For quite a while I thought that Obama’s slogan “change we can believe in” was a bromide wrapped in a truism.
After all, there will be a change of presidents in January 2009 and anyone observing this reality has to believe in it. And empty slogans allow voters to project their own hopes onto a candidate.
But Shelby Steele sees something deeper in the Obama candidacy, an end to “white guilt.” Contra Jesse Jackson, Obama wants to drop “white guilt” as a form of cultural leverage and use the resulting “white gratitude to win the presidency. The “change” is a change in the political strategy of the black community. It is absolutely fascinating analysis.
Here’s the theme:
 Their faith was in the easy moral leverage over white America that the civil rights victories of the 1960s had suddenly bestowed on them. So Mr. Jackson and his generation of black leaders made keeping whites “on the hook” the most sacred article of the post-’60s black identity.
They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To argue differently — that black development, for example, might be a more enduring road to black equality — took whites “off the hook” and was therefore an unpardonable heresy. For this generation, an Uncle Tom was not a black who betrayed his race; it was a black who betrayed the group’s bounty of moral leverage over whites. And now comes Mr. Obama, who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.
Mr. Obama’s great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America’s racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.
There are a few problems with this analysis. Michelle Obama seems to be the Jackson school. And “white guilt” is something that exists largely among liberals and baby boomers. Those of us born after the success of the civil rights movement simply do not feel guilty. We didn’t support any segregationists or oppose civil rights–and we don’t believe in guilt by association. Our friends come from diverse backgrounds and when race comes up it is almost always playful. (”White boy here says he knows how to cook ribs” or, when a friend calculates incorrectly, another says “What is that? Ebonics math?”). In the class room and certain professional settings, we tiptoe around race to keep our older, uptight baby boomer colleagues happy–but, in private, it is no big deal. Yes, there are still residual pockets of racism. But most of us think those people are misguided idiots, not a dire threat to the national consensus on racial matters. We have the equality they fought for and we like it.
In other words, Obama’s timing may be perfect. The supply of “white guilt” may have peaked. The time to trade it for gratitude may be right.
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3 Comments
Roger L Simon:Interesting. Of course Obama seems to want it both ways. Otherwise why spend 20 years in a church that traded almost exclusively on the guilt gambit, mixed with its handmaiden, black separatism? That won’t make white feel better. Sure, Obama’s right that the days of the Jacksons and Sharptons are numbered, if not over, but he hasn’t full shaken free. And then there are foreign policy problems… but that’s another matter.
Jul 22, 2008 - 11:18 pm Clare:First, guilt is a useless emotion. There are many of us who were here prior to the 60s ‘love-in’ and many of us who abhor the affirmative action that created. The only reason any racism is still around is because, as you pointed out, those who are angry continue to push victimization.
Guess what–life is pretty simple, especially in America where there is opportunity of success. Opportunity of success does not mean equality of success no matter how much affirmative action is granted.
Jul 23, 2008 - 5:09 am j green:Obama is still trading on the guilt market, but he’s doing it in a slick way. Remember the speech he made that was labeled a major break-through and honest discussion on race, where, instead of denouncing his beloved reverend, he actually made a case about the unheeled wounds and harm “we still haven’t fixed”? (Sounds like Jesse and Al, no?)
Obama said “We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” Here begins the guilt trip that some claim he has abandoned.
Furthermore “Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students”. He thinks we still have segregation in schools. “we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education”
“That history [guilt trip again] helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.”
“And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods…” The alleged “lack of basic services” is attributed to poorer, older neighborhoods, where black people happen to live. The services are not lacking because the residents are black, Meessrs. Obama, Wright, Jackson, and Sharpton–I’m sure if they moved to Beverly Hills they wouldn’t have that problem and it would still not be related to skin color. Perhaps they allege that the power company, water company, phone company, cable company, and anyone else providing “basic services” will come make the official “black man reduction” in levels of service at a Beverly Hills mansion as soon as the black people move in?
He mentions these points to us, submitting them as facts that services are lacking in black neighborhoods because the neighborhood is populated by blacks–not because those blacks happen to live in a poor under-serviced neighborhood. If he was honest, he’d say “I believe this too” since in grammatical construction he already did–just come out with it and admit it the way Jesse and Al already profess.
“…blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.” He says we are continuing to inflict damage! This is worse than the guilt trip!! The guilt trip is shaming the whites on past events that, though they no longer happen, continue to have reprecussions (though Obama, Wright, Jackson, et al would never phrase it like this, the reprecussions serve to explain statistics like the disproportionate number of black criminials or blacks living in poverty, etc.) They aren’t settling for mere guilt–they are asserting the sins of the past continue to this very day! Forget shame, this is more powerful.
“This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up.” Obviously, Obama himself is also a follower of these philosophies since he presented these to us as facts without modifiers explaining that certain people hold those views (the people in those generations who grew up with these sins), and then synthesizing it with this thought quoted here. This statement is a contradiction anyway. How can he defend Wright, for example, since he grew up in the times these sins were occcuring, and concurrently in the same speech, say the sins are still occuring?
His speech is full of contradictions, giving points to both people who think Obama is different and others who think he’s the same. That’s bacuase he is a charlattan. The existance of phrases like those quoted by me prove without possibility of denial that he is exactly the same thing–otherwise he would neverhave submittd these “continuing damages” hallucinations in the first place.
He sounds exactly like Wright and Jackson and Sharpton to me. Like Arafat, he has different stories for the consumption of different audiences. Though Arafat could hide behind different laguages, Obama merely depends on racial divisions to prevent the one version of the story from permeating other groups who are not supposed to hear it.
Jul 23, 2008 - 10:52 am