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

“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

“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

“Usually adolescent rebels are quickly humbled because they overestimate their own truth and underestimate the truth of their elders. As Mark Twain famously put it, “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.” One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one’s self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. One opposes it to discover its logic and validity for one’s self. And by failing to defeat it, one comes to it, and to greater maturity, through experience rather than mere received wisdom. Of course, every new generation alters the adult authority it ultimately joins. But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past. The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. Baby boomers, already rather inflated from growing up in the unparalleled prosperity of postwar America, were inflated further by an adult authority that often backed down in the face of their rebellion. It doesn’t matter, for example, that there was honor in America’s acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgement of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority—and, thus, adult authority—despite the good it achieved.”
― 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

“the fact is that we blacks are free.”
― 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

“also lost a degree of their authority to stand proudly for the values and ideas that had made the West a great civilization despite its many evils.”
― 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

“Almost always, oppressed groups enter freedom by denying that they are in fact free, this as a way of avoiding the daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes.”
― 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

“The family signed them over to their nonpaying renters for nothing, happy to be rid of the liability.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“When I ask if they feel racially aggrieved away from campus at their summer jobs, they often look surprised, as if the question is not relevant. But then most say they don’t see as much racism at their summer jobs.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“White guilt had inadvertently opened up racism as the single greatest opportunity available to blacks from the mid-sixties on—this for a people with no other ready source of capital with which to launch itself into greater freedom.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“By the mid-sixties white guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of black leadership, not selfless men like King who appealed to the nation’s moral character but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers, and haranguers—not moralists but specialists in moral indignation—who could set up a trade with white guilt.”
― 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

“Thus, white guilt made racism into a valuable currency for black Americans—a currency that enmeshed whites (and especially American institutions) in obligation not to principles but to black people as a class. (Notice that affirmative action explicitly violates many of the same principles—equal protection under the law, meritorious advancement—that the King-era civil rights movement fought for.)”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era