Shelby Steele
My current book is White Guilt, and it’s an attempt to look at what seems to me to be a really important phenomenon, certainly in American life if it doesn’t extend beyond that I think maybe to much of the Western world. And nobody else was writing about it, so it seemed to me that that’s what a writer is looking for, new territory.
So I’ll just talk about that for a little while. I don’t want to give you a whole, full-blown, technical lecture here and put everybody to sleep, so what I’d like to do is just talk about it for a little while. Then we’ll open it up for questions and have a conversation.
It begins, it seems to me, in a phenomenon that I think, at any rate, is one of the most important events certainly in late 20th century history. I think even more important than the collapse of communism that happened in the ‘80s. And that is the collapse or the delegitimization, to use the long awkward word, of white supremacy. And it’s interesting to me that this phenomenon has gone unremarked, uncommented on in many ways. But white supremacy was an enormously important force, idea in the world for centuries, and organized the entire globe, and extended the nation-state system from one end of the world to the other. So its mark will never leave the world, and it gave a coherence to the world.
And the important thing, I think, to understand about white supremacy is not whether or not it really is an argument for the supremacy of whites or the inferiority of other races, but what was important about it was the idea that whiteness constituted in and of itself moral authority. And so that if a black man in Africa met a white man on a path somewhere, and there was no one around within 50 miles, the black man would have to carry the white man’s bags—because whiteness was authority, and thus it was power. And so whites—given that authority—could very reasonably go around the world and take over whatever territories they desired, and to take whatever resources they desired, and to then sort of corral the people into some sort of servitude if it so suited them. Well, so you see it was an enormously powerful idea that gave a certain meaning to life in the world.
After World War II there began to be revolutions from one end of the globe to the other. There was a revolution in India that was passive. There were revolutions all across Africa, all across the Middle East, all across Asia. Some of these revolutions were violent. The Algerian revolution was a particularly violent one. Some of them were pacifistic—India. The American civil rights revolution was just one of many. It was one, thankfully, that was also nonviolent. Some were communist. Again, nationalistic.
But in any case, all of them were in one way or another revolutions against, not the idea of white supremacy—they sort of left that argument aside—but against the authority. And they succeeded. Western powers retreated everywhere in the world. Britain, France drew back from their colonies. The civil rights movement in America was victorious. So that the idea that whiteness in and of itself constituted authority was defeated, was killed off.
There are no serious people today anywhere in the world who stand forth in the public square and argue that whites ought to rule the world, that white supremacy is a valid idea. Doesn’t mean that people don’t believe in the idea of white supremacy, doesn’t mean that all racism is gone, but the authority that was once inherent in white supremacy has been defeated, and I think it has had a profound effect on the world. Certainly it has also had a profound effect here in America.
Looking specifically at America, which in many ways is where I think the dimensions of white guilt become maybe their clearest. In 1964, we passed a civil rights bill in the United States. In 1965, we passed the Voting Rights Act. Both of these acts I think are some of the greatest social legislation ever passed anywhere in the world, ever written anywhere in the world. They’re the model for other such legislation around the world. And inherent in this legislation was the acknowledgement on the part of America that it had done something very wrong, that racism was wrong. That slavery was wrong. That segregation was wrong. That white supremacy itself was wrong.
I think this was America’s greatest moment. Here was a nation that morally came to terms with itself, faced itself. Maybe it has happened, but I’m not aware of it anywhere else in the world before this happening, where a society rich and powerful looks at itself, examines itself in the way that America did at that period in time, and makes the decision to change, and acknowledges the wrong, and vows to become a different kind of society.
And so America has to be applauded. I’m glad to be in America, because America was able to do that. It would have been a very difficult if America had not been able to do that.
The problem, though, as always happens in human affairs, when you acknowledge a wrong, you say, yes, it was wrong, and we’re going to move away from that. The price you pay is that you lose your moral authority. And I think this is again one of the most important events in American history, that given after the civil rights movement Americans, white Americans, but more importantly than individuals are institutions, lost a considerable amount of moral authority, because now blacks and other minorities could look at them, could point the finger, and could say, well, by your own acknowledgement, by your own acknowledgement you’re admitting that you—that America did us wrong.
