White Guilt by Shelby Steele

Author:Shelby Steele
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

13

ADOLESCENTS ALL

I remember a brief encounter I had with John during his dramatic return to campus. At a party he told me that if I really cared about civil rights, I too should head out to California. He said something about big things happening in the East Bay, as if I would certainly know where the East Bay was and what was happening there. I didn’t know, or at least not until it was far too late to impress him with my up-to-the-minute command of the black protest scene. I just smiled, hoping he wouldn’t notice the blank I was drawing, and waited for him to make his point. But there was to be no point. He took on the pained look of a man who would have loved to talk forever were it not for all the pressing calls on his time. He made a quick apology, and then he was gone. I never saw him again. Only later that night did I remember that the East Bay meant Oakland, California, the home of the Black Panthers.

But it was also surprising even to hear the words “civil rights” pass from John’s lips. Like many young whites of that era, he seemed to have been untouched by racial matters. This was the first generation raised on TV and Disney, on sitcom images of an immaculately raceless America. Only the evening news, with its images of the civil rights struggle, gave most white children a window into the nation’s “race problem.” But this only made it a rather far-off and abstract “current event,” something to be dutifully kept up with, and something therefore easily neglected. I would have been surprised if John even knew that there was a student civil rights group on our campus. Certainly racial injustice had nothing to do with the grand rebellion he was staging. And yet, the mere act of rebellion at that late sixties moment not only gained him an association with the great social issues of the day but also positioned him as a man of progressive sympathies, a man on the moral side of important issues.

This happened because John, I, and baby boomers generally were the beneficiaries of a near-perfect synchronicity between our adolescent rebellion and the advent of white guilt. We began to question adult authority at the precise historical moment when our parents began to lose moral authority to race, war, the women’s issue, and so on. The adolescent rebel is always—at least secretly—a bit insecure, worrying on some level that his indictment of his parents might be wrong, fearing that they might in fact be better and more knowing people than he gives them credit for. This rebellion is normally more focused on achieving autonomy than on explicitly defeating one’s parents. But for baby boomers, there was almost no way to avoid defeating them, no way to give the parental generation the benefit of the doubt. History itself seemed to have rendered a summary indictment against them. They were racist,

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