| Note how directly Steele blurs the individual and the instutional: Bargainers put individual whites at ease, "Challengers on the other hand say, I presume that you, this institution, this society, is racist until it proves otherwise by giving me some concrete form of racial preference."
But why is a critical attitude toward white institutions perceived as an attack on white individuals? Why can't whites say, "Yes, that's unfair?" Why do they have to feel responsible for something they had no part in creating? Conservatives often complain that blacks are blaming white people today for historical grievances that today's whites had no part in. But an institutional critique is not an attack on individual whites. The confusion here does not come from blacks seeking equitable treatment, it comes from whites with confused loyalties-and from conservatives who do their darnedest to keep folks confused.
In part, this is done because they can't help themselves. This goes back to Robert Kegan's schema of cognitive development, in which each successive stage takes as object (those aspects/configurations of self and world that it can act on consciously) that which was formerly subject (the subconscious background/context used to apprehend what is object). Here, again, is the table showing how this works through a succession of levels:
| Kegan's Subject/Object Schema of Cognitive Development | | Stage | We Are:
Subject
(structure of knowing) | We Have:
Object
(content of knowing) | Underlying Structure | | 1 | Perceptions
SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS
Impulses | Movement
Sensation |  | | 2 | Concrete
POINT OF VIEW
Enduring Dispositions | Perceptions
SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS
Impulses |  | 3
Traditionalism | Abstractions
MUTUALITY/
INTERPERSONALISM
Relationship
Inner states | Concrete
POINT OF VIEW
Enduring Dispositions
Needs, Peferences |  | 4
Modernism | Abstract Systems
INSTITUTION
Relationship-Regulating Forms
Self-authorship | Abstractions
MUTUALITY/
INTERPERSONALISM
Relationship
Inner states
Subjectivity
Self-consciousness |  | 5
Post-
Modernism | Dialectical
INTER-
INSTITUTIONAL
Self-transformation | Abstract Systems
Ideology
INSTITUTION
Relationship-Regulating Forms
Self-authorship
Self-regulation
Self-formation |  |
Conservatives confuse individual and social/individual criticism for a very simle reason: conservatism is the natural philosophy of level 3, the level at which the individual subject is defined by its social roles and relationships. The capacity to stand outside these roles and relationships, to take them as object, and alter them, if necessary, does not emerge until level 4. This capacity is the same capacity to alter marriage, for example. It was employed in the past to alter marriage from primarily a material, familial alliance to a romantic, individual one-a move that conservatives staunchly opposed at the time. In the same way, it is being employed today to alter marriage from being solely a heterosexual alliance to being one defined irresepective of sexual orientation.
Thus, there is a consistent inadequacy of conservative thought that is built into it at the fundamental cognitive level. Unable to separate the individual from the group, multiple confusions ensue, while vital critical distinctions simply make no sense, because they lack the critical distance needed to see them.
However, it is important to realize that not all conservatives are at level 3. Many are not. But their political philosophy is locked in at that level-at a maximum. In fact, their politics often devolves to level 2 or lower. When they conceive of people in terms of their fixed, immutable nature, this is a form of "durable category" which is characteristic of level 2. I do not believe that Steele is necessarily functioning at level 3 in his everyday life. But his political commitments bind himself to seeing the world in terms that only make sense conditioned by the limits of level 3.
And so it is that Steele speaks in terms of "absolution":
you go into any American institution today and they're all used to dealing with challengers. They all have a whole system of things that they can give to challengers, who then will offer absolution.
This personalized language and approach to talking about public policy is a further indication of level 3 thinking. There are no larger universal principles involved. (Level 3 thinkers are capable of thinking in terms of abstractions-but not abstract systems.) There are only individual acts of accusation, absolution, challenging, bargaining, etc. This is a profoundly trivialized view of public policy. Indeed, it is all of one piece with the white conservatives who refer to civil rights leaders as "race hustlers.' Shelby Steele is more genteel than that. He calls them "challengers" instead. But he thinks of them in the same sort of limited framework that cannot systematically organize principles into a larger coherent framework. He can invoke abstract principles, such as justice, but he cannot reason about them in a systematic fashion, because doing so requires level 4 thinking. At level 3, abstract principles are a given, embedded in the same subjective, unexaminable context that the self itself is embedded in and constructed out of.
Next let's skip back to near the beginning. Here we see why Steele migh have been a good novelist. Novelists, after all, can do just fine writing exclusively on level 3, and they can express profound insights on that level. (You can even have profound insights on level 2: the Linean system of classifying all living things is one such example. The Periodic Table of Elements is another.)
BILL MOYERS: But you go on to say why he can't win. Now, that would seem to suggest you don't think he can become President.