And so the moral authority that whites lost shifted to minorities and became extreme—it became an important source of power for minorities. As I’ve said, white guilt is black power. It’s the same—they have the same phenomenon, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute when I look at specifically how blacks responded to this.
So white guilt, then, is not a guilt of conscience. It’s not “I can’t sleep at night because I’m so guilty about what happened to black Americans before I was born.” It’s not that kind. If white guilt was that then we wouldn’t be here today talking about this phenomenon. But it is this vacuum of moral authority, this having the authority to be able to speak about any number of issues, race, poverty, and so forth, because of having acknowledged this past, the sins of the past.
White guilt is enforced by stigma. When you acknowledge that you were a part of a group—that you belong to a group that did a wrong in the past. If you want to I think see this in vivid terms, think of the Germans after World War II, the stigma of having been a Nazi, having a Nazi in your family, an uncle who was whatever. Well, you might yourself not have been a Nazi, might never have subscribed to that point of view, but outside of Germany, all Germans in a sense became from then on stigmatized by the sin of Nazism, and other people could look at them and have a certain kind of, again, moral authority in relation to them.
Well, in many ways I think that’s what happened in America. Whites became stigmatized as racist. And from that point on whites were in the position of forever having to prove the negative, that they’re not a racist. And again, if they don’t prove the negative, then the stigma sticks. Well, you must be a racist. And so since that time whites, and particularly, again, institutions, have lived under threat of stigmatization.
Why’s that important? It’s important because if you are stigmatized as a racist in American society—an institution, let’s say. It’s easier, I think, to see on the institutional level. Then that institution becomes illegitimate. It loses its legitimacy. It loses its ability to really function in this society. So the stigma, again, has a powerful impact, because it has so much control over legitimacy. How can you be a legitimate institution in a multi-racial society that is supposed to be free, and everyone is supposed to be equal under the law—how can you be legitimate if you don’t have any blacks in your institution?
So we could look at a disparity like that—blacks could—again, moral authority having passed to us. We could look at a disparity like that, and we could say you don’t have any blacks in your institution. It’s a racist institution. It’s illegitimate. We will sue it. We will do whatever it takes. And in a sense since the ‘60s that’s pretty much what has been —what has happened is that minorities have begun to sort of manipulate that stigma. We call it some circles today the race card. Play the race card. What does the race card mean? Well, if you don’t do what I want you to do, then you’re going to be stigmatized as a racist, and the price you’ll pay is you’ll lose your legitimacy.
So white guilt is a powerful, powerful force. Not because people feel guilty, but because people are stigmatized, and again have to prove the negative all the time, and living forever under threat of being stigmatized.
This leads to the next phenomenon that is a feature of white guilt, and that’s dissociation. The only way to get away from the stigma of being a racist is to find some way to dissociate oneself from the stigma, from the image that you are a racist. That you are like the whites of old. That you still secretly are a white supremacist. That you still secretly believe in this. That you may be smiling, but your heart is still committed to racism. And so again, whites walking around under this sort of cloud of suspicion then have to find ways to dissociate themselves from that.
The first great example of dissociation in American life was President Johnson’s Great Society. Why all of a sudden, in 1965, do you just say, well, we’re going to spend billions and billions of dollars, and we’re going to create all kind of social programs, and we’re going to dump all this money, and we’re going to end poverty in our time? You create all these programs, almost all of which failed. Certainly they did not eradicate poverty. They did not bring about racial equality. They did virtually nothing. But they did dissociate the American society and the American government from the stigma of racism.
The federal government had just, by its own legislation, acknowledged that it had been racist. That was too much moral authority for minorities to have, and the government really had to do something dramatic because the sin had been so dramatic. The wrong had been so dramatic, and had gone on for so long, and had so clearly violated the principles of a free society. That America had to do something big and huge. Had to spend a lot of money, to say in effect we’re not like that anymore. We’re not that old America that discriminated and oppressed people. We’re a new America. And we’re going even get rid of poverty, we’re going to wipe it out from the human condition.
