Charles Todorich is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a resident of South Portland. 

Seldom does a book of under 200 pages provide all you need to know to understand 60 years of American history. But Shelby Steele’s 2006 classic “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era” does precisely that.

At age 80, Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. But in 1968 he was an angry young Black man who, cigarette in hand, was part of a gang of militant black students who took over the office of Coe College’s president, Dr. Joseph McCabe, and presented a list of demands. 

Expecting Dr. McCabe to challenge their disruptive behavior, Steele saw him instead transformed from an “implacable” authority figure to an “empathetic” negotiator, or, as Steele puts it, “from a traditional to a modern college president,” transformed because he realized that whatever outrage attached to the Black students’ behavior was far exceeded by the outrages of racism and slavery. 

Thus Steele’s definition of white guilt and its consequences — “the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one’s race is associated with racism … this lost authority transfers to the victims of historical racism and becomes their great power in society.”

“The great irony,” Steele writes, “was that racism had become valuable to those who had been its victims … this infusion of moral authority gave Blacks the power to imprint on the national consciousness a powerful new edict … that no Black problem — whether high crime rates, poor academic performance or high illegitimacy rates — could be defined as largely a Black responsibility, because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems.”  The moral authority of whites and American institutions was made “contingent” on proving a negative — that they are not racist.

Steele sees white guilt as the 1960s crack in the facade of American greatness that energized the anti-Vietnam War movement and the women’s and environmental movements, with collateral damage accruing to long accepted character norms of personal responsibility, work, initiative, merit, excellence and delayed gratification. White guilt caused everything to be questioned, including the fundamental goodness of America. Baby boomers, never modest, put themselves in charge of redeeming America.

But first they had to restore white authority and the legitimacy of American democracy — hence, their support of LBJ’s Great Society, which Steele says was “apology for racism” aimed at “dissociating  American power from the nation’s racist past.”

Such “dissociation,” says Steele, combined with the implied duty to facilitate the uplift of Black people, “made whites human again” and “locked white liberals into an unexamined white supremacy,” thus “preserving the old racial hierarchy of whites over Blacks … and granting all whites who identify with it moral superiority to other whites and intellectual superiority to Blacks.” The air of moral superiority that surrounds American liberalism survives to this day.

Let’s be clear — the color of skin racism that denied equal opportunity to Blacks was a moral abomination. But it has been nearly completely excised from public conversation, so much so that Steele writes that today’s conservatives sound like Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963.

But King’s moralism soon gave way to a new generation of Black leaders, says Steele, “not selfless men like King who appealed to the nation’s moral character but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers and haranguers — not moralists but specialists in moral indignation — who could set up a trade with white guilt.”

It is a tragedy of American history that over several decades this new generation of race hustlers, with white guilt as their cudgel, turned Martin Luther King Jr.’s noble words completely upside down, so that today race determines everything in the worldview of the progressive left, which has completely absorbed the once-great Democratic Party, either threatening the extinction of, or cowing into silent submission, whatever few traditional moderate Democrats remain.

“Content of character” be damned. Affirmative action, racial quotas, reparations, the 1619 Project, corporate shakedowns, Black Lives Matter, DEI, critical race theory — “all of these divisive impulses have been stoked by racial grievance and white guilt.”

It didn’t have to be that way. As recently as 1997 a TIME/CNN poll found that nearly 90% of young Blacks said racism had “little impact” on their daily life. Now the “racist” label is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that the interstate highway system was racist. Borders are said to be racist. Capitalism and Western Civilization are racist. Racial colorblindness is racist.  Dr. Seuss and “Jingle Bells” are racist. Statistics, mathematics and merit are racist. Standard English and voter ID laws are racist. White people are racist. Worse yet, white people reproducing is racist. Of course, if everything is racist nothing is.

Of all of this it needs to be said — not a single white American alive today has ever been a slaveowner and not a single Black American alive today has ever been a slave. Neither individual guilt nor personal benefit should attach to the legacy of slavery.

How do we end racism? Legendary “60 Minutes” host Mike Wallace put that question to Academy Award-winning Black actor Morgan Freeman in a 2005 interview.

Freeman’s response? “Stop talking about it.”