White Guilt Quotes

“It is also the formula that keeps black America underdeveloped even as we enjoy new freedom and a proliferation of opportunity. No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“To be a proud and militant black after the sixties, you screamed black power in order to induce the application of white power. And you lived by an ethic that still sees full responsibility as oppression, if not racism, when applied to blacks. Still today, the best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations. In the age of racism, whites said blacks were inferior so as not to see their own desire to exploit them, their true motivation. In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Moral authority comes to institutions only when they relieve minorities of responsibility (lowered standards, racial preferences). In this age of white guilt responsibility is synonymous with oppression where blacks are concerned. So whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism. This is the formula that locks many whites into publicly supporting affirmative action even as they privately dislike it.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion’s share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late sixties—and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next four decades—grew out of black America’s complete embrace of the latter option.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“anger is never automatic or even inevitable for the oppressed; it is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice. Wounds and injustices create only the potential for anger, but weakness in the oppressor calls out anger even when there is no wound or injustice. In both the best and the worst sense of the word, black rage is always a kind of opportunism.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“For black leaders in the age of white guilt the problem was how to seize all they could get from white guilt without having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer. With it, the smallest racial incident proved the “global truth” of systemic racism.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“The most striking irony of the age of white guilt is that racism suddenly became valuable to the people who had suffered it.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Like most people in the King-era civil rights movement, they were Gandhians because nonviolent passive resistance was the best way to highlight white racism as an immorality. Their rejection of violence, even as a weapon against racial oppression, gave them the extraordinary power of moral witness—the great power of the early civil rights movement. What could America think of itself when passive freedom riders were beaten or when a little black girl in crinoline and pigtails—an image of perfectly conventional human aspiration—had to be escorted into school past a screaming white mob?”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“(One of the delights of Marxian-tinged ideas for the young is the unearned sense of superiority they grant.)”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“But the American liberal “new man” that emerged in the sixties also hoped to redeem through supremacy. He was superior to all previous Americans because he was without the great American shames of racism, sexism, militarism, and materialism.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“After all, diversity is a “progressive” idea conceived of by an elite. It did not spring naturally from the American soil, as it were. And to embrace it is, at the very least, to have pretensions toward that elite.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Double standards always stigmatize precisely those they claim to help, so it will be minority officers—not white officers—who will be seen as second-rate under such a system.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Whites cannot celebrate their race without aligning themselves with white supremacy and, thus, with the murder, enslavement, and exploitation of millions the world over.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“The greatest black problem in America today is freedom. All underdeveloped, formerly oppressed groups first experience new freedom as a shock and a humiliation because freedom shows them their underdevelopment and their inability to compete as equals.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“(Today’s college presidents routinely make such speeches when they stand to proclaim their institution’s commitment to “diversity.”)”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say ‘You are free to compete with all the others.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“When I was in the fields picking tomatoes and onions on the truck farms just south of Chicago rather than caddying at Olympia Fields golf course, the experience of being responsible was in fact an experience of injustice.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Logic would have argued the other way, that the new civil rights legislation meant that blacks were facing a far less deterministic racism. And surely black leaders would have agreed with this logic if they were responding to actual racial oppression. But they weren’t. They were responding to white guilt.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“There is no determinism between one’s racial wounds and the acting out of black rage—a phrase that came into use only after the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“And, interestingly, the moral relativism of one era was the puritanism of the other. Race simply replaced sex as the primary focus of America’s moral seriousness.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Relativism spares us from far worse sins, they seemed to be saying, those greatest of all sins for my baby-boomer generation—judgmentalism and hypocrisy.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“It was unapologetic moral relativism—the idea that sexual morality is relative only to the consent of the individuals involved, and that there is no other authority or moral code larger than their choice.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“In a democracy, the legitimacy of institutions and of government itself is earned and sustained through fidelity to a discipline of democratic principles. These principles strive to ensure the ennobling conditions that free societies aspire: to freedom for the individual, the same rights for all individuals, equality under the law, equality of opportunity, and an inherent right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Freedom, then, is not a state-imposed vision of the social good (say, a classless society); rather, it is the absence of any imposed vision that would infringe on the rights and freedom of individuals. In a true democracy, freedom is a higher priority than the social good.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era – A Race Relations Scholar's Meditation on Personal Responsibility

“Dowd illustrates the great internal contradiction of white liberalism: that its paternalism, its focus on whites rather than on blacks as the agents of change, allows white supremacy to slip in the back door and once again define the fundamental relationship between whites and blacks. So the very structure of the liberal faith—that whites and “society” must facilitate black uplift—locks white liberals into an unexamined white supremacy. They can’t really believe in blacks but they must believe in whites. Whites are agents; blacks are agented.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“in the age of white guilt, white blindness has been driven not by racism but by the white need to dissociate from racism. Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today not out of bigotry but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority. And when they find a way to dissociate from racism—“diversity,” politically correct language, political liberalism itself—there is little incentive to understand blacks as human beings. Dissociation makes whites human again.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“The Sambo doll, as an image of grotesque black inferiority sold to whites in homage to their superiority, is an ominous and recurring image in Invisible Man, a novel set in the era of segregation. Yet, even today, when people argue for diversity and, thus, for racial preferences, black students are effectively Sambo-ized. They are assigned an inferiority so intractable that nothing overcomes it, not even good schools and high family incomes.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“But without white supremacy as a source of moral authority, the reverse began to happen. The loss of moral authority went too far the other way, not only denying legitimacy to the plunder of the nonwhite world but also denying it to that entire set of difficult “character” principles that bring coherence and even greatness to free societies: personal responsibility, hard work, individual initiative, delayed gratification, commitment to excellence, competition by merit, the honor in achievement, and so on. How could these principles be important when they had coexisted so easily with racism?”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Like racism, white guilt not only generates new social customs, redefines the way institutions function, gives us new law, and reorients our national politics; it also, in a sense, makes a new world by forever altering our idea of virtue. It says that white supremacy is not a moral truth that decency requires us to observe, but rather an evil that decency requires us to condemn. This new virtue demands that whites condemn the idea of their own racial superiority. So white guilt means that white skin now subtracts moral authority from rather than adds it to people and, thus, imposes humility where it once granted superiority.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era