The subtitle of Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character is “A New Vision of Race in America.” But the observations of the award-winning writer and English professor are for the most part deeply personal. Using his own life experiences, he explores how and why block Americans carry within a “memory of oppression [that] has such power, magnitude, depth, and nuance that it constantly drains our best resources.” In the following excerpt, he discusses how early wounds to the spirit can be fostered in the school setting.
Until the 6th grade, I attended a segregated school in a small working-class black suburb of Chicago. The school was a dumping ground for teachers with too little competence or mental stability to teach in the white school in our district. In 1965, when I entered the 6th grade, I encountered a new addition to the menagerie of misfits that was our faculty--an ex-Marine whose cruelty was suggested during our first lunch hour when he bit the cap off his Coke bottle and spit it into the wastebasket.
Looking back, I can see that there was no interesting depth to the cruelty he began to show us almost immediately--no consumptive hatred, no intelligent malevolence. Although we were all black and he was white, I don’t think he was even particularly racist. He had obviously needed us to like him, though he had no faith that we would. He ran the class like a gang leader, picking favorites one day and banishing them the next. And then there was a permanent pool of outsiders, myself among them, who were made to carry the specific sins that he must have feared most in himself.
The sin I was made to carry was the sin of stupidity. I misread a sentence on the first day of school, and my fate was sealed. He made my stupