A Dream Deferred, the Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. - book review

Racism is the original sin of American society, and no matter how a millenarian society centered on equality attempts to ameliorate it or, better still, eradicate it, it remains, a baffling and ugly fact. Slavery, the Missouri Compromise, John Brown, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Great Society - still racism is there, and nothing makes it go away.

Since the heroic death of Martin Luther King and the freedom movement of the 1960s, America has been engaged in another great effort to right the wrongs of its past treatment of blacks. "Affirmative action" may be taken as the covering term for a vast social effort that ranges from aid to dependent children and welfare, to racial preferences in college admissions, job hiring, and the granting of contracts, to social scientists who would "prove" that intelligence tests, in which blacks do not score as well as whites, are racially biased.

For the most part, the public voices we hear on this issue are white and liberal. They largely tell us that America has turned its back on its shameful history of racism, and that progress is being made in all areas, not only as a result of government intervention and financing but by a change of heart everywhere. The former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, in their book, The Shape of the River, for example, demonstrate that affirmative action in higher education has created a black middle class that is not only prospering but contributing to the public weal. So attractive is the book's message that the New York Times commended it in an editorial. Statistics tell us that black income is rising. A black novelist, Toni Morrison, wins the Nobel Prize. Black athletes and entertainers are getting rich. Advertisements - an important component of American "reality" - now feature blacks as figures of authority and "role models."

It is a tough problem, but we are getting somewhere at last, say the traditional American voices of optimism and activism. But Shelby Steele, a black intellectual and research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is not buying it. In his recent book, A Dream Deferred, The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America,(*) he argues that "affirmative action" is a great sham. America, so goes his interpretation, has slavery and racism on its puritan conscience, and, unable to endure the guilt for past sins, it constructed "affirmative action" to restore its feeling of virtue. The policy relieves the American conscience of its guilt and restores its "moral vanity" but really changes nothing. It is only another instance of "our general willingness to have the glib, 'innovative' idea stand in for principle and difficult struggle."

Steele is not merely commenting on the smug hypocrisy that always hangs about good causes. He considers affirmative action to be "the second betrayal of black freedom in America," slavery being the first. The present attempt to help blacks continues to assert their inferiority, functioning to the same end, though far more generously and subtly, of course, as Jim Crow and even slavery itself. In accepting the responsibility, Steele argues, for what it has done to blacks in the past, affirmative action turns those blacks into "victims," an inferior race that is not responsible for either its own past sufferings or its present problems. It is white society that is responsible, white society that makes things go, not the black individual. Do poorly in entrance exams to college - it is the fault of deficient early education. Do badly in early education - it is the fatherless family, or the drug-taking mother, or the cruel ethos of the street gangs that is responsible. Do poorly anywhere, and it is the heritage of oppression that is to blame.

In this way, liberal America cultivates in black people themselves a feeling of inferiority and insufficiency in contrast to the "white masters" who make things happen on their own. And, as blacks come to think of themselves as victims of white society, they lose, according to Steele, the cutting edge of their suffering. They blame others rather than themselves, thus failing to take the self-preserving actions that suffering should generate in the sufferers. "This is intolerable, we must do something to get out of this situation," is what Steele wants blacks to say. But instead they ask for reparations, and America acts in bad faith, vitiating its own most fundamental principles, such as equality, to provide them in the form of affirmative action. Witness the O. J. Simpson case!

Still, there is no great harm in being misguided do-gooders, a trifle naive perhaps, but still warmhearted and caring. Yes? "No," says Steele, who finds behind affirmative action a concealed desire not only to establish white superiority but also to assert the moral authority of the reformers. Surely, not everyone will see affirmative action as a covert bid for political dominance, but it will be hard for even our most zealous reformers to deny altogether that they harbor a desire "to repeat history, to have whites take agency over black life and use it for their own ends." And those ends are, according to Steele, mostly forms of power.

In the reform movement that began in the 1960s, "power was literally lying around like money on the ground, for anybody to pick up." Wherever Steele looks, he sees people who do not solve problems but use them. This happens not only in connection with race but in all the many areas where guilt is involved and where the reformer absolves himself of guilt, asserts his moral superiority, and claims authority by blaming others for the wrongs that the reformer is struggling to remedy.

Affirmative action is like the many other areas where politics uses rather than cures problems: we don't simply go to work on environmental problems, we show ourselves to be redeeming America from a history of cruel imperviousness toward the environment. We don't simply enforce reasonable sanctions against the sexual harassment of women; we redeem society from the shame of male boorishness. We don't correct obvious problems so much as try to establish our innocence in relation to them. Today even diseases like AIDS and breast cancer, which affect groups with historical grievances against the United States, can trigger the contingencies that lead to special interventions (like more research money), which in turn allow America to redeem itself from the "indifference" or "prejudice" through which it no doubt "structurally" contributed to the disease.

Steele's analysis of affirmative action cuts deep and, I think, to the center. He cannot prove his case with statistics, does not even try, but he catches perfectly and explains persuasively the hypocrisy and self-serving qualities that seem always to hover around liberal social programs - some unspoken truth that everyone knows and no one says. Whoever is able to establish moral authority vis-a-vis some "outrage" grasps the power to lead and to do what they will.

But surely there are those who act out of genuine purity of heart, most of us would say. Or, if not, can we usefully invoke, as Steele does implicitly, the hard Calvinist doctrine that the heart of man is so corrupt that out of it no good can proceed? I think not. We cannot live with it. Besides, motives remain a mystery, and it is impossible to say with any certainty who is acting out of self-interest and who out of genuine altruism, or some mixture of these.

