The Race Problem and "Moral Innocence"

...All one need do to benefit from such programs is to be black...

...In The Content of our Character, * a collection of previously published essays, Steele states that the true source of trouble between whites and blacks is that "races are competing power groups...

...At present, the entire Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences has only two tenured blacks—Orlando Patterson and Martin Kilson...

...He makes empirical claims about the entirety of black life using only his personal encounters as data base...

...But unlike other students of racial conflict with similar assumptions, Steele informs us that the prize they compete for is neither wealth nor material power but "moral innocence...

...But in pursuit of a white ear, Steele's critique of white America avoids sharpness...

...Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power (in relation to each other...

...They cannot take pride in their achievements because they know that they have been unfairly favored...

...Steele's popularity rests on the fact that he allows whites to admit their frustration at the fact that the Negro problem just won't go away...

...Yet the peculiarity of this black entitlement to power "binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as victim...

...All the while—the feeling goes—they are robbing and raping, hooked on crack, producing unwanted babies, killing each other, and dancing on Soul Train rather than attending school...

...White racists created the idea of blacks as inferior in order to feel innocent (read: entitled) in their domination of blacks...

...If there is a redeeming quality to Steele's book, it lies in its message to black middleclass readers...

...Further, blacks who benefit from affirmative action suffer doubt about the authenticity of their achievements...

...And who is more frustrated with our problem than blacks themselves...

...Worse still, this memory of oppression is invoked by blacks to explain their own inability to succeed in an age when racism is no longer a major handicap to black lives...

...Rockefeller wants people to think he is entitled to his power...

...Emphasis added...

...Yet one cannot ignore the obvious...

...This guilt stems from their knowledge of the treatment of blacks by their white ancestors...

...The inferiority of the black always makes the white man superior...

...Blacks, in making their case for their moral superiority, lay claim to an innocence that absolves them of guilt about their own plight...

...Yet its absence in some blacks does not account for the relative absence of autonomy among many blacks...

...Steele claims that the answer lies in the peculiar way innocence entitles blacks to pursue power...

...As to the reasons behind the differences in their life-styles, Steele has little to say except to imply that Rockefeller may be driven by personal responsibility, while the black beggar is probably self-destructive...

...On Being Black and Middleclass" introduced Shelby Steele as a new interpreter of American race relations...

...Given the logic of Steele's argument that moral innocence is a form of power and that this power is greatest among the victimized, one is forced into dialectical frivolity: the powerless are the most powerful...

...His lack of profundity is concealed by the novelty of his voice as a nonliberal black...

...Ac78 • DISSENT Moral Innocence cording to Steele, Reagan's "emphasis on traditional American values—individual initiative, self-sufficiency, strong families—offered . . . the most enduring solution to the demoralization and poverty that continue to widen the gap between blacks and whites in America...

...Again, Steele sidesteps any question that demands knowledge greater than that provided by his intuition...

...It is shameful for Steele to write as if the key to alleviating the plight of the black lower class lies solely in self-help...

...His doubts become "our doubts...

...Do black Americans living in urban welfare hotels sit around at night claiming, "We may not have enough to eat but at least we're morally superior to white folks" or "I won't get a job because then we will have more to eat and a better place to live but in the process we will lose our innocence...

...Steele's dichotomy of it's either the fault of racism or of us indicates a mind incapable of complexity...

...Steele says that blacks cannot generally admit to their flight from responsibility, for they would then lose the sense of innocence they derive from victimization...

...According to Steele, during the 1960s, whites lost some of their innocence and so lost a degree of power over blacks...

...Do these men question the validity of their achievements because of this "advantage...

...Yet, the book is fundamentally flawed...

...The Content of our Character is an extraordinarily repetitious collection of essays...

...What makes Steele even more enticing to a casual reader is the emotional undercurrent of his writings...

...Berkeley...

...Dartmouth...

...The fundamental premise of Steele's text is that whites have achieved the moral and cultural character that blacks need to acquire...

...When talking about affirmative action, Steele would have us believe that blacks are overrunning white meritocratic institutions...

...It is incredible that an author can make statements about black life without providing a reference to any scholarly study...

...The * The Content of our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, by Shelby Steele...

...Steele does not understand the distinction between feeling responsible for oneself and being able to realize a self-sufficient (nonwelfare) existence...

...racial struggle in America," he argues, "has always been primarily a struggle for innocence...

...Steele has written a praisesong for white America...

...The supposed tragic result of this is that blacks have experienced "twenty years of decline and demoralization, even as opportunities for blacks to better themselves have increased...

