The Great Racial Bargain, The Great Alibi, And The Treasury Of Virtue

Shelby Steele is one of those rare writers who leaves readers — at least he leaves me — different after reading one of his powerful essays. His perception can be so penetrating, even profound, and his prose so inconspicuously effective that more than once reading an essay of his has changed the way I look at the world of race.

One of those powerful essays has just appeared (here) in the Wall Street Journal, which Steele begins by noting:

Probably the single greatest problem between blacks and whites in America is that we are forever witness to each other’s great shames.

Out of this mutual witness came what Steele implicitly describes (he doesn’t use these exact words) as The Great Racial Bargain: in order to expiate their great shame of racial oppression, whites have assumed the burden of lifting blacks out of poverty and oppression, of making them equal. This bargain, in turn, allowed blacks to escape the shame of their inferior condition.

Once white racism — long witnessed by blacks and acknowledged since the ’60s by whites — was in play, the subject was changed from black weakness to white evil. Now accountability for the poverty that shamed blacks could be once again assigned to whites. If this was tiresome for many whites, it was a restoration of dignity for many blacks.

In the ’60s — the first instance of open mutual witness between blacks and whites in American history — a balance of power was struck between the races. The broad white acknowledgment of racism meant that whites would be responsible both for overcoming their racism and for ending black poverty because, after all, their racism had so obviously caused that poverty. For whites to suggest that blacks might be in some way responsible for their own poverty would be to relinquish this responsibility and, thus, to return to racism. So, from its start in the ’60s, this balance of power (offering redemption to whites and justice to blacks) involved a skewed distribution of responsibility: Whites, and not blacks, would be responsible for achieving racial equality in America, for overcoming the shames of both races — black inferiority and white racism. And the very idea of black responsibility would be stigmatized as racism in whites and Uncle Tomism in blacks.

Steele argues, persuasively in my view, that this was, or at least that it has become, a bad bargain for blacks.

The problem here is obvious: The black shame of inferiority (the result of oppression, not genetics) cannot be overcome with anything less than a heroic assumption of responsibility on the part of black Americans. In fact, true equality — an actual parity of wealth and ability between the races — is now largely a black responsibility. This may not be fair, but historical fairness — of the sort that resolves history’s injustices — is an idealism that now plagues black America by making black responsibility seem an injustice.

One can quibble with Steele’s assertion that “true equality” means “an actual parity of wealth and ability between the races” rather than non-discriminatory equal opportunity, but his (and Bill Cosby’s) basic point is certainly sound.

Steele’s essay, both in its style and its substance, is strongly and almost eerily reminiscent of an essay — published in 1961 as a short book — by one of my favorite, and I would argue one of the best, 20th Century American writers, Robert Penn Warren. In The Legacy of the Civil War, Warren argued that The War bequeathed to the South “a Great Alibi” — namely, that whatever shortcomings exist, and continue to exist, in the South can be blamed on The War, and even the perfidious Yankee. The Great Alibi provided an all-trumping excuse for all defects in the South, for all time. It is not hard to see the analogy to Steele’s bargain in which blacks, unfortunately, continue to blame all of their predicament on white racism, and whites award themselves “redemption” for acknowledging their guilt and taking responsibility for black progress.

If The War gave the South a blank check alibi for all its failings, it provided the North with what Warren calls “a Treasury of Virtue.” I don’t have the book handy to quote from, but found the following quote, and some others, here:

“If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history, automatically redeemed,” Warren continues. “He has in his pocket, not a Papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner in the Middle Ages, but a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history.”

The guilt of white racism may seem to be an exception, rather than an analogy, to Steele’s portrayal of the “redemption” received by whites in the great racial bargain, but it isn’t: by acknowledging guilt for the sin of racism and oppression, and voluntarily taking on the burden of redressing black oppression, whites — now, we may be speaking only of white liberals — have merely reaffirmed their “redemption,” their moral superiority, the late-twentieth century version of the “Treasury of Virtue” that filled their moral coffers after The War, and if Warren is right has continued to keep it filled.

I can’t think of a higher compliment to Shelby Steele than to say he reminds me of Robert Penn Warren.