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I 6 Te iciga Dil -Wedesay Otobr S, 00
I Wednesday, October 4, 2006 -The Michigan Daily 7B
Why racial preferences are a product of
An oe u to my collegues and students at the;:
By Prof. Carl Cohen
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Very cordial greetings. I write to urge you to read a very small book that now sits on my desk. It
was written this year for persons in just our circumstances. It's honest and respectful and very
eloquent, too. The author, Shelby Steele, criticizes some policies widespread among universities
in ways that may cause us to bite our lips, but his criticism is embedded in sympathetic understanding.
Long a university professor, Steele's reflections on the life and spirit of our universities are the meat of this
very penetrating book.
He begins with a vivid account of the day on which, riding a wave of "militancy and outrage," he led
a group of black students into the office of the president of the university at which he was then a senior.
Racial oppression had not angered him directly, he reports, but it did give him the opportunity to choose
to be angry. Steele and his fellows acted out in that president's office - with non-negotiable demands and
all the rest - the black rage that was excused as an understandable response to historic injustice.
He nurtured that anger for a decade. It became an exceedingly useful tool for the advancement of policy
objectives. Black anger was nearly invincible. Why? Because, Steele explains, by the end of the century
America "had moved out of its long age of white racism and into a new age of white guilt" Guilt about race
had become so widespread, so enervating, that it cleared the path to power for blacks.
The college presidents who bore the brunt of those angry protests were certainly not racists. That old
college president of his, Steele observes, was a man of considerable integrity; he had not once denied or
minimized the injustice of racism. Confronted by non-negotiable demands from a band of black accus-
ers he had become plainly angry - but he was powerless to respond. He was rendered powerless by an
amorphous sense of guilt, the thought (or feeling) that the offensiveness of the conduct of the protesters
was outweighed by the oppression that had led to it. The protesters knew this, and with this knowledge
they were secure. Black awareness of the powerlessness of those in authority became the key to subsequent
strategy and tactics. Whites who were confrontedfelt their own guilt; they could not deny it. They were
stranded ina moral vacuum. That president who had been Steele's target, like many others,"found himself
without the moral authority to reprimand us for our disruptive behavior"
White guilt thus became, and still remains, the central nerve of relations between blacks and whites. No
one has understood it more deeply, or traced its ramifications more wisely, than Shelby Steele. With him
we come to apprehend the ways in which whites in authority are often trumped by their own consciousness
of guilt. They hunger to show themselves redeemed. But redemption does not come easily.
Once having acknowledged guilt, subconsciously if not explicitly, college presidents, Steele writes,
"lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice .. . The authority
they lose transfers to the victims of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is wisy
white guilt is literally the same thing as black power."
The subtitle of this book is "How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil
Rights Era" Its title I hardly need to tell you. The use and abuse of white guilt we find almost impossible
to reprove. The obsequious behavior of some university presidents - and some university faculties, too
- can be understood in this light. White guilt is not a transitory phenomenon of a generation past; it is the
moral tone that has come to pervade our universities.
At the University much that happens is explained by guilt. Consider two recent examples, one anecdotal
See COHEN, page 1OB