Broken Promise

...But the fact that decisions are made on a nonmeritocratic basis is a good thing if you are trying to assuage guilt: The more you discriminate—the more unjust you are to some in favoring oth-ers—the more you burnish your do-gooder credentials...

...If Clinton had done that, his presidency would have ended...

...As an English professor and, now, as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Steele has written innumerable articles and an indispensable trilogy of books about the psychology of modern American race relations: The Content of Our Character (1990), A Dream Deferred (1998), and now White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era...

...sex with a White House intern, he would have been toast...

...But with every tick of the clock, this difficulty diminishes...

...In fact, most of today's conservatives sound like Martin Luther King in 1963," writes Steele...

...Not so unlikely, actually, as it is this angle on the scandal that prompts Steele's reverie: President Eisenhower, he dimly recalls, was rumored to have, from time to time, used the n-word on the golf course...

...by Roger Clegg Last May, Shelby Steele was presented the Bradley Prize for his outstanding achievements as a scholar and writer, and he greatly deserved it...

...Forty years ago, it might have been difficult for white people to acknowledge the ugliness of racial discrimination without also feeling guilty about it...

...For baby boomers like Bill Clinton, then, sexual White Guilt How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele HarperCollins, 192 pp., $24.95 immorality was no big deal, but political incorrectness on race would be unthinkable...

...As Steele writes, "It must be acknowledged that blacks are no longer oppressed in America...

...But] black rage is always a kind of opportunism," and, indeed, "failing the litmus test of militancy incurred the Uncle Tom stigma...

...This turned out to be a bad bargain for African Americans...

...Steele's basic point is this: White Americans were quite right in the 1960s to admit the error of their racist ways, but this acknowledgment resulted in a general loss of moral authority and an overwhelming sense of guilt...

...Still, the struggle is far from resolved...

...In particular, a "70 percent illegitimacy rate among all blacks (90 percent in certain inner cities) pretty much makes the point that there is a responsibility problem...

...And, as it continues, we are lucky to have Shelby Steele in it...

...To the contrary: As the empirical evidence continues to mount that liberal civil-rights policies are not just unproductive but counterproductive, one concludes that the reason for the left's stubborn insistence that they be left in place has to be rooted in something other than external reality...

...Meanwhile, prejudice has become so socially unacceptable and universally uncool that there is less urgency in making a big display of one's lack of racism—everyone is assumed to oppose hunger, cancer, and bigotry...

...Their principal hurdles, rather, are self-imposed...

...So the deal was struck and has stuck ever since...

...It is interesting that this is the second major book this past year in which an African-American intellectual concludes that policies hatched by sixties liberals and radicals have had unintended and deadly consequences for his race...

...This is sinking in, and more African Americans are having their "Cosby moments," as Steele calls them...

...To regain moral authority and assuage this guilt, it was necessary to "dissociate" from the racist past, and the obvious way to do this was to support social programs that were ostentatiously remedial in purpose: the Great Society, affirmative action, corporate celebration of diversity, and the like...

...So what accounts for the change in American mores between the 1950s and the 1990s, such that a hanging offense in one era became mere peccadillo in the other, and vice versa...

...But it is no less valuable for that...

...The loss of moral authority as a result of acknowledged racism had concurrent results in other areas, too...

...The programs were practical failures, of course...

...Steele does not predict how long this mindset will stay with us, but there is reason for hoping that it is already and rapidly fading...

...This, then, is an essay, very light on statistics and social science, with no index and lots of personal anecdotes and Jamesian psychology...

...The underlying psychology has practical ramifications...

...The other is Winning the Race by John McWhorter (reviewed here last March...

...American elites became timid in foreign affairs (our past is not only racist but imperialist), apologetic about capitalism (we are racists, imperialists, and environmental rapists), and adamantly nonjudgmental about sex, drugs, and illegitimacy (who are we to criticize anyone...

...Thus, one might unthinkingly assume, as I had, that the sacrifice of quality to quotas would be painful and grudging...

...if Eisenhower had been caught having Roger Clegg is president of the Center for Equal Opportunity...

...White attitudes are, one hopes, changing, too...

...White Guilt is presented as Steele's interior monologue—his internal "Chautauqua, a kind of narrative lecture through a subject or dilemma"—about race as he drives from Los Angeles to Monterey with, as an unlikely backdrop, the car radio's reports on the developing Clinton-Lewinsky scandal...

...And, worse, they implicitly required blacks to cede personal responsibility for their futures to liberal whites, to be abjectly grateful for the programs—Steele skewers Maureen Dowd's column that berated Clarence Thomas on his lack of proper "gratitude" for affirmative action—and to accept the premise that African Americans cannot and should not be held to the same intellectual and moral standards as whites: "They are assigned an inferiority so intractable that nothing overcomes it...

...It became unchic to believe, as Steele does, that "the West [is] a great civilization" and, specifically, that "America—for all its transgressions— is also indisputably great...