So the purpose of the Great Society was not actually to end poverty or achieve racial equality. It was to restore some legitimacy to the American government, to the American society.
I remember that time very well. I was in college in those years, and as much as I disagree with the Great Society, as terrible as it was, as wasteful it was, as destructive as it was, I can remember feeling that I was not going to recognize my own government if it didn’t do something, if it didn’t make some gesture. I’d be happy to tell it what kind at this point, but it certainly didn’t make the right one, and I was a part of it back in those days.
But it had to do something. There were riots from one end of America to the other. Los Angeles burned up. New York. Newark. Detroit. Huge riots. Destructive riots. Many deaths. Much, much property damage, and it looked as though blacks were simply no longer going to identify with America as their nation. Militant groups began to spring up everywhere. Cultural nationalists. The Black Panthers right up the road here in Oakland. No longer with nonviolent passive resistance, now with guns, and ready to have shootouts with the police, and so forth.
So the President knew there had to be something huge to dissociate the United States government from the past, to say we’re not like that anymore, we’re a different America.
Well, my feeling is that almost all of the racial policy since the Great Society, since 1965, has been designed, not to solve racial problems, but to dissociate our institutions and our government from its racist past and to restore moral authority and legitimacy to the government.
You see, for example, a few years ago in the affirmative case, the Michigan case. There were 100 briefs were submitted to the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences by every imaginable American institution, from corporations to city governments. Even the military submitted a brief. You notice there was no march on Washington in favor of affirmative action by blacks, by black people, or other minorities. Nothing. But this extraordinary pressure from America’s institutions arguing that the Supreme Court ought to allow racial preferences to stay in place.
Well, again, why? I think the reason is because those institutions are saying, look, we are under a stigma. Our legitimacy is at stake here. We have to have a way to prove, to indicate, that we’re not like that anymore, that we’re not an exclusive racist institution. We are an open, inclusive—that’s the new word—inclusive institution that wants everybody in our midst, and so we have to have diversity policies, and we have to be able to bring in minorities so that they’re here, because again, our entire legitimacy depends on it. Harvard University, Stanford University, all of the Ivy League have to have about 8 percent of every single freshman class be black. Has to be. Not 7 percent, not 6 percent, but at least 8 percent. Probably without racial preferences about 1 percent, 2 percent of every freshman class would be black. So the rest, the 7 percent are the result of racial preferences.
I’ve written a lot about the negative effects I think that has on minorities. I think one of the cruelest things a society can do is to take the best and the brightest young black Americans and basically say to them you simply cannot compete with the best and brightest of other races. We won’t allow you to do that. You can’t do it. You have to depend on our paternalism.
Well, what a cruel thing to do to a group that’s trying to overcome four centuries of oppression. But does the administration at Harvard, or Stanford, or Yale, or Princeton or any of those schools care about the impact that they’re having on black students, the way they’re stigmatizing them as second raters? Even that 1 percent or 2 percent who would have gotten into that institution anyway?
They say, look, we have to have 8 percent blacks in our freshman class. We don't care about you, because the legitimacy of our institution depends on that. If we go down to 1 percent or 2 percent, then we are going to be stigmatized as a racist university. Faculty won’t want to come here. We will lose money. We will lose grants. Our institution will decline in its whole. We will lose our reputation in every way. And so baby, we’re going to have 8 percent blacks in this freshman class no matter what we have to do to get them. Because it’s the dissociation from the stigma that is so necessary to the legitimacy of the institution.
The early ‘70s, we began to practice a welfare in America, where we basically said to people—this is coming out of the welfare rights movement and coming out of the civil rights movement. We basically said to people, okay, we’ll give you a little bit better than subsistence living, and you don’t have to do anything at all. Nothing. Don’t have to educate yourself or your children. Don’t be married—in fact, you can’t be married. You can’t have a whole family. And if your children grow up and they have children, then of course, we’ll put them on the dole too. And they too don't have to do anything.
