, and anything more brings $1,100. Here is the sort of guilty kindness that kills. What kind of self-respect is a black student going to have as he or she reaches out to take $550 for C work when many white students would be embarrassed by so average a performance? What better way to drive home the nail of inferiority? And what more Pavlovian system of conditioning blacks to dependency than shelling out cash for grades? Here, black students learn to hustle their victimization rather than overcome it while their patrons escape with the cheapest sort of innocence. Not all preferential treatment is this insidious, but the same dynamic is always at work when color brings entitlement.

I think effective racial policies can only come from the sort of white guilt where fear for the self is contained so that genuine concern can emerge. The test for this healthy guilt is simply a heartfelt feeling of concern without any compromise of one's highest values and principles. But how can whites reach this more selfless form of guilt? I believe the only way is to slacken one's grip on innocence. Guilt has always been the lazy man's way to innocence—I feel guilt because I am innocent, guilt confirms my innocence. It is the compulsion to always think of ourselves as innocent that binds us to self-preoccupied guilt. Whites in general, and particularly those public and private institutions (not necessarily white) that make racial policy, must not be so preoccupied with their image of innocence or, put another way, their public relations of good intentions. What is needed now is a new spirit of pragmatism in racial matters where blacks are seen simply as American citizens who deserve complete fairness and in some cases developmental assistance, but in no case special entitlements based on color. We need deracinated social policies that attack poverty rather than black poverty and that instill those values that make for self-reliance. The white message to blacks must be: America hurt you badly and that is wrong, but entitlements only prolong the hurt while development overcomes it.

Selfish white guilt is really self-importance. It has no humility and it asks for an unreasonable, egotistical innocence.

Nothing diminishes a black more than this sort of guilt in a white, which to my mind amounts to a sort of moral colonialism. We used to say in the sixties that at least in the South you knew where you stood. I always thought this was a little foolish since I didn't like where I stood there. But I think one of the things we meant by this—at the time—was that the South had little investment in its racial innocence and that this was very liberating in an ironical sort of way. It meant there would be no undercurrent of enmeshment with white need. It gave us back ourselves. The selfishly guilty white is drawn to what blacks least like in themselves-their suffering, victimization, and dependency. This is no good for anyone.