SHELBY STEELE: My gut feeling is that he's going to have a difficulty-- a difficult time doing that. The reason I think that we don't yet know him. We don't yet quite know. What his deep abiding convictions are. And he seems to have, you know, almost in a sense kept them concealed. And a part of the I think infatuation with Obama is because he's something of an invisible man. He's a kind of a projection screen. And you sort of see more your - the better side of yourself when you look at Obama than you see actually Barack Obama.
BILL MOYERS: You say in here that his supporters want him not to do something, but to be something.
SHELBY STEELE: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: To represent something. What do you think they want him to be?
SHELBY STEELE: I think to be very blunt about it, in a lot of that support is a desire for convergence of a black skin with the United States Presidency, with power on that level - the idea is that to have a black in that office leading a largely white country would be redemptive for America.
BILL MOYERS: Redemptive?
SHELBY STEELE: Redemptive. Would take us a long way. Would indicate that we truly have moved away from that shameful racist past that we had.
BILL MOYERS: That's perfectly logical isn't it?
SHELBY STEELE: Yes, it is.
BILL MOYERS: And desirable. You seem to--
SHELBY STEELE: I want it.
However, such yearning for symbolic redemption has a very different meaning if it does not change the lives of ordinary people. This is a major lesson of South Africa, where the ruling black majority has adapted itself to the international neo-liberal order, and kept the vast majority of its voting base in abject poverty. There is severe discontent with this arrangement, and a dissident populist leader has just been elected to head the African National Congress. It requires a level 4 conseciousness to properly appreciate the symbolic redemption along with its limits and contradictions. This is what the great 19th century social novelists possessed in abundance, They wrote almost exclusively at level 3, while thinking at level 4. It was the juxtaposition of diverse level 3 stories that revealed underlying contradictions and conveyed a level 4 view of the world to people normally incapable of seeing the world that way. It was, in prose, analogous to the Renaissance discovery of perspective in drawing. Steele may well possess a level 4 consciousness, but it cannot be expressed in his level 3 ideology. Still, his level 3 insight is profoundly right, so far as it goes.
There is, of course, a tragic undertone when he speaks of Obama as "an invisible man." One cannot hear this phrase, even casually, without conjuring up Ralph Ellison's novel, particularly its beginning:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me. To have a black man become President, and yet still, in some sense, be Ellison's protagonist....
This is not just an idle speculation on my part, as will be seen below.
But first, we need to leaven Steele's insight with his profound stupidity-and, sadly, Bill Moyers' willingness to join in with him. Picking up at the tail end of a passage quoted earlier:
SHELBY STEELE: Affirmative action. Diversity programs. Opportunities of one kind or another. And so, there is a much more concrete bargaining on the case of challengers. And you go into any American institution today and they're all used to dealing with challengers. They all have a whole system of things that they can give to challengers, who then will offer absolution.
BILL MOYERS: And what are the--
SHELBY STEELE: Then we'll say this institution is vetted now. It's not racist anymore.
Oh, really???
BILL MOYERS: One of the worst things that can happen to you in this country is to be charged with being racially biased.
Oh, really???
SHELBY STEELE: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Racial stigma.
SHELBY STEELE: You never get over it. On your obituary, it'll be the first line. And there's almost no redemption. The good side of that is it makes the point of how intense this society is in its desire to overcome racism and its past.
Oh, really??? Then why the fuck did the Supreme Court just reverse Brown v. Board of Education???
BILL MOYERS: Yes.
Oh, my bad!
SHELBY STEELE: So it's a good thing on the other hand. On the other hand, the bad side of it is that it has become a form of cruelty. And all you're doing is terrifying whites. I wrote in the last book, WHITE GUILT. Whites live under now, we've underestimated the power of this. Whites live under now this threat of being stigmatized as race. Our institutions live under this threat of being stigmatized as racist and they're almost panicked over it. What makes me sad there is then whites look at what happened to Don Imus. And now, they're never going to tell me what they really feel.
So, we've moved on from black thugs terrifying whites (even though most crime occurs between members of the same race) to blacks in general terrifying whites with the threat of being called racist. Because, of course, all whites identify with Don Imus, they sit around all day with their friends talking in non-stop racial stereotypes, that's just how white folks are. (Is there any race Steele doesn't insult?)
Whites know never tell blacks what you really think and what you really feel because you risk being seen as a racist.
If you're Don-fucking-Imus!
And the result of that is that to a degree, we as blacks live in a bubble. Nobody tells us the truth.
Don Imus tells the truth???
Nobody tells us what they would do if they were in our situation. Nobody really helps us. They use us. They buy their own innocence with us. But they never tell us the truth. And we need to be told the truth very often.
So, Don Imus was helping black folks?
Yeah, that's the ticket!
