Shelby Steele - The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America

"Of all that might be omitted in thinking, the worst was to omit your own being."

Saul Bellow

On the afternoon of Martin Luther King's birthday in 1986, I found myself half-listening to a radio interview with a local black leader on "the state of black America." Long before this afternoon I had begun to feel that public discussions of the race issue had become virtually choreographed. Blacks were expected to speak in tones of racial entitlement, to show a modified black power assertivenessnot as strident as the sixties black power rhetoric, but certainly not as ameliorative as the integrationist tone of the civil rights era. Racism had to be offered as the greatest barrier to black progress, and blacks themselves had still to be seen primarily as racial victims. Whites, on the other hand, had to show both concern and a measure of befuddlement at how other whites could still be racist. There also had to be in whites a clear deference to the greater racial authority of blacks, whose color translated into a certain racial expertise. If there was more than one black, whites usually receded into the role of moderators while the black "experts" argued. This is still the standard media formula, the ideal public choreography of black and white. It reflects, I think, the balance of power between the races that settled things down a bit after the turbulent sixties.

I cannot say that the two men I listened to that afternoon were lying to each other, or that much of what they said wasn't true. I can say, however, with much empathy, that they were boring, enough so that they received no more than a few calls on a call-in station whose switchboard is normally swamped. The source of their boringness, I believe, was that each man had left his full self at home and brought only the "received" part of himself to the studio. I can think of no issue that makes for a wider gap between the public and private selves than race. Publicly, we usually adhere to the received wisdom that gives us the most advantageous "racial face"; privately we are harassed by the uncensored thoughts and feelings that occur to us spontaneously. Race is an area in which Americans have been conditioned by a history of painful conflict into a rigid and unforgiving propriety. Each race has its politics and its party line that impose a certain totalitarianism over the maverick thoughts of the individual. Because of this we become a bit afraid of what we really think about race. And since we don't easily tolerate in others what we won't tolerate in ourselves, we tend to censor, name-call, and even purge those who let slip their real thoughts. Truth has a hard swim in waters where received wisdom so systematically dominates thought and intuition.

After this radio program, which was more a meeting of two postures than of two people, I picked up a pencil and began to write this book. I was tired of my own public/private racial split, the absence of my own being from what I said to people about race. The first paragraph I wrote remains unchanged as the first paragraph of the chapter titled Race-Holding. As the reader will see, that paragraph is probably filled with too much of myself. It was both scary and exhilarating to write because it portended a new looseness with the going racial propriety and a good deal of personal vulnerability. But I felt that if I could only stay with myself, I might get somewhere. I had no interest in writing autobiography or even in being autobiographical, only in following the road from the private self to the public reality. If there are inevitable distortions in this method, there are also distortions in every method. To posit anything is to be at risk. Though all the agonies of writing have been with me in abundance throughout the slow creation of this book, it has also been a joy to learn what I think.

In the writing, I have had both to remember and forget that I am black. The forgetting was to see the human universal within the memory of the racial specifics. One of the least noted facts in this era when racial, ethnic, and gender differences are often embraced as sacred is that being black in no way spares one from being human. Whatever I do or think as a black can never be more than a variant of what all people do and think. Some of my life experiences may be different from those of other races, but there is nothing different or special in the psychological processes that drive my mind. So in this book I have tried to search out the human universals that explain the racial specifics. I suppose this was a sort of technique, though I was not conscious of it as I worked. Only in hindsight can I see that it protected me from being overwhelmed by the compelling specificsand the politicsof racial difference. Now I know that if there was a secret to the writing of this book, it was simply to stall from the painfully obvious premise that all races are composed of human beings.

At this point I must acknowledge that I was helped immensely in this "technique" and the overall writing of this book by my wife, Rita Steele, who is a practicing clinical psychologist. Though her profession and the specialized knowledge it involves were helpful, these things do not explain her contribution. We both realize what an old professor of mine once said, that "ideas themselves come a dime a dozen." What one is after is the right fit of idea to reality. And reality must always have priority, accepting only those ideas that truly illuminate it. At any rate, this is the goal, and my wife's real contribution was her willingness to chew over endlessly with me the realities I struggled to explore. And lest "chewing" seem mundane, let me say that I know it to be everything. No page of this book is untouched by her effort, and many pages are the result of it. My children son Eli and daughter Loninot only endured a frequently distracted and ill-tempered father, but also shared with me their own thoughts.

I also wish to acknowledge Bill Thomas, my editor, whose encouragement, insightful criticism, and endless patience enabled me to make this a better book. No writer could ask for a more sensitive and understanding editor. I am also very grateful to Gerald Marzorati at Harper s magazine for his thoughtful editorial assistance and to the magazine itself for its belief in my work. Finally, I thank my agent, Carol Mann, for consistently sound advice. It has been encouraging to work with people who give their own being a place in their thoughts.

It is a warm, windless California evening, and the dying light that covers the redbrick patio is tinted pale orange by the day's smog. Eight of us, not close friends, sit in lawn chairs sipping chardonnay. A black engineer and I (we had never met before) integrate the group. A psychologist is also among us, and her presence encourages a surprising openness. But not until well after the lovely twilight dinner has been served, when the sky has turned to deep black and the drinks have long since changed to scotch, does the subject of race spring awkwardly upon us. Out of nowhere the engineer announces, with a coloring of accusation in his voice, that it bothers him to send his daughter to a school where she is one of only three black children. "I didn't realize my ambition to get ahead would pull me into a world where my daughter would lose touch with her blackness," he says.