It simply does not exist. Surely Mr. Steele can see that pretending that all in America is racially “sweetness and light,” (except for black racism, that is, is just the flip side of “wallowing in victim-hood.” They are opposite sides of the same coin of racist denial.
Now that we as a society have somehow “backed” into a more or less quiescent period of reduced racial tension, where racism ceases to be personal, where it is more institutional and structural; where passive-aggressive and stealth racism has replaced the rabid, venomous overt brutal form, does not mean that America has suddenly turned the corner and become a non-racist state. Quite the contrary in fact: All of the reactionary racist forces have circled their wagons and have reassembled as the conservative forces of the Republican party, and as the religious Neo-cons. As the Bush administration has demonstrated they are plotting a determined comeback.
Simply because mainstream American society (and Professor Steele) chooses not to face up to these facts makes them no less true. The victims of racism have never been just those “consciously targeted,” but have always included the “unintended” and “untargeted” victims as well – which is to say, that long-term racism has always had unintended and cumulative consequences. This remains true whether Professor Steele or the majority culture wishes to acknowledge it or not.
White Guilt: Games that Whites Play on themselves
In fact, arguably the unintended victims of America’s ongoing racial wars are the greatest victims of all. For they must bear the brunt of having to live under the perpetual dark cloud of whether their identities and the whole basis of their self-worth and self-esteem even their civilization has been built up on, sustained by, and still depends on, denying both past racist atrocities, and the fact that they are still heavily invested in the gains of an illicit American past, a past, that for the most part, continues to sustain their way of life. By any known standards, this is a heavy cross to bear for any one group. Surely it is sufficient, in and of itself, to produce any amount of guilt one can conceive of without the need for black “bargainers” and “challengers.” Just as blacks are responsible for their own uplift, so too are whites responsible for erasing their own guilt.
Thus, it is clear that those who propagate racism at the same time that they deny they are also victims of racism, are shielding themselves from the larger hidden truth: the denial that the American holocaust ever took place, and more importantly, from the denial that its negative effects as well as its benefits are cumulative and still ongoing.
In the end Steele’s embedded theory is wrong: It is not blacks, whether they be “challengers” or “bargainers,” that make whites feel guilty: It is white’s own “guilty self-knowledge” about secretly benefiting from an illicit and brutal racist past, that does this. At some level, all whites, no matter how they may feel about race, must know that their own identities are a part of the same wider fraud that all of the myth of white supremacy is. And thus, just like the Nazis knew, white Americans know that they have inherited a legacy of brutality to which their mostly fraudulent identities are anchored. This is a burden heavy enough to produce guilt and to produce the kind of self-censoring tyranny that seeks to snuff out anyone who reminds them of this vital truth that lies at the moral core of our society.
Unwittingly, Professor Steele and his conservative cohorts are a part of a frontline defense to continue perpetuating this fraud (assisting whites in playing the games that whites play on themselves) to forever conceal and entomb the truth about this, the true source of white guilt.
Conclusion
So, in summary, the American psychological world is not divided into “challengers” and “bargainers,” as this book suggests, but into those “who deny that America’s racial holocaust took place at all” and “those who admit, own up to, and embrace their own victim-hood” – whether they are white or black.
Sadly for our society, no one has a choice in this matter it is an immutable fault line bisecting the psychological terrain almost perfectly. The one exception is Mulattoes like Professor Steele and Senator Obama. For a brief time at least, they both get to “hang out” in their own contrived, insulated and conflicted mulatto reality. Yet, in the end, they too, like everyone else, are sucked into the same black hole of racist denial. They too are a part of the spectrum of racial fraud that is the main spring of America’s Balkanized racial existence.
We can debate the issue of whether Senator Obama will or will not win the presidential election as this book has done; and whether or not he will remain a bargainer or will find a “true self” with independent convictions. We may also debate the matter of whether he is a ”true symbol of redemption” for white guilt and white innocence, as the book so elegantly proposes: But what we cannot debate is the source of white guilt. It is not blacks whether they be “bargainers,” or “challengers” that are the source of that guilt. Whether they be Harvard polished mulattoes like Senator Obama and Professor Steele himself, or the likes of Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton, or even just the “purple-suited joker” who rides the subway of the inner city ghetto. Together, all black existence is a threat to revealing this vital lie, which is the true basis of white guilt, and thus the true foundation upon which our nation’s deepest and most cherished moral values rest.
In the end, Tod Clifton, of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, walked out of a history as inauthentic as was his mask. Professor Steele, seems to have failed to see that in America, we all wear mask. It has always been that way. It is an existential requirement. Some just blend in with the empty neutral background better than do others.
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