The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America

125 Pages·1998·1.07 MB·English

by  Shelby Steele

Table of Contents
Introduction
1 I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?
2 Race-Holding
3 Being Black and Feeling Blue
4 The Recomposed Self
5 White Guilt
6 On Being Black and Middle Class
7 Affirmative Action
8 The Recoloring of Campus Life
9 The Memory of Enemies
Epilogue
To Shelby, Sr.
Introduction
"Of all that might be omitted in thinking, the worst was to omit your own being."
— S B
AUL ELLOW
On the afternoon of Martin Luther King's birthday in 1986, I found myself half-
listening to a radio interview with a local black leader on "the state of black
America." Long before this afternoon I had begun to feel that public discussions
of the race issue had become virtually choreographed. Blacks were expected to
speak in tones of racial entitlement, to show a modified black power
assertiveness—not as strident as the sixties black power rhetoric, but certainly
not as ameliorative as the integrationist tone of the civil rights era. Racism had to
be offered as the greatest barrier to black progress, and blacks themselves had
still to be seen primarily as racial victims. Whites, on the other hand, had to
show both concern and a measure of befuddlement at how other whites could
still be racist. There also had to be in whites a clear deference to the greater
racial authority of blacks, whose color translated into a certain racial expertise. If
there was more than one black, whites usually receded into the role of
moderators while the black "experts" argued. This is still the standard media
formula, the ideal public choreography of black and white. It reflects, I think, the
balance of power between the races that settled things down a bit after the
turbulent sixties.
I cannot say that the two men I listened to that afternoon were lying to each
other, or that much of what they said wasn't true. I can say, however, with much
empathy, that they were boring, enough so that they received no more than a few
calls on a call-in station whose switchboard is normally swamped. The source of
their boringness, I believe, was that each man had left his full self at home and
brought only the "received" part of himself to the studio. I can think of no issue
that makes for a wider gap between the public and private selves than race.
Publicly, we usually adhere to the received wisdom that gives us the most
advantageous "racial face"; privately we are harassed by the uncensored
thoughts and feelings that occur to us spontaneously. Race is an area in which
Americans have been conditioned by a history of painful conflict into a rigid and
unforgiving propriety. Each race has its politics and its party line that impose a
certain totalitarianism over the maverick thoughts of the individual. Because of
this we become a bit afraid of what we really think about race. And since we
this we become a bit afraid of what we really think about race. And since we
don't easily tolerate in others what we won't tolerate in ourselves, we tend to
censor, name-call, and even purge those who let slip their real thoughts. Truth
has a hard swim in waters where received wisdom so systematically dominates
thought and intuition.
After this radio program, which was more a meeting of two postures than of two
people, I picked up a pencil and began to write this book. I was tired of my own
public/private racial split, the absence of my own being from what I said to
people about race. The first paragraph I wrote remains unchanged as the first
paragraph of the chapter titled Race-Holding. As the reader will see, that
paragraph is probably filled with too much of myself. It was both scary and
exhilarating to write because it portended a new looseness with the going racial
propriety and a good deal of personal vulnerability. But I felt that if I could only
stay with myself, I might get somewhere. I had no interest in writing
autobiography or even in being autobiographical, only in following the road
from the private self to the public reality. If there are inevitable distortions in this
method, there are also distortions in every method. To posit anything is to be at
risk. Though all the agonies of writing have been with me in abundance
throughout the slow creation of this book, it has also been a joy to learn what I
think.
In the writing, I have had both to remember and forget that I am black. The
forgetting was to see the human universal within the memory of the racial
specifics. One of the least noted facts in this era when racial, ethnic, and gender
differences are often embraced as sacred is that being black in no way spares one
from being human. Whatever I do or think as a black can never be more than a
variant of what all people do and think. Some of my life experiences may be
different from those of other races, but there is nothing different or special in the
psychological processes that drive my mind. So in this book I have tried to
search out the human universals that explain the racial specifics. I suppose this
was a sort of technique, though I was not conscious of it as I worked. Only in
hindsight can I see that it protected me from being overwhelmed by the
compelling specifics—and the politics—of racial difference. Now I know that if
there was a secret to the writing of this book, it was simply to stall from the
painfully obvious premise that all races are composed of human beings.
At this point I must acknowledge that I was helped immensely in this
"technique" and the overall writing of this book by my wife, Rita Steele, who is
a practicing clinical psychologist. Though her profession and the specialized
knowledge it involves were helpful, these things do not explain her contribution.