White Guilt

Sometimes it is a banality—something a little sad and laughable—that makes you aware of a deep cultural change. On some level you already knew it, so that when the awareness comes, there is more recognition than surprise. Yes, of course, things have changed.

So it was not long after the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal began that it occurred to me that race had dramatically changed the terms by which political power is won and held in America. When I woke on that January morning to the sight of President Clinton wagging his finger on the morning news and saying “I never had sex with that woman,” I thought two things: that he was lying and that he would be out of office within two weeks. It was a month later that I realized not only that he might survive his entire term but also that his survival, even for a month, already spoke volumes about the moral criterion for holding power in the United States.

I came to this realization on a drive back to northern
California from Los Angeles with the scandal keeping me company on the car radio. A commentator said that President Eisenhower would not have survived a single day had he been caught in circumstances similar to President Clinton's. Having grown up in the fifties, I thought this was probably true, and this is when the deep cultural shift became clear.

I seemed to remember—in the way that one vaguely remembers gossip about the famous—someone once telling me that Eisenhower occasionally used the word “nigger” on the golf course. Maybe he did; maybe he didn't. In that era we blacks fully assumed that whites in all stations of life used this word at least in private. However, I cannot imagine that a reporter in that era, overhearing Eisenhower speak in this way, would have seen it as anything more than jocular bad taste. Certainly no one would have questioned his fitness to hold office. Yet, if an affair with a young female intern had exploded in the national media, with details of secret retreats off the Oval Office, thongs, cigars, etc., there is little doubt that 1950s America would have judged him morally unfit to hold power. It was taken for granted in that gray-flannel era that public trust had to be reciprocated by a rigorous decorum around sexual matters, even if that decorum was the very face of hypocrisy.

Yet, on that long drive talk-show callers passionately argued that private indiscretions were no bar to public trust, that what Clinton did in his private life had no bearing on his ability to run the country. It was unapologetic moral relativism—the idea that sexual morality is relative only to the consent of the individuals involved, and that there is no other authority or moral code larger than their choice. In the voices of many callers you could hear
this expressed as a kind of pride. Relativism spares us from far worse sins, they seemed to be saying, those greatest of all sins for my baby-boomer generation—judgmentalism and hypocrisy.

All this drew me back to my college days in the sixties when we would sit around in the student union, smoking French cigarettes and arguing that monogamy was a passé bourgeois convention. Of course it was an adolescent argument of perfectly transparent wishful thinking, since beneath all the big ideas—at least for us boys—was the fervent hope that the girls would actually believe it. There was a lot of lust in this kind of thinking—lust everywhere in baby-boomer thinking—and over time it became part of the generational license that opened the way for a sexual revolution. But it was jarring these many decades later—so deep now into adult life—to hear such thinking hauled out in defense of the president of the United States.

 

But then something occurred to me. I wondered if President Clinton would be defended with relativism if he had done what, according to gossip, Eisenhower was said to have done. Suppose that in a light moment he had slipped into a parody of an old Arkansas buddy from childhood and, to get the voice right, used the word “nigger” a few times. Suppose further that a tape of this came to light so that all day long in the media—from the unctuous morning shows to the freewheeling late-night shows to the news every half hour on radio—we would hear the unmistakable presidential voice saying, “Take your average nigger…”

Today in America there is no moral relativism around racism, no sophisticated public sentiment that recasts racism as a mere quirk of character. Today America is puritanical rather
than relativistic around racism, and if Clinton had been caught in this way, it is very likely that nothing would have saved him. The very legitimacy of the American democracy in this post–civil rights era now requires a rigid, if not repressive, morality of racial equality. A contribution of the civil rights movement was to establish the point that a multiracial society cannot be truly democratic unless social equality itself becomes a matter of
personal
morality. So a president's “immorality” in this area would pretty much cancel his legitimacy as a democratic leader.

The point is that President Clinton survived what would certainly have destroyed President Eisenhower, and Eisenhower could easily have survived what would almost certainly have destroyed Clinton. Each man, finally, was no more than indiscreet within the moral landscape of his era (again, Eisenhower's indiscretion is hypothetical here for purposes of discussion). Neither racism in the fifties nor womanizing in the nineties was a profound enough sin to undermine completely the moral authority of a president. So it was the good luck of each president to sin into the moral relativism of his era rather than into its puritanism. And, interestingly, the moral relativism of one era was the puritanism of the other. Race simply replaced sex as the primary focus of America's moral seriousness.

