White Guilt

Manifesto

So George Will writes another article about race. Write is a little kind because all he really does is paraphrase a book by professor Shelby Steele:

In "White Guilt," Shelby Steele, America's most discerning black writer, casts a cool eye on yet another soft bigotry of low expectations—the ruinous "compassion" of a theory of social determinism that reduces blacks to, in Steele's word, "non-individuated" creatures.
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"By the mid-sixties," Steele writes, "white guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of black leadership, not selfless men like King who appealed to the nation's moral character but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers and haranguers—not moralists but specialists in moral indignation—who could set up a trade with white guilt." The big invention by these small men was what Steele calls "globalized racism." That idea presumes that "racism is not so much an event in black lives as a condition of black life," a product of "impersonal" and "structural" forces. The very invisibility of those forces proved their sinister pervasiveness.

The theory of "structural" or "institutional" racism postulates a social determinism that makes all whites and American institutions complicit in a vicious cultural pattern. The theory makes the absence of identifiable adverse events in the lives of individual blacks irrelevant to blacks' claims to victimhood. Victim status is a source of endless, sometimes lucrative and always guilt-free leverage over a guilt-ridden society.

I'll do best not to critique Mr. Steele's book. First because I haven't read it and I don't trust Mr. Will's representations of it. Second, because I don't know nearly enough to rebut any single point as paraphrased by Mr. Will. But I would like to look a little at Mr. Will's motivations. Rather than offer his own opinion, Will instead hides behind the cover of Mr. Steele. You see, this is classic George F. Will. Find somebody who takes a controversial position, paraphrase and cite it. In this way, he can avoid "controversy" because "he didn't say it." This is especially more true if you can find a black writer to criticize black culture. Note how important it is for Mr. Will to note that Mr. Steele is black in the first sentence.

But this is just the start. Mr. Will loves pointing out and reveling in the fact that affirmative action failed. He loves it. And he blames those crazy liberals who promoted it for its failures, constantly implying that it was/is an idea doomed to failure. But Mr. Will should look in the mirror. It was he and his conservative brethren who fought affirmative action and equal rights every step of the way. Affirmative action and equal rights were/are tremendous goals that need the entire society behind it. Mr. Will and other conservatives have fought these goals for 50 years. And their fight was successful. Isn't it more than a little disingenuous for Mr. Will to now blame the program itself as a failure? Conservatives have spent the better part of half a century insuring its failure, shouldn't he be taking some credit for it now? Right, it is always more fun to blame liberals. That and the fact that it is better to publicly say that the idea failed because it was bad, and keep in the dark your complicity in ensuring that equal rights always remains simply an ideal and not a reality.