Shelby Steele

On May 1, Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution delivered the ninth of the 2005-2006 Bradley Lectures. Edited excerpts follow. The full text of the lecture is available here.

One of the most remarkable events of the late twentieth century was the collapse of white supremacy--not just in America, but around the world. The presumption was that whites had the authority and the right to make the world their dominion.
 
After World War II, we began to have revolutions across the world that defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy. The civil rights movement in the United States was victorious, and the federal government finally admitted that it had practiced segregation and that racism was immoral.

Blacks were always stigmatized as inferiors. White guilt is also enforced by stigma. It has become a huge political, cultural, and economic force in American life that we have yet to really acknowledge and fully examine. The pressure of white guilt forces whites to find a way to dissociate from that stigma, saying, “I’m not a racist.” And because white guilt is such a huge force in society, dissociation is a huge component that drives individual whites to say, “I have a black friend.” Such a declaration dissociates the individual from the stigma that he is a racist.
 
Let us move to foreign affairs and how all this plays out. America clearly has a kind of supremacy. Because of the white Western past, global supremacy now looks like white supremacy. In other words, our global supremacy is stigmatized by our past, and so Americans do not even want to say they have supremacy. If they said this, they would be seen as sort of rejoining that old white supremacist world. And so again, the simple global supremacy we have attained is easily stigmatized elsewhere in the world.
 
As a nation, we have to dissociate from the racist stigma of our past. Much of American foreign policy has become obsessed with finding ways to dissociate ourselves from the white Western past, so that when we do go to war, those efforts can be seen as legitimate.
 
When we go to war--as in Iraq--we are fighting two wars. In one war we strive to achieve a military victory. In the other war we fight to achieve dissociation from our white Western past. We are thus fighting for both military victory and our legitimacy in Iraq.
 
This is why suddenly in the 1990s we became obsessed with coalitions. What were those coalitions really about? They certainly do not contribute much to the military effort. In reality, the coalition dissociates us by saying, “Okay, we are not the white racist supremacists of old. We have an actual reason to do this, and it is a legitimate reason.”
 
The United Nations at this point seems to have almost no other purpose than to provide the United States with the dissociation and the legitimacy it needs for its various actions. We want the world to say, “You are not the same old imperialist power that just goes around the world and does what you want and steps on people. You are a new power and are dissociated from all of that.”
 
Why do we fight wars today with a sort of managerial minimalism in which we leave just a little room for the enemy to stay alive and keep fighting, rather than using all of our power to end the wars? I think this minimalism is a form of dissociation. It dissociates us from the old imperialist armies of the past.
 
White guilt causes another phenomenon that we see internationally as well as domestically: anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism runs on a similar mechanism as white guilt and has a perfect sort of formula for power. It stigmatizes America with its racist past. One needs only to be anti-American to be good. I think it is the primary power of the American Left and of the international Left, and is practiced by people as diverse as Al Sharpton in America and Jacques Chirac in France. They both do the same thing: they keep using that stigma to keep you off-balance, making you prove that you are not guilty of all the evils they accuse. Anti-Americanism has become so appealing around the world because of the power it carries. It gives people who have no military, economic, or cultural power a moral power that is very effective in any given society. And so you see politicians in Europe using it to run for office, and you see people in our own society using it to take power. They do not use it in an innocent way; it is always a power move.
 
We are at a time in history in which we need to integrate our truly remarkable moral transformations into our public lives and our public policy. We must start making policy that is based on a moral confidence in ourselves as a decent people that have shunned white supremacy rather than constantly making policy to beat back a stigma that empowers the powerless.