So it’s one of these odd situations where you actually put an incentive in place for human inertia. You get rewarded for being nothing, for doing nothing. Nothing. You get rewarded for in a sense giving up your humanity.
Well, what kind of society, other than one trying to dissociate from the stigma of racism —acting guilty—would put in place a policy like that?
Well, again, white guilt—its purpose really is not to help the people who it says it wants to help but to give the society itself a way to dissociate from racism, and say, oh, see, we’re not a racist society, and we know blacks have had it rough, and so we’re going to give them welfare, and we’re going to—without any strings attached. That’s just how wonderful and generous we are.
Well, you put that in place, and, of course, it was at that precise moment in American history that the black underclass began to develop. That we began to have illegitimacy rates—even to this very day, the illegitimacy rate in black America is about 70 percent. In many inner city communities the illegitimacy rate is 90 percent. There was a rapper a couple weeks ago who said, “marriage is for white people.”
Slavery and segregation came nowhere close to injuring the black family in the way that these white guilt welfare policies injured, if not destroyed, the black family in America.
It was precisely the black family that had enabled blacks to survive slavery and segregation. It was the black family that was the primary institution in black America that enabled us to survive all of that oppression.
And so now because we live in a society that doesn’t feel, but acts guiltily towards us all the time, and it doesn’t feel it has the moral authority to ever ask anything of us, we get policies that injure us more profoundly than our oppression did.
Well, let me look at the other side. There’s another side to this story, and that’s the black side, and of course I think much of this extends to other minorities, but it certainly does especially apply, I think to blacks.
When we won the civil rights movement, and we did win it, when white supremacy was defeated, we moved into freedom for the very first time in our history. And, of course, freedom had been the promised land, and we had longed to get there. You go back to the Negro spirituals, and black music, and folklore, and there’s all this talk about the promised land, and what’s it going to be like when we get there, and so forth. And of course we always equated that promised land with freedom.
My current book is White Guilt, and it’s an attempt to look at what seems to me to be a really important phenomenon, certainly in American life if it doesn’t extend beyond that I think maybe to much of the Western world. And nobody else was writing about it, so it seemed to me that that’s what a writer is looking for, new territory.
So I’ll just talk about that for a little while. I don’t want to give you a whole, full-blown, technical lecture here and put everybody to sleep, so what I’d like to do is just talk about it for a little while. Then we’ll open it up for questions and have a conversation.
It begins, it seems to me, in a phenomenon that I think, at any rate, is one of the most important events certainly in late 20th century history. I think even more important than the collapse of communism that happened in the ‘80s. And that is the collapse or the delegitimization, to use the long awkward word, of white supremacy. And it’s interesting to me that this phenomenon has gone unremarked, uncommented on in many ways. But white supremacy was an enormously important force, idea in the world for centuries, and organized the entire globe, and extended the nation-state system from one end of the world to the other. So its mark will never leave the world, and it gave a coherence to the world.
And the important thing, I think, to understand about white supremacy is not whether or not it really is an argument for the supremacy of whites or the inferiority of other races, but what was important about it was the idea that whiteness constituted in and of itself moral authority. And so that if a black man in Africa met a white man on a path somewhere, and there was no one around within 50 miles, the black man would have to carry the white man’s bags—because whiteness was authority, and thus it was power. And so whites—given that authority—could very reasonably go around the world and take over whatever territories they desired, and to take whatever resources they desired, and to then sort of corral the people into some sort of servitude if it so suited them. Well, so you see it was an enormously powerful idea that gave a certain meaning to life in the world.
After World War II there began to be revolutions from one end of the globe to the other. There was a revolution in India that was passive. There were revolutions all across Africa, all across the Middle East, all across Asia. Some of these revolutions were violent. The Algerian revolution was a particularly violent one. Some of them were pacifistic—India. The American civil rights revolution was just one of many. It was one, thankfully, that was also nonviolent. Some were communist. Again, nationalistic.
