Read Online White Guilt by Shelby Steele - Free Book Online

Johnson has done any better.
    President Roosevelt’s New Deal had frankly asked for sacrifice and hard work from the average American because it was clear that whatever the government did had to be met by the responsibility of the citizens. But Roosevelt was seeking prosperity, not redemption. It is nothing less than stunning that in the four decades of racial reform since the sixties, and amid constant racial debate, there has not been a single articulation by an American president of how blacks might so much as even share responsibility for their own advancement.

10
THE REDISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY
    But I couldn’t have known any of this as I stood listening to Dick Gregory. I just felt greatly relieved that the burden of responsibility I had always known was suddenly without moral authority. I remember thinking a little nervously of my father. Would he buy Gregory’s implication that responsibility was a “trick bag” for blacks, a submission to white authority that extended our oppression? I could not imagine it. Responsibility was his great faith; he would never see the logic in thinking of it as something that “blamed the victim.”
    But this thought gave me only brief pause. I was convinced that we were in a new era of civil rights. Even whites as high as the president now agreed that responsibility had been oppression itself for blacks. So here, I thought—with the arrogance my generation was famous for—was a case of age having no advantage over youth. My father had no more experience of this new era than I had.
    And if, in the long run, time proved me wrong, in the short run it proved me right. By the night of my encounter with Dick Gregory the goal of the civil rights movement had escalated from a simple demand for equal rights to a demand for the redistribution of responsibility for black advancement from black to white America, from the “victims” to the “guilty.” This marked a profound—and I believe tragic—turning point in the long struggle of black Americans for a better life.
    Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion’s share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late sixties—and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next four decades—grew out of black America’s complete embrace of the latter option.
    Racial militancy and anger are, of course, easy emotions to feel when your country finally admits to having oppressed you for no reason other than the color of your skin. But if blacks had left America in the mid-sixties for a land of their own where no whites dwelled, this militancy and anger would have been beside the point. Without whites it would have had no object, no point. And instead of the interminable preoccupation with race and social justice that we blacks developed after our civil rights victories, there would have been only the hard work of making the group competitive with other groups and societies.But we did not leave America in the sixties. We remained inside the same society that had wronged us, a society that suddenly needed to show great concern for us on pain of its own moral authority. Why not look to this society to take responsibility for what it had done to us? America had been responsible for our suffering, why not for our uplift?
    Black militancy, then, was not inevitable in the late sixties. It came into existence solely to exploit white guilt as a pressure on white America to take more responsibility for black advancement. Effectively, black militancy and white guilt are two sides of the same