...For instance, Steele asserts that on most American campuses today the children of black professional parents are offered scholarship monies not available to the children of working-class white parents...

...thus he desires to be seen as innocent...

...It is not incidental that Steele can write, "As a black person you always hear about racists but rarely meet any...

...But where on American campuses are black faculty roaming around in large numbers...

...The latter requires opportunity...

...Affirmative action eliminates the need for blacks to excel...

...In some important respects, Steele's text reads like a modernized version of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery...

...Although Steele supported Reagan's attempt to end "racial quotas and any affirmative action that supersedes merit," he did object to Reagan's claims for moral innocence toward blacks...

...Rather than risk their vulnerable identities in the American meritocratic contest for upward mobility, blacks engage in a "flight from opportunity...

...It is riddled with illogical claims and factual misrepresentations...

...Moreover, they do so in a manner that lures readers into believing that they are engaging in a more universalistic commentary than those offered by most autobiographies...

...At the university where I worked, one of his essays was distributed by an administration in search of campus racial quietude...

...But meanwhile the lack of black guilt means relinquishing a sense of self-responsibility...

...Still, to believe this, we would need some supporting data— perhaps from shrinks who service black people in welfare hotels...

...At the same time, Steele depicts whites as mired in a pit of racial guilt toward blacks...

...He does not use the quest for innocence as a metaphor for the ideological underpinnings of black-white relations...

...First and foremost, Steele's attempt to analyze black-white relations as a competition for moral innocence is utterly simplistic...

...However, the hidden consequences of these policies is an employment ceiling beyond which blacks cannot advance, a ceiling enforced by white employers who expect their upper-echelon managers to have earned their positions...

...He has tapped into the enduring American ideology of individual achievement and selfsufficiency...

...Steele believes that blacks spend too much time and energy remembering their historical oppression...

...WINTER • 1991 • 79 Moral Innocence Doesn't such an assertion require some mention of data...

...Steele ultimately "essentializes" black Americans to such a degree that he allows for no diversity among us...

...He has captured attention for having successfully appealed to sentiments floating around in the popular mind...

...A corollary argument that Steele repetitiously makes is that blacks invoke racism as the cause of their individual failures when in fact their personal incompetence is probably to blame...

...Yet each individual essay is well written...

...Steele's recent visibility may have more to do with ideological "utility" than with the power of his arguments...

...If, as Steele argues, the quest for moral innocence is the fundamental human drive, and moral innocence is derived from victimization, why do we not see a massive migration of affluent whites from Fairfield County to the South Bronx...

...Steele is a master of this genre...

...When coupled with Steele's claim that Reagan's presidency offered a reasonable set of policy options toward the black poor, his book becomes appalling...

...After all, Steele's nonsense found its way into the pages of this democratic socialist journal despite the fact that he wrote about the contemporary black plight with no reference to the political-economic contexts of black lives...

...Since then, Steele's work has appeared regularly in some of our most prominent intellectual journals...

...Much of his intellectual capital lies in his blackness...

...We may never solve them...

...But how strong is this black memory...

...Well, Steele might admit, there are some racially parochial white people, but they are few and far between...

...Martin's Press, 1990...

...It is probably for this reason that Steele has become the black intellectual-of-choice among neoconservatives and establishment liberals...

...Essentially, blacks use the idea of racism as a therapeutic balm for their shortcomings...

...The black street beggar wants passersby to feel guilty about his plight...

...His essays are all self-referential in a way that generates a sense of personal vulnerability...

...Black political leadership is generally mediocre and seemingly indifferent to the wrongs perpetrated by blacks on whites...

...But when Steele says that it is paradoxical that twenty-five years after the civil rights movement, black conditions have worsened, we need only respond that five years after the 1963 March on Washington the federal government decided that black social inclusion would not be a national priority...

...And if black beneficiaries of affirmative action policies are so riddled with doubt, why don't they refuse to be beneficiaries...

...Worse, too many blacks don't try to better themselves precisely because they hold on to an outdated image of America as a racist country that denies blacks opportunity...

...According to Steele's logic, the struggle between David Rockefeller and a black street beggar is a struggle for moral innocence...

...This is news to me...

...Though the book is written as if Steele is a personal voice from everyday black life, it is conspicuously aimed at white readers...

...After all these years, black folk continue to spend much of their time generating never-ending accusations and complaints...

...Many white male faculty at the best of our universities were the beneficiaries of a racially and sexually restricted job market...

