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THE AGE OF WHITE GUILT



This is the title of a long, thoughtful and most provocative article by Shelby Steele, a black research fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford University. The article appeared in the November 2002 issue of Harper’s magazine. In essence, the article details the wrong turn taken by the Afro-American leadership community in emphasizing the wrongs done to that community as a whole by American white society over the centuries. Instead of demanding that Afro-Americans take their own individual lives into hand and raise themselves as individuals, the leadership of that community continually points out the weaknesses of the Afro-American community and its impossibility of improving itself by its own efforts. As Steele states: “Here is a brief litany of obvious truths that have been resisted in the public discourse of black America over the last thirty years: a group is no stronger than its individuals; when individuals transform themselves they transform the group; the freer the individual, the stronger the group; social responsibility begins in individual responsibility. Add to this an indispensable fact that has also been unmentionable: that American greatness has a lot to do with ingrained individualism, with the freedom granted individuals to pursue their happiness – this despite many egregious lapses and an outright commitment to the oppression of black individuals for centuries. And there is one last obvious but unassimilated fact: ethnic groups that have asked a lot from their individuals have done exceptionally well in America even while enduring discrimination.”   

 

                        Steele continues: “Now consider what this [Black] Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-Black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly, a conservative reformer who opposes racial preferences, points to far less racism and far more freedom and opportunity for blacks, the young [Black] man must find a way, against all the mounting facts, to argue that Black Americans simply cannot compete without preferences. If his forebears seized freedom in a long and arduous struggle for civil rights, he must argue that his own generation is unable to compete on paper and pencil standardized tests. It doesn’t help that he locates the cause of Black weakness in things like ‘structural racism’ and ‘uneven playing fields.’ Blacks from families that make $100,000 a year or more perform worse on the SAT than whites from families that make $10,000 a year or less. After decades of racial preferences Blacks remain the lowest performing student group in American higher education. And once they are out of college and in professions, their own children also underperform in relation to their white and Asian peers. Thus, the young man must also nurture the idea of a black psychological woundedness that is baroque in its capacity to stifle black aspiration. And all his faith, his proud belief, must be in the truth of this woundedness and the injustice that caused it, because this is his only avenue to racial pride. He is a figure of pathos because his faith in racial victimization is his only release from racial shame.”

 

                        Steele puts the matter even more bluntly: “My parents protested in an age of white racism, whereas I protested in an age of white guilt. They were punished. I was rewarded…To be black in my father’s generation, when racism was rampant, was to be a man who was very often victimized by racism. To be black in the age of white guilt is to be a victim who is rarely victimized by racism. Today in black life there is what might be called “identity grievance” – certainty of racial grievance that is entirely disconnected from actual grievance. And the fervor of this symbiosis with white guilt has all but killed off the idea of the individual as a source of group strength in black life. All is group and unity, even as those minority groups that ask much of their individuals thrive in America despite any discrimination they encounter…Today the angry rap singer and Jesse Jackson and the black-studies professor are all joined by an unexamined devotion to white guilt.”

 

                        Steele points out the obvious but politically unutterable truth. The mainstream black community has been ill served by its leaders and spokesmen. By their pandering to white guilt and not demanding high standards of family life, educational performance and mental and moral toughness from their own group, they have institutionalized victimization, resentment and the belief of inherent inferiority within the black society. Affirmative action has allowed many more blacks to attend university than ever before. But it has consistently failed to improve the standards of scholarship or professional achievement of those students. It has also forced blacks to come forth into the world of education and commerce as representatives of a group rather than as individuals, free to rise and fall on their own merits. Again Steele sums up the point: “[The black] lives in a society that needs his race for the ‘good’ it wants to do more than it needs his individual self. His race makes him popular with white institutions and unifies him with blacks. But he is unsupported everywhere as an individual. Nothing in his society asks for or even allows his flowering as a full, free and responsible person. As is always the case when the ‘good’ becomes ascendant over freedom, and coercion itself becomes a good thing, the individual finds himself in a gulag.”  

