May 22, 2006

Shelby Steele: Accusations of White Guilt are False, and are Made Only to Gain Power

Author Shelby Steele. 

The audience included luminaries such as David Horowitz, Janet Levy, and Robert Spencer. 

Last Thursday author Shelby Steele spoke to the Wednesday Morning Club at the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles. Steele made some points that I found eye-opening.

From my hand-written notes:

The Civil Rights era was a high point of our history in this country.

...But many people in America today, feel white guilt, and should not. They are forever having to prove they are not racist.

This is true on institutional levels as well. Institutions have to prove they are not racist.

...In war we often fight against that stigma rather than achieving our goals. So we don't talk about victory -- we talk about our exit strategy. Why do we do that? We are following a pattern of white guilt. We don't use the full measure of our power, because if we do use the full measure of our power to achieve quick victory, we will be seen as oppressors.

We end up leaving a little room for the enemy to fight us - almost encouraging, eliciting an insurgency, as if they have a right to fight us back, and we're going to protect their right to fight us back.

...This causes us to fight these long term wars that never seem to come to an end, but just seem to peter out.

Steele elaborated on this in his closing remarks (transcribed from an audio recording):

White guilt makes anti-Americanism into power. The American left - the international left, for that matter - which is almost all of Europe - wields this stigma against American power and says, "well you know the truth is" - and this is I think the deep core of the American left - and says, "the truth is, that America really is at its core an evil civilization that is in fact dedicated to racism, to imperialism, to raping people of color around the world of their resources," and so forth. And we have an iconography of characters and issues that symbolize this. You say the word "Haliburton" (laughter), and such terms, as an emblem of the "true" America, the "evil" America.

And so the reward you get for that is that you get to take the moral high ground. And you then in your anti-Americanism, you're the one who gets to set the terms of legitimacy. And so the real America has to dance to your tune. And that's real power. If you can get a power as great as America to dance to your tune and you get to control the terms of legitimacy, this has got a lot to do with what you see and hear in universities today, where the left has almost completely won out. But anti-Americanism puts you in that position where you get to control the terms of legitimacy -- and you always presume the worst about America. In that presumption you find real political power. So again, if  you are Al Sharpton, or if you are Jacque Chirac, that is a source of enormous power. That is a power so big that it can contain the power of America. And it's just too tempting in many ways for them to avoid it.

How do we get out of this mess? I don't know; the older I get the more, I suppose, Libertarian I am - I think bad systems sort of eventually exhaust themselves. People like David Horowitz fight against them, and point out, and keep heightening, the contradictions - to use the old Marxist term.

But I think that the important thing - I think that the new right is in many ways a kind of correction against white guilt. The new right in America is saying, "well you know, we have made an enormous amount of moral progress in the last 40 years in this society." Racism is no longer a variable in anybody's life in this society. It just isn't. You can do pretty much what you put your mind to doing. But because we're so terrorized by the stigma, we don't say that about ourselves. We never say that because it would sound as though we were being racist, and inviting the stigma. But it's a fact. And it needs to be accepted. America is a very good country. (Applause)

I know this personally. It's a very good country. And again I think the right, my explanation of why talk radio, conservative talk radio has become so popular, is because it's a white-guilt free zone. (Laughter, applause). There are so many successful people in that area now, and they believe America's good. And they're not going to be pushed around. They're not afraid of the stigma. And of course look at them. They are mainstream. They are just utterly stigmatized. If even a conservative mentions the words, "Rush Limbaugh," people's hackles go up.

But these people have accepted stigmatization as the price they pay to say what they really think. And that's what I think the new right does, and I think that's where the fight has to keep going. And in confidence, in faith in one's self, that we are in fact, a good nation. 

We Americans, as a people who want others to be successful and happy, and as a people who have been raised in the beautiful Judeo-Christian tradition of caring about other people's feelings, are susceptible to accusations that we have done wrong; those opposing America have found this to be a chink in our armor, and are using it falsely to attack us. I say "falsely" because it is not true that America is a racist nation. As Steele is quoted above to have said, "Racism is no longer a variable in anybody's life in this society."

At another event, just last night,  I heard a woman make the often-heard claim that America was "the root cause" of terrorism because we had at one point supported people who later became terrorists. This is a perfect example of what Steele is talking about: playing on the susceptibility Americans have to accusations of guilt, in order to control what this nation does -- in this case, to preoccupy this nation with unreasonable accusations, so that we stop defending ourselves against terrorist attacks that are surely being planned.

To conclude: the eye-opening thing, for me, about Steele's remarks, was that he pointed out that accusations that Americans are racist, and that America as a nation is an oppressor, are inaccurate based on the facts, and are made only as an attempt to gain power.