By Shelby
Steele
San Francisco 49ers protest before playing the Redskins in
Washington, Oct. 15. Photo: Getty Images
Have
whites finally found the courage to judge African-Americans fairly by universal
standards?
The recent protests by black players
in the National Football League were rather sad for their fruitlessness.
They
may point to the end of an era for black America, and for the country
generally—an era in which protest has been the primary means of black advancement
in American life.
There was a forced and unconvincing
solemnity on the faces of these players as they refused to stand for the
national anthem.
They seemed more dutiful than passionate, as if they were
mimicking the courage of earlier black athletes who had protested: Tommie Smith
and John Carlos, fists in the air at the 1968 Olympics; Muhammad Ali,
fearlessly raging against the Vietnam War; Jackie Robinson, defiantly running
the bases in the face of racist taunts. The NFL protesters seemed to hope for a
little ennoblement by association.
And protest has long been an
ennobling tradition in black American life.
From the Montgomery bus boycott to
the march on Selma, from lunch-counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to the 1963
March on Washington, only protest could open the way to freedom and the
acknowledgment of full humanity.
So it was a high calling in black life. It
required great sacrifice and entailed great risk. Martin Luther King Jr. , the
archetypal black protester, made his sacrifices, ennobled all of America, and
was then shot dead.
For the NFL players there was no
real sacrifice, no risk and no achievement.
Still, in black America there
remains a great reverence for protest. Through protest—especially in the 1950s
and ’60s—we, as a people, touched greatness.
Protest, not immigration, was our
way into the American Dream.
Freedom in this country had always been relative
to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.
[Editor’s Note: See “The Truth About Slavery”]
It is not surprising, then, that
these black football players would don the mantle of protest.
The surprise was
that it didn’t work. They had misread the historic moment. They were not
speaking truth to power. Rather, they were figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal
to a black identity that had run its course.
What they missed is a simple truth
that is both obvious and unutterable: The oppression of black people is over
with.
This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless.
We blacks
are, today, a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by
surprise.
Of course this does not mean there
is no racism left in American life. Racism is endemic to the human condition,
just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it
is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our
history.
Protest always tries to make a
point. But what happens when that point already has been made—when, in this
case, racism has become anathema and freedom has expanded?
What happened was that black America
was confronted with a new problem: the shock of freedom. This is what replaced
racism as our primary difficulty.
Blacks had survived every form of human
debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity
for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of
wide-open freedom.
Watch out that you get what you ask
for, the saying goes. Freedom came to blacks with an overlay of cruelty because
it meant we had to look at ourselves without the excuse of oppression.
Four
centuries of dehumanization had left us underdeveloped in many ways, and within
the world’s most highly developed society.
When freedom expanded, we became
more accountable for that underdevelopment.
So freedom put blacks at risk of
being judged inferior, the very libel that had always been used against us.
To hear, for example, that more than
4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2016 embarrasses us because this level of
largely black-on-black crime cannot be blamed simply on white racism.
We can say that past oppression left
us unprepared for freedom. This is certainly true. But it is no consolation.
Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not
develop or uplift those who win it.
Freedom holds us accountable no matter the
disadvantages we inherit from the past. The tragedy in Chicago—rightly or
wrongly—reflects on black America.
That’s why, in the face of freedom’s
unsparing judgmentalism, we reflexively claim that freedom is a lie.
We conjure
elaborate narratives that give white racism new life in the present: “systemic”
and “structural” racism, racist “microaggressions,” “white privilege,” and so
on.
All these narratives insist that blacks are still victims of racism, and
that freedom’s accountability is an injustice.
We end up giving victimization the
charisma of black authenticity. Suffering, poverty and underdevelopment are the
things that make you “truly black.” Success and achievement throw your
authenticity into question.
The NFL protests were not really
about injustice. Instead such protests are usually genuflections to today’s
victim-focused black identity.
Protest is the action arm of this identity. It
is not seeking a new and better world; it merely wants documentation that the
old racist world still exists. It wants an excuse.
For any formerly oppressed group,
there will be an expectation that the past will somehow be an excuse for difficulties
in the present.
This is the expectation behind the NFL protests and the many
protests of groups like Black Lives Matter.
The near-hysteria around the deaths
of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others is also a hunger for
the excuse of racial victimization, a determination to keep it alive.
To a
degree, black America’s self-esteem is invested in the illusion that we live
under a cloud of continuing injustice.
When you don’t know how to go
forward, you never just sit there; you go backward into what you know, into
what is familiar and comfortable and, most of all, exonerating.
You rebuild in
your own mind the oppression that is fading from the world. And you feel this
abstract, fabricated oppression as if it were your personal truth, the truth
around which your character is formed.
Watching the antics of Black Lives
Matter is like watching people literally aspiring to black victimization,
longing for it as for a consummation.
But the NFL protests may be a
harbinger of change.
They elicited considerable resentment. There have been
counterprotests. TV viewership has gone down. Ticket sales have dropped.
What
is remarkable about this response is that it may foretell a new fearlessness in
white America—a new willingness in whites (and blacks outside the
victim-focused identity) to say to blacks what they really think and feel, to
judge blacks fairly by standards that are universal.
We blacks have lived in a bubble
since the 1960s because whites have been deferential for fear of being seen as
racist.
The NFL protests reveal the fundamental obsolescence—for both blacks
and whites—of a victim-focused approach to racial inequality.
It causes whites
to retreat into deference and blacks to become nothing more than victims.
It
makes engaging as human beings and as citizens impermissible, a betrayal of the
sacred group identity.
Black victimization is not much with us any more as a
reality, but it remains all too powerful as a hegemony.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is author of “Shame: How America’s
Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).