 

                        Steele concludes his trenchant essay by saying: “Restraint should be the watchword in racial matters. We should help people who need help. There are, in fact, no races that need help; only individuals, citizens. James Baldwin once wrote: ‘What Europe still gives an American is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself.’ If America now gives this sanction to most citizens, its institutions still fiercely deny it to blacks. And this society will never sanction blacks in this way until it drops all the mechanisms by which it tries to appease white guilt. Guilt can be a very civilizing force, but only when it is simply carried as a kind of knowledge. Efforts to appease or dispel it will only engage the society in new patterns of dehumanization against the same people who inspired guilt in the first place. This will always be true. Over time maybe nothing in the society, not even white guilt, will reach out and play on my race, bind me to it for opportunity. I won’t ever find in America what Baldwin found in Europe, but someday maybe others will.”   

 

                        Much of Steele’s thesis can be applied to sections of the Jewish world as well. Here in Israel, the rise of the Shas political party is based solely on the perception of much of the Sephardic community in Israel that it can never get ahead here without outside governmental Ashkenazic help. Shas’ politics is to continually portray its community as being helpless as individuals and that only Shas representing all Sephardim as a group can lobby the government sufficiently to provide the necessary outside help to this community. There is no sense of individuality allowed to take root in the community, no individual self-identity – only the group and the injustices that it has suffered. Shas has not been nearly as successful here in Israel as Sharfton, Jackson, Cornell West, et al. have been in America. The Ashkenazic sense of guilt is nowhere near as strong in Israel as is the sense of white guilt in America. But until such time as the Sephardim see themselves in terms of their own personal freedom to develop as individuals and not only as members of the group they will continue to lag behind general Israeli society no matter how many seats Shas controls in the Knesset. All immigrating groups to Israel and everywhere else in the world as well perforce begin as groups. But those who are successful in integrating themselves into the society do so by becoming individuals and shedding much of the group identity baggage. It is no coincidence that the “Russian” parties that fielded candidates for the last Knesset elections are running as general parties in this coming election. The Russian immigration has been so successful that Russian immigrants see themselves now as individual Israelis and not as a group that suffers from discrimination. The Sephardim, for whatever reasons, have not been able to move past their group identity as of yet and achieve the individuality and personal freedom that will alone raise them educationally, socially and financially. 

 

                        The same problem exists in the Charedi world. There also, there is scant room for individuality and personal freedom and choice. Loyalty to the group is the highest priority. The sense that no one can or even should attempt to make it on one’s own is so ingrained in our society that it is now natural and ordinary to demand that others be responsible for one’s welfare, family, finances, and personal well being. Whether in Israel, where these demands are mostly made to a government that is officially despised and unrecognized as being legitimate in the Chardedi world, or in the rest of the world where the burden falls on government welfare programs, parents and grandparents and on the general Jewish community, the moral, psychological and social toll on Charedi society is staggering. Again, as Steele pointed out, there are always individuals that need help and must be helped. The Torah told us explicitly that “the poor shall not depart from the face of the earth.”  But the Torah speaks of the poor as individuals, not as whole sections of society, committed generation after generation to living on the largesse of others. And because one is bound to the group so tightly for one’s own minimum welfare, one must conform to the dictates of the group, no matter what one’s personal opinion is. No room for individuality here. Conformity and silence are the watchwords of the group.

 

            In Jewish history it has always been the “different” person that has pushed us forward. Rashi, Rambam, Rabbi Yosef Caro, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the Gaon of Vilna, the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, Rabbi Yisrael Lipkin of Salant, Rabbi Shraga Mendelowitz, etc. – the builders of the Jewish people over the past millennia were all “different” people. They conformed to no particular group pattern and they were free individuals who propelled the Jewish people forward by their originality, creativity and freedom of thought, expression and action. It is hard to see how such original, individualistic, creative people can arise from the situation of the Charedi community grouping as it currently exists. People who are trained and indoctrinated to expect to always be cared for others, who are not independent thinkers, who lack self-reliance and are not free to develop their own inner talents can hardly be expected to rise to effective leadership roles in their community later in their lives. And the Charedi community suffers greatly from the fact that, unlike the blacks and the Sephardim, there is almost no guilt felt towards it by the rest of Jewish society. That itself, in my opinion, should give us pause and wonder why that is. After all, is not Torah to become beloved through us? Only freedom from the shackles of the group, the rigidity of party lines and unquestioning stifling conformity will create a society of Torah individuals who will lead the generation into the light of social acceptance and personal accomplishment.