You know, America is a great society, a great country. Has all sorts-- the values have gotten us to this place where we are the world's greatest society in many ways. Well, those values, yes, we had a history of terrible racism. But those same values will work for blacks. They will help us join the mainstream, become a part of it. But whites can't say that because then they seem to be judgmental. They're seen as racist. And so, no one says it to us.
Are we talking "no one" as in Don Imus? Or "no one" as in every single conservative blowhard in the known universe??? [Hmmmm. Rush Limbaugh as "Invisible Man." Who knew?]
This is where Bill Moyers Journal suffers grievously in comparison with Showtime at the Apollo. Shelby Steele has been onstage looooong after he should have been yanked.
After all, as I noted in my last diary, the racial wealth gap means that middle class blacks, who have done everything right, learned all those lessons, gone to college, gotten degrees and professional jobs, are still living a marginal existence in America, especially compared to whites who are making the exact same income.
But, then, magically, he veers back to his singular insight, talking about bargainers again:
BILL MOYERS: So you can understand though, why some whites would look to Obama as a redeemer from that--
SHELBY STEELE: They think that Obama is a way out of all of that. That he will bring an American redemption. And whites are very happy for that bargain and show gratitude and even affection for bargainers. Oprah Winfrey is the classic bargainer who has also a kind of magic about her that I think again reflects the aspirations of white America.
BILL MOYERS: But she never challenges white America.
SHELBY STEELE: No. She--
BILL MOYERS: She's successful in part because she makes us.
SHELBY STEELE: She makes you feel that this aspiration is possible. That-- it's-- real. White American women love Oprah. Love Oprah. And so, she makes them feel that way.
BILL MOYERS: Bill Cosby did that with his--
SHELBY STEELE: Bill Cosby did that.
BILL MOYERS: Cliff Huxtable.
SHELBY STEELE: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Remember? The--
SHELBY STEELE: But he made a big mistake, Bill Cosby.
BILL MOYERS: What?
SHELBY STEELE: He finally in the last few years has one of the iron clad rules for bargainers is they can never tell you what they actually think and feel. They can never reveal their deep abiding convictions. Because the minute they do that, they're no longer an empty projection screen. They become an individual. And whites begin to say, well, I didn't know you felt that way. I didn't know you believed that. And the aura dissipates. If Barack Obama starts to say, you know, I really think there's a value to racial preferences even though it conflicts with equality under the law, people are, you know, that that's a little too-- that's a little too revealing of who he might really be.
Of course, even with so-called "racial preferences" the ones who can't "equality under the law" are B-L-A-C-K, but we take that sort of conservative canard for granted from the likes of Steele. But look what's he's just said: a bargainer can't be a person! He can't have his own ideas! He can't be an individual!
And here the whole standard conservative line is the black masses lead by racial hustlers versus the enlightened, independent, individual blacks, learning the lessons of America... "America is a great society, a great country. Has all sorts-- the values have gotten us to this place where we are the world's greatest society.... those same values will work for blacks. They will help us join the mainstream, become a part of it." But now Steele is admitting that the would-be alternative for blacks is to disappear! To not be an individual at all! To be invisible!
Not just my words. It's where Steele himself is headed:
BILL MOYERS: So you're saying he can not serve the aspirations of one race without antagonizing the other?
SHELBY STEELE: That's right. That's right. They're two different agendas. And so his answer, this is the answer of all bargainers in a sense is to remain invisible as much as possible.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean invisible? Because he's all over television.
SHELBY STEELE: He's all over television. But if you listen to his -- speeches 'change,' 'hope.' I mean, it's a kind of-- it's an empty mantra. I mean a surprising degree of emptiness, of lack of specificity. What change? Change from what to what? What direction do you want to take the country? What do you mean by hope? There's never any specificity there because specificity is dangerous to a bargainer.
BILL MOYERS: But, to be a successful politician in a presidential campaign in particular you have to engage a larger public. That's why so many politicians use ambiguity.
SHELBY STEELE: In Obama's case, there's more ambiguity. We have a pretty good idea. I mean, Hillary Clinton does the same thing, uses ambiguity. But we still have a pretty good idea of who she really is and what she wants to do with the country and so forth. John Edwards has probably got the straightest, most concrete message of any of them. We really know who he is. But Obama is still more invisible. We don't quite-- we don't know what he would do.
Which, of course, is the problem I've had all along with Obama.
Now, maybe, just maybe, Obama really does have a very good idea who he is, and what he's going to do. But if even the benighted level 3 Shelby Steele can make the Obama/Ellison connection, it really is time that we seriously faced that reality, and asked ourselves, what can we do about it?
Because it wasn't Ellison's narrator who made himself invisible. It was everyone else. |