...Steele appears on national television and is quoted widely in editorials...

...At a time when the "personal is political," self-referential writers are able to use their own life stories as the center point for the unfolding of history...

...and if we listen to Shelby Steele we may not even try...

...To show how guilt and innocence control black-white relations, Steele invokes the policies of Ronald Reagan...

...Perhaps this is a bad joke, but I think it is one step in a carefully orchestrated shuffle...

...q WINTER • 1991 • 81...

...But why, one may ask, do blacks relish this innocence...

...That Steele and his black "yuppie" peers (called in the black community "buppies") have experienced "opportunity" supposedly proves the existence of opportunity for all blacks...

...He writes as if his white American readership has been exorcised of all remnants of racism...

...As Steele sees it, the central problem for today's Afro-Americans lies in the fact that their historical oppression at the hands of previous generations of white racists has fueled a self-destructive quest for innocence...

...But then, it is essential to Steele's arguments that we see him as the typical black...

...It is naïve for Steele to assume that prior to affirmative action the United States was a meritocracy for whites...

...Blacks, he writes, are now in a paradoxical position where taking responsibility for their lives is seen as nothing less than a capitulation to white power...

...Since the days of the Nixon presidency, America has steadfastly refused to tackle its racial problems...

...White beggars seem unexplainable...

...Ignoring the work of analysts like William J. Wilson, he doesn't have a clue as to the significance of status or class...

...In fact, Steele wouldn't even mention this possibility, for the unstated racist corollary to Steele's arguments concerning contemporary black advantage is that earlier generations of blacks, had they been provided the opportunity, would not have been able to compete for these jobs anyway...

...This "memory of enemies" supposedly hinders blacks from taking advantage of present-day opportunities...

...To be innocent someone else must feel guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other's backs...

...Steele is quite perceptive about the racial angst present in certain sectors of the black middle class...

...Blacks, Steele notes, "are further behind whites today than before the victories of the civil rights movement...

...In effect, affirmative action limits mobility...

...Steele thinks that his discussion is evenhanded because he would be willing to argue that neither Rockefeller nor the beggar is more innocent than the other...

...Interestingly, Steele condemns affirmative action and then proceeds to use the black mobility enabled by affirmative action as proof of the attenuation of racism...

...There are also many blacks in need of more moral autonomy...

...For that matter, who has a bigger "memory of enemies" than some American Jews...

...Steele does not tell us why we should see his own racial anxieties as characteristic of all 80 • DISSENT Moral Innocence black life...

...Steele might want to claim that these views operate on the subconscious level...

...He concludes: "If conditions have worsened for most of us as racism has receded, then much of the problem must be of our own making...

...This pattern means that both races have a hidden investment in racism and racial disharmony despite their good intentions to the contrary...

...Like Washington, Steele calls for blacks to relinquish political engagement in behalf of improving "the content of their characters...

...Blacks who do have opportunities may be inspired by Steele to confront some racially inspired personal doubts that have kept them from realizing their potential...

...According to Steele, blacks sensed that Reagan was trying to deny their claims to innocence and therefore objected to his reasonable domestic policies...

...In an era when academicians find it difficult to convey ideas even to colleagues in the same discipline, the academic who writes for a general audience should be saluted...

...I know that I cannot undo Steele's attractiveness to many white Americans, for he touches deep ideological and psychological wellsprings...

...Steele writes about race relations without any mention of political and economic structures...

...This was certainly not the case at Wesleyan University, where I have taught, nor at Harvard or Yale, where I was a student...

...A reader can get the gist of Steele's arguments by reading one of the longer essays and skipping the rest...

...the evil might of whites makes blacks good...

...Whereas Washington wanted to use the passivity of blacks as a trade-off to obtain white philanthropic aid, Steele's agenda, if he has one, has not been articulated...

...They wonder whether they are inferior...

...Admittedly, dealing with the black problem might have frustrated even Francis of Assisi...

...his fears, "our fears...

...The University of Virginia...

...Instead, he asserts that most blacks personally cherish a belief in their moral superiority vis-à-vis white Americans...

...Of course not...

...Yet their memory certainly does not seem to have undermined their upward mobility...

...Though their subtexts are the burden of American racism, both authors tend to highlight only those personal interactions with whites that were helpful along their journeys...

...According to Steele, this black selfdefeatism has now been institutionalized in affirmative action policies...

...Within the black populace there are certainly underachievers, self-defeatists, victim-status pimps, and terrified loudmouths parading in militant garb...