Who would have thought that rectifying the sins of America’s racial past would institute new wrongs? It’s unthinkable, but here we are. My story is about a new injustice born out of America’s confession of guilt. It’s a familiar story about how we who live in the “age of white guilt” participate in the charade of the present to avoid the shame of our collective racial past.
In order to tell my story, I will draw from Shelby Steele’s penetrating insights. Steele is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and specializes in the study of race relations and multiculturalism. He has written widely on race in American society and the consequence of contemporary social programs on race relations. The purpose of my story is two-fold: 1) to introduce you to Shelby Steele’s seminal cultural analysis and 2) to illustrate his analysis in real time.
Historically Situating the Text
It is 1988, and Shelby Steele publishes “On Being Black and Middle Class” in Commentary Magazine, an essay about the double bind of being black and middle-class in post-Civil Rights America. It is a year before Derrick Bell holds a conference where Critical Race Theory is born; Bell’s protégé, Kimberlé Crenshaw, introduces the idea of “Intersectionality”; and Peggy McIntosh coins the phrase “White Privilege.”[1]
1. Voddie T. Baucham, Jr., Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe (Washington: Salem Books, 2021), xi.
Two years later, in 1990, Steele published The Content of Our Character, including a chapter titled “White Guilt.” Six years later, he published A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. In 2006, he published White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.
With Voddie Baucham’s admonition to read broadly, think of Steele as Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, a cultural guide for post-Civil Rights America.
The Central Theme of White Guilt
According to Steele, we live in a culture where personal morality has given way to a social morality, an ethics defined by mere identification. The moral person in 2006 is bound not by an ethic of personal virtue but by a social ethic that demands both a dissociation from historic racism and an association with any target of perceived systemic injustice. This cultural shift elevates social virtue over personal virtue. For example, I could live a sexually promiscuous lifestyle but still be considered a moral person if I dissociate from the systemic, moral failings of America’s past by associating with its former victims—blacks, women, homosexuals, etc.
He posits that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, America’s confession of wrongdoing and its rejection of white supremacy, created a vacuum of moral authority that requires whites to bargain for innocence. White skin is now associated with the sins of America’s racist past. So, the bargainer assumes different masks to wriggle out from under the burden of that stigma by becoming a friend of the dispossessed, or the homosexual apologist, or the LGBTQIA+ sympathizer, etc.
The contemporary outworking of Steele’s contention is that whites embrace identity politics as a means to an end: a supposed moral innocence.
What we now recognize as wokeness is a bargaining chip in an attempt to regain moral authority lost by white guilt due to systemic racism, and identification is the key to winning it back. It’s a reflexive effort to grasp innocence: “Oh, no, I’m not like so and so. I’m not a bigot—not a racist, sexist, homophobic. I’m not transphobic. I’m innocent!”
But innocence can’t be gained with bargaining chips. In the age of white guilt, innocence lost cannot be bought back with a panicked dissociation without exacting a cost, without wounding another.
My Story: The Day MLK and I Became “Racists”
Katie is viscerally agitated: “I don’t care what you say. You’re wrong, Mr. Kirk. Just wrong!”
It is 2023. We are in a sophomore English classroom in a public school in the Midwest.
Having watched Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech the class prior, we are now reading the text together. Katie interrupts, assuming the air of a deeply offended moral superior, announcing that MLK’s use of the word “Negro” is wrong: “It’s the same thing as the N-word, Mr. Kirk. Why would you have us read this? I can’t listen to this. I won’t.” In tears, Katie storms out of the classroom, virtue signaling her blamelessness every step of the way.
Katie is a white, fifteen-year-old female now perched on a staircase just outside my door. She is angry, indignant, and inconsolable—ready for a fight. Katie is a 21st-century trope.
Her self-righteous posture is characteristic of her generation, a cohort primed to compete for moral authority. It is part adolescent rebellion—a challenge to authority; part reflex—to assert innocence. It’s a desperate scrapping for exoneration.