But if all attempts to reform are corrupt, then what can be done to make things better? Are we merely to sit on our hands and hope that matters will turn out well in time? They will not. And Steele would not have us sit still. We must try to do the hard things that will actually change what is wrong. If black students fail to read adequately, don't teach remedial courses in college, don't change the method of scoring, don't argue that blacks have their own language, "ebonics." Turn instead to the gritty work of teaching them to read well. Insist that black students take personal responsibility for their own problems and seek their own solutions.

A distinguished black intellectual like Steele, and others like him, understandably feels particularly insulted by programs and attitudes that assert his historical, if not innate, inferiority. Witness Clarence Thomas desperately trying to explain not to whites but to other blacks that he is a free man with his own views, not just another black victim of racism seeking reparations. The sensitivity of black intellectuals to affirmative action's hidden aspects gives unique urgency to their solutions. But, in the end, though our hearts go out to them, their rejection of affirmative action and its hidden agenda is another chapter in the continuing tragedy of American racism which they act out for all to see.

Tragedy is not a word or a concept that means very much in America. The term ordinarily refers to any unhappy event such as a flood or a death. But the deeper meaning that the humanistic tradition once supplied through tragedies like Oedipus Rex, King Lear, The Brothers Karamazov is neither much known nor widely wanted. The classic definitions of tragedy - Aristotle's pity and fear, Hegel's dialectic of the old moral right and the new, Nietzsche's struggle of the Apollonian with the Dionysiac - show every attempt to make things better only making them worse. In tragedy, humanity is tangled in a net in which every effort to get free only tightens the web around it, and every attempt at bringing the curse to an end only intensifies it. A Dream Deferred puts affirmative action in this tragic perspective. The liberal dream of righting the wrong of racism and ending at last its long and shameful history is revealed by Steele as only another more subtle form of racism, another form of the libido dominandi that lies below slavery and racism in the first, and last, place.

The contemporary world knows these tragic places well, though it refuses to call them by their right name. Their distinctive marks are familiar: rights that become wrongs, attempts to help that only make things worse, an unending tangle that no amount of suffering will bring to an end. Northern Ireland, Israel, Bosnia, Vietnam, all fit the pattern of classical literary tragedy. But we refuse to see them as tragedies, preferring in the best American way to regard them only as difficult problems in which right confronts wrong and overcomes it once the right treaty is signed, or if worst comes to worst, the villains are killed. For America, there is always light at the end of the tunnel, if only we escalate our efforts, purify our hearts, and spend more money.

This positive view of human action seems natural to democracy, where the goodness of the human heart is taken for granted, and where the difficult is done at once and the impossible takes only a little longer. Humanistic education, with the study of such forms as tragedy, once showed the limits of this view. But with the increasing thinning out of the humanities and the triumph of the social sciences, Americans have forgotten these old truths. Some situations can only be endured in the best way possible because they cannot be broken down into right and wrong. Certainly, they cannot be solved by some governmental program and money.

Race in America is one of these tragic situations, and the marks of tragedy spot race relations from the beginning. The author of the Declaration of Independence and the "self-evident" truth "that all men are created equal," was not only a slave owner but, it now appears from unimpeachable genetic proof, a man who entered into a long-term sexual relationship with one of his slaves and had unacknowledged children by her. In the midst of a major effort at "affirmative action," we are reminded daily of its insufficiency. Everywhere we look menial jobs are still largely filled by blacks; central cities are largely black ghettoes, from which whites have fled, where no one dares be abroad at night; reading levels in black schools are a disaster; and catastrophically large numbers of young black men are unemployed, on drugs, or in prison. Still we tell ourselves, or are told by the media, that enormous amounts of money are being spent on these problems by the government, that we are trying, and that things are getting better.

In literary tragedy, the curse on the land continues until some hitherto hidden truth becomes clear enough to be understood and acknowledged. In Oedipus, the curse on Thebes is broken only when Oedipus tears out his eyes, when he finally understands that he is the killer of the king, his father and the husband of his mother. The play teaches that human rationality is blind to its own dark side and ignores its own weakness. In Moby Dick, to come closer to home, the truth is out only when the power of nature, the moral emptiness of the universe, appears in the white whale and destroys the Pequod and the Yankee drive of Captain Ahab to control nature and to penetrate the transcendental.

If we apply the template of literary tragedy to racism in America - which was the way we once used our Great Books - we can only wonder what kind of truth might be needed to bring it to an end at last. The Civil War, the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the revelation of Jefferson's guilt - all these and so many other events of pain and suffering would seem to be catastrophic enough to force the truth into the open at last and to wear out the curse. But, as in Aeschylus's Oresteia, where in a search for justice each revenge becomes only a new crime requiring new punishment, so with American racism each attempt to end it seems only to become a new instance of it.

What, we ask then, can possibly be the truth that will end our curse? Steele's profound answer is that it would be a full recognition that power underlies all of America's race relations, and that even attempts to lift the curse by acting morally and generously, as in affirmative action, are themselves only new ways of asserting black inferiority and thereby maintaining white authority. When will we know it? Only when white America can at last recognize its own aggressive pride, and when suffering causes blacks to assert their equality by taking full responsibility for their problems.

* Harper Collins Publishers. 185 pp. $24.00.

ALVIN KERNAN is Avalon Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Princeton University. His In Plato's Cave will be published by the Yale Universtiy Press this spring.

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