 

Just out of Los Angeles I decided to set myself the task of exploring this dilemma on the long drive up to Monterey and home. The idea of driving with a mental task was appealing. Maybe the physics of plunging ahead through time and space would give motion and focus to my thoughts. I had been thinking a lot about white guilt just as the Clinton scandal broke. And now I
thought this phenomenon might have something to do with the little dilemma I wanted to explore.

But what about form? In the nineteenth century there was a narrative form called the Chautauqua, a kind of narrative lecture through a subject or dilemma that people would listen to for hours, a little longer even than we spend at movies today. There was always an interplay of theme and pertinent digression, and the faith was that digression would bring fuller understanding. Maybe this form would do, with a little of the personal journal thrown in. I could move through two landscapes at the same time—one of coastline, small charming towns, and lush wintergreen coastal mountains; the other of memory and thought. All I really needed was something I had already procured: two Starbucks double espressos and a bottled water.

 

Conventional wisdom says that the America I was driving through on that sunny winter morning had been in moral decline since the sixties—almost everyone's idea of when the American character began its denouement. And there is much evidence to support this wisdom. Since then divorce, illegitimacy, single-parent homes, drug use, and crime have gone up greatly. Marriage rates, levels of academic performance, church attendance, reading, and voting have all gone down. “Declinism” is now a kind of postmodern ideology in certain circles and an academic subject in others.

But something else was also true about America, something that became clear to me as I turned off Highway 101 into San Luis Obispo for a bite to eat. Cruising into the town proper, I
experienced what might be called a “segregation flashback.” I remembered cruising into another town, decades earlier, on a trip from Chicago to Kentucky with my father to visit relatives. Just off the highway we did what we always did upon entering a new town—what we had to do before any of our personal needs could be met. We went in search of a black person.

Usually we could spot one quickly, but not always, not if we came into town from the white end. Whites were often friendly enough but they had no hard information. Bladder full and stomach empty, it was like finding a treasure to come upon a black person, and my father would swing the car in to the curb, hop out, and in a tone that was at once pleasant and conspiratorial, shout, “Say, chief.” In minutes he would be back behind the wheel with a complete local geography of black possibility—houses where we might spend the night (often run by widows), places to eat, and information about churches, taverns, and barbershops. Every black a chamber of commerce unto himself. And then, of course, we would essentially disappear from the white world, where none of these things were available to us, and enter an all-black territory similar to the Chicago-area neighborhood we'd come from.

Now President Eisenhower, along with most white Americans, took a rather relativistic stance toward the segregation that required my family to travel in this way. If he felt it was morally wrong, he nevertheless easily lived with it. He could be, in fact, “sophisticated” about it, “tolerant” of the racist imposition of a segregated existence on blacks and mindful of the need to “go slow” in ending it. He did not want to push Americans (read: whites) away from this immorality too fast.

 

So, yes, there has been much moral decline in America since the sixties, but it is also true that I drove into San Luis Obispo on that winter morning knowing that I could sleep or eat anywhere my wallet would take me. I had no need to search out a local black person or to find the black part of town. So, in the same decades of America's “moral decline” there had obviously also been a great moral advance. A great evil had been stilled, pushed back, repressed. In downtown San Luis Obispo I searched only for a restaurant that suited me, not one that would have me. And after parking my car, I walked through a world cleansed by a very hard-earned moral advance and held in this new benign state by an unforgiving social puritanism. So it was hard for me, having walked down streets where one's color was a bar to everything, to believe fully in declinism. No doubt the divorce rate in this town is twice what it was when I was unwelcome here. But it is also true that in other ways people here are better than they once were.

Thus, President Clinton's sin was a little anachronistic, a sin against the moral sensibility of another time more than of his own. And this makes the point that the great moral preoccupation and commitment in America today are social. I believe it was our racial history that effectively renormed American culture around social morality. As I was reminded on that morning in San Luis Obispo, there is much good in this. But there is also much bad, much that undermines social equality as surely as racism once did.

But first, how did social morality become ascendant?