Steele’s cultural analysis would describe the scene in my classroom in terms of white guilt, where in a vacuum of moral authority, Katie is jostling for the front of the line, to be the first one offended and, by default, to claim the moral high ground.
Sitting in the stairwell, Katie cops a moralistic tone that feels like an interrogation. Later, it becomes a formal accusation: “Mr. Kirk is wrong for reading the word ‘Negro’ in class. He’s using the N-word in class.” By word-of-mouth, the accusation shortens: “Mr. Kirk uses the N-word in class.” The smear crystallizes: “Mr. Kirk is a racist.”
“Racist” becomes the “word on the street,” the rumor mill in the halls, and the stigma sticks. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty until proven innocent.
But my reputation is not the only casualty in this cultural transaction. Unthinkably, MLK is smeared, and his famous speech is canceled. In short order, an edict from the administration proclaims, “Maybe our sophomores are not quite ready to be confronted by such controversial literature.”
How did MLK’s iconic speech become a benighted, controversial text, one that triggers woke teenagers in 2023?
With Steele as our guide, he gives us a clue: “Most of today’s conservatives sound like Martin Luther King in 1963. Contemporary conservatism treats race with precisely the same compassionate Jeffersonian liberalism that Martin Luther King articulated in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”[2]
2. Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Harper Perennial ed (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2007), 177.
Yes, Katie may have been confused about the “N-word,” but it was much more than that. She instinctively knew that she and MLK were not inhabiting the same cultural space. As we analyzed the speech, it wasn’t just the word “Negro” that offended her sensibilities; it was MLK’s appeal to principles, the ideals of the American Founding, that provoked her. MLK became associated with the “white face” of Mr. Kirk, a “whiteness” with which she desired to dissociate.
In the age of racism, blacks experienced what Steele describes as the “rage of invisibility.”[3] While telling his own story, he uses an iconic scene from Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man to lament a bitter reality for blacks in the age of white guilt: they are as invisible now as they were then. Sixty years later, where once he was unseen due to overt racism, Steele explains that white guilt renders him invisible, still, as an individual—his individual identity subsumed by the white need to categorize and patronize him.
3. Steele, White Guilt, 135.
In the age of white guilt (wokeness), whites are triggered similarly by a ubiquitous, pernicious, and public shaming attached to one’s skin color. But of course, this genetic characteristic is as indelible as it is immutable. One cannot hide from the color of one’s skin, but one can dissociate oneself from it by accusing another of racism, bigotry, or prejudice.
On that day, I, too, became invisible. Katie could not see me. All she saw was what she imagined me to be—a construct of the deplorable white man, a menacing symbol of all she felt compelled to dissociate from.
During the school year, I became invisible to my principal, too. On three occasions, he repeated a line to me that stabbed like a knife: “Well, Tim, I don’t think you’re a racist, but that’s the reputation you have in the building.” For his part, it was a resignation to my newly acquired public stigma and an unconscious dissociation from it. The implication being: “I don’t associate with racists or people who are accused of such things, wrongly or rightly.” Or, as Steele contends, it is “someone you dissociate with to win moral authority.”[4]
4. Steele, White Guilt, 163.
As a man wearing white skin, to associate with me now is to place himself in danger of losing his position of moral authority, so even in his own head, he must dissociate from his former friend and colleague.
I, too, experience the rage of invisibility.
Steele describes this manifestation of white guilt in the following way: “Such a person has metaphorically annihilated you. He doesn’t hit you. He simply doesn’t see you out of a conviction that there is nothing of you worth seeing beyond his own thin preconception of you. You cease to exist in your own right and exist, instead, as a figment of his imagination.”[5]
5. Steele, White Guilt, 135.
I protest, “But you know me. Why would you imply that I might be a racist or that I’ve done something that warrants that label? We’re colleagues and friends. We’re brothers in Christ.”