But in any case, all of them were in one way or another revolutions against, not the idea of white supremacy—they sort of left that argument aside—but against the authority. And they succeeded. Western powers retreated everywhere in the world. Britain, France drew back from their colonies. The civil rights movement in America was victorious. So that the idea that whiteness in and of itself constituted authority was defeated, was killed off.
There are no serious people today anywhere in the world who stand forth in the public square and argue that whites ought to rule the world, that white supremacy is a valid idea. Doesn’t mean that people don’t believe in the idea of white supremacy, doesn’t mean that all racism is gone, but the authority that was once inherent in white supremacy has been defeated, and I think it has had a profound effect on the world. Certainly it has also had a profound effect here in America.
Looking specifically at America, which in many ways is where I think the dimensions of white guilt become maybe their clearest. In 1964, we passed a civil rights bill in the United States. In 1965, we passed the Voting Rights Act. Both of these acts I think are some of the greatest social legislation ever passed anywhere in the world, ever written anywhere in the world. They’re the model for other such legislation around the world. And inherent in this legislation was the acknowledgement on the part of America that it had done something very wrong, that racism was wrong. That slavery was wrong. That segregation was wrong. That white supremacy itself was wrong.
I think this was America’s greatest moment. Here was a nation that morally came to terms with itself, faced itself. Maybe it has happened, but I’m not aware of it anywhere else in the world before this happening, where a society rich and powerful looks at itself, examines itself in the way that America did at that period in time, and makes the decision to change, and acknowledges the wrong, and vows to become a different kind of society.
And so America has to be applauded. I’m glad to be in America, because America was able to do that. It would have been a very difficult if America had not been able to do that.
The problem, though, as always happens in human affairs, when you acknowledge a wrong, you say, yes, it was wrong, and we’re going to move away from that. The price you pay is that you lose your moral authority. And I think this is again one of the most important events in American history, that given after the civil rights movement Americans, white Americans, but more importantly than individuals are institutions, lost a considerable amount of moral authority, because now blacks and other minorities could look at them, could point the finger, and could say, well, by your own acknowledgement, by your own acknowledgement you’re admitting that you—that America did us wrong.
And so the moral authority that whites lost shifted to minorities and became extreme—it became an important source of power for minorities. As I’ve said, white guilt is black power. It’s the same—they have the same phenomenon, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute when I look at specifically how blacks responded to this.
So white guilt, then, is not a guilt of conscience. It’s not “I can’t sleep at night because I’m so guilty about what happened to black Americans before I was born.” It’s not that kind. If white guilt was that then we wouldn’t be here today talking about this phenomenon. But it is this vacuum of moral authority, this having the authority to be able to speak about any number of issues, race, poverty, and so forth, because of having acknowledged this past, the sins of the past.
White guilt is enforced by stigma. When you acknowledge that you were a part of a group—that you belong to a group that did a wrong in the past. If you want to I think see this in vivid terms, think of the Germans after World War II, the stigma of having been a Nazi, having a Nazi in your family, an uncle who was whatever. Well, you might yourself not have been a Nazi, might never have subscribed to that point of view, but outside of Germany, all Germans in a sense became from then on stigmatized by the sin of Nazism, and other people could look at them and have a certain kind of, again, moral authority in relation to them.
Well, in many ways I think that’s what happened in America. Whites became stigmatized as racist. And from that point on whites were in the position of forever having to prove the negative, that they’re not a racist. And again, if they don’t prove the negative, then the stigma sticks. Well, you must be a racist. And so since that time whites, and particularly, again, institutions, have lived under threat of stigmatization.
Why’s that important? It’s important because if you are stigmatized as a racist in American society—an institution, let’s say. It’s easier, I think, to see on the institutional level. Then that institution becomes illegitimate. It loses its legitimacy. It loses its ability to really function in this society. So the stigma, again, has a powerful impact, because it has so much control over legitimacy. How can you be a legitimate institution in a multi-racial society that is supposed to be free, and everyone is supposed to be equal under the law—how can you be legitimate if you don’t have any blacks in your institution?