Let us be like the men from Issachar in 1 Chronicles, men and women who understand the times so that we do not intentionally or unintentionally sin against one another (1 Chron. 12:32).
Understanding the cultural forces swirling around us may help us to realize that, yes, even in the Church, we may fall prey to its undue influences. My principal is a fellow believer, but he unconsciously bends the knee to the demands of white guilt and wounds me in this cultural transaction.
My brother steals my reputation in exchange for racial innocence.
The injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” is a command to practice what is unnatural—to consider the other over our natural self-preoccupation. Likewise, Jesus’s command to “love one another” is so central to the New Testament that it is impossible to conceive of a Christian who does not love sacrificially.
If, in the age of white guilt, identification is the key to moral innocence, then intentionality is the key to keep us from falsely accusing one another.
John 13:34-35: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
In the age of white guilt, Steele contends that “reasoning against an association is like punching a shadow.” Futile. Infuriating. Demoralizing. On the same page, Steele writes: white guilt “operates more by association and dissociation than by reason and principle.”[6] The modus operandi of white guilt defies logic—it is untouched by appeals to reason. It is a perfunctory reflex, an unconscious, involuntary reaction to stigmatization.
6. Steele, White Guilt, 135.
To avoid the shame of the past, we participate in the charade of the present.
Again, it’s neither malicious nor intentional, but my principal sees only a caricature of Tim Kirk, “the racist,” from whom he must dissociate to protect his own racial innocence. In the age of white guilt, because he is white, he is already guilty, and I am now a liability. Our friendship is subordinated to his higher need to protect himself against the libel that lies dormant under the surface—always. He must dissociate from me as a newly stigmatized, “racist” other.
But why does he cancel MLK? Steele would say that he kneels to the unseen, ubiquitous pressure to conform to the demands of white guilt.
Being a former English teacher himself, having taught MLK, Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass, and Langston Hughes, this principal knows the difference between “Negro” and the N-word. But instead of simply correcting Katie and company (she has involved her friends and family—calls made to the district office), he eventually cancels these historic black voices in obeisance to the logic of white guilt, to a social morality that claims the following: “In matters of race, a white administrator does not have the moral authority to be reasonable, to speak the truth, or to correct error.” And so, he capitulates. And history, and memory, and truth capitulate right along next to him.
The consequence is that I am now a deplorable “racist,” and MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech is intolerable, too controversial to be countenanced in the age of white guilt.
So many crimes are committed for fear of blushing, to avoid shame.
My story—and thousands like it—confirm and illustrate that the cultural revolution and reversal that began in the 1960s is complete; the profound cultural shift from personal to social morality is operating at total capacity.
In the “age of white guilt,” my white skin is suspect—a marker of inferiority. To endure the shame of it, we are tempted to align ourselves with a social morality that dissociates from the very hint of bigotry, regardless of facts, stats, or truth. Why? We participate in the charade to protect ourselves from being accused, shore up our fragile sense of self, and distance ourselves from anyone or anything that might impugn our character—our moral standing in the world.
And because MLK now sounds like a conservative—in alignment with classical “Jeffersonian liberalism”—he, like me, is associated with the damnable “age of racism.”
Though I am in good company, he and I join a growing fugitive class of those who, having been deemed deplorable, are excommunicated from polite society—canceled.
Shelby Steele: A Voice of Reason in an Irrational Age
Yes, it’s unthinkable, but here we are. Who would have thought that rectifying the sins of America’s racial past would institute new wrongs? But we who live in the age of white guilt find ourselves participating in the charade of the present to avoid the shame of our collective racial past.
Charles Mackay once posited that “men . . . think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”[7]
7. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), viii.
If we wish to recover our senses, if we hope to understand our cultural moment for the purpose of loving each other well, Shelby Steele’s works, especially his little book about the advent of white guilt in post-Civil Rights America, is an excellent place to start. I contend that it is required reading—but only for those willing to be confronted by controversial literature.