So we could look at a disparity like that—blacks could—again, moral authority having passed to us. We could look at a disparity like that, and we could say you don’t have any blacks in your institution. It’s a racist institution. It’s illegitimate. We will sue it. We will do whatever it takes. And in a sense since the ‘60s that’s pretty much what has been —what has happened is that minorities have begun to sort of manipulate that stigma. We call it some circles today the race card. Play the race card. What does the race card mean? Well, if you don’t do what I want you to do, then you’re going to be stigmatized as a racist, and the price you’ll pay is you’ll lose your legitimacy.
So white guilt is a powerful, powerful force. Not because people feel guilty, but because people are stigmatized, and again have to prove the negative all the time, and living forever under threat of being stigmatized.
This leads to the next phenomenon that is a feature of white guilt, and that’s dissociation. The only way to get away from the stigma of being a racist is to find some way to dissociate oneself from the stigma, from the image that you are a racist. That you are like the whites of old. That you still secretly are a white supremacist. That you still secretly believe in this. That you may be smiling, but your heart is still committed to racism. And so again, whites walking around under this sort of cloud of suspicion then have to find ways to dissociate themselves from that.
The first great example of dissociation in American life was President Johnson’s Great Society. Why all of a sudden, in 1965, do you just say, well, we’re going to spend billions and billions of dollars, and we’re going to create all kind of social programs, and we’re going to dump all this money, and we’re going to end poverty in our time? You create all these programs, almost all of which failed. Certainly they did not eradicate poverty. They did not bring about racial equality. They did virtually nothing. But they did dissociate the American society and the American government from the stigma of racism.
The federal government had just, by its own legislation, acknowledged that it had been racist. That was too much moral authority for minorities to have, and the government really had to do something dramatic because the sin had been so dramatic. The wrong had been so dramatic, and had gone on for so long, and had so clearly violated the principles of a free society. That America had to do something big and huge. Had to spend a lot of money, to say in effect we’re not like that anymore. We’re not that old America that discriminated and oppressed people. We’re a new America. And we’re going even get rid of poverty, we’re going to wipe it out from the human condition.
So the purpose of the Great Society was not actually to end poverty or achieve racial equality. It was to restore some legitimacy to the American government, to the American society.
I remember that time very well. I was in college in those years, and as much as I disagree with the Great Society, as terrible as it was, as wasteful it was, as destructive as it was, I can remember feeling that I was not going to recognize my own government if it didn’t do something, if it didn’t make some gesture. I’d be happy to tell it what kind at this point, but it certainly didn’t make the right one, and I was a part of it back in those days.
But it had to do something. There were riots from one end of America to the other. Los Angeles burned up. New York. Newark. Detroit. Huge riots. Destructive riots. Many deaths. Much, much property damage, and it looked as though blacks were simply no longer going to identify with America as their nation. Militant groups began to spring up everywhere. Cultural nationalists. The Black Panthers right up the road here in Oakland. No longer with nonviolent passive resistance, now with guns, and ready to have shootouts with the police, and so forth.
So the President knew there had to be something huge to dissociate the United States government from the past, to say we’re not like that anymore, we’re a different America.
Well, my feeling is that almost all of the racial policy since the Great Society, since 1965, has been designed, not to solve racial problems, but to dissociate our institutions and our government from its racist past and to restore moral authority and legitimacy to the government.
You see, for example, a few years ago in the affirmative case, the Michigan case. There were 100 briefs were submitted to the Supreme Court in favor of racial preferences by every imaginable American institution, from corporations to city governments. Even the military submitted a brief. You notice there was no march on Washington in favor of affirmative action by blacks, by black people, or other minorities. Nothing. But this extraordinary pressure from America’s institutions arguing that the Supreme Court ought to allow racial preferences to stay in place.
Well, again, why? I think the reason is because those institutions are saying, look, we are under a stigma. Our legitimacy is at stake here. We have to have a way to prove, to indicate, that we’re not like that anymore, that we’re not an exclusive racist institution. We are an open, inclusive—that’s the new word—inclusive institution that wants everybody in our midst, and so we have to have diversity policies, and we have to be able to bring in minorities so that they’re here, because again, our entire legitimacy depends on it. Harvard University, Stanford University, all of the Ivy League have to have about 8 percent of every single freshman class be black. Has to be. Not 7 percent, not 6 percent, but at least 8 percent. Probably without racial preferences about 1 percent, 2 percent of every freshman class would be black. So the rest, the 7 percent are the result of racial preferences.
I’ve written a lot about the negative effects I think that has on minorities. I think one of the cruelest things a society can do is to take the best and the brightest young black Americans and basically say to them you simply cannot compete with the best and brightest of other races. We won’t allow you to do that. You can’t do it. You have to depend on our paternalism.
Well, what a cruel thing to do to a group that’s trying to overcome four centuries of oppression. But does the administration at Harvard, or Stanford, or Yale, or Princeton or any of those schools care about the impact that they’re having on black students, the way they’re stigmatizing them as second raters? Even that 1 percent or 2 percent who would have gotten into that institution anyway?
They say, look, we have to have 8 percent blacks in our freshman class. We don't care about you, because the legitimacy of our institution depends on that. If we go down to 1 percent or 2 percent, then we are going to be stigmatized as a racist university. Faculty won’t want to come here. We will lose money. We will lose grants. Our institution will decline in its whole. We will lose our reputation in every way. And so baby, we’re going to have 8 percent blacks in this freshman class no matter what we have to do to get them. Because it’s the dissociation from the stigma that is so necessary to the legitimacy of the institution.
The early ‘70s, we began to practice a welfare in America, where we basically said to people—this is coming out of the welfare rights movement and coming out of the civil rights movement. We basically said to people, okay, we’ll give you a little bit better than subsistence living, and you don’t have to do anything at all. Nothing. Don’t have to educate yourself or your children. Don’t be married—in fact, you can’t be married. You can’t have a whole family. And if your children grow up and they have children, then of course, we’ll put them on the dole too. And they too don't have to do anything.
So it’s one of these odd situations where you actually put an incentive in place for human inertia. You get rewarded for being nothing, for doing nothing. Nothing. You get rewarded for in a sense giving up your humanity.
Well, what kind of society, other than one trying to dissociate from the stigma of racism —acting guilty—would put in place a policy like that?
Well, again, white guilt—its purpose really is not to help the people who it says it wants to help but to give the society itself a way to dissociate from racism, and say, oh, see, we’re not a racist society, and we know blacks have had it rough, and so we’re going to give them welfare, and we’re going to—without any strings attached. That’s just how wonderful and generous we are.
Well, you put that in place, and, of course, it was at that precise moment in American history that the black underclass began to develop. That we began to have illegitimacy rates—even to this very day, the illegitimacy rate in black America is about 70 percent. In many inner city communities the illegitimacy rate is 90 percent. There was a rapper a couple weeks ago who said, “marriage is for white people.”
Slavery and segregation came nowhere close to injuring the black family in the way that these white guilt welfare policies injured, if not destroyed, the black family in America.
It was precisely the black family that had enabled blacks to survive slavery and segregation. It was the black family that was the primary institution in black America that enabled us to survive all of that oppression.
And so now because we live in a society that doesn’t feel, but acts guiltily towards us all the time, and it doesn’t feel it has the moral authority to ever ask anything of us, we get policies that injure us more profoundly than our oppression did.
Well, let me look at the other side. There’s another side to this story, and that’s the black side, and of course I think much of this extends to other minorities, but it certainly does especially apply, I think to blacks.
When we won the civil rights movement, and we did win it, when white supremacy was defeated, we moved into freedom for the very first time in our history. And, of course, freedom had been the promised land, and we had longed to get there. You go back to the Negro spirituals, and black music, and folklore, and there’s all this talk about the promised land, and what’s it going to be like when we get there, and so forth. And of course we always equated that promised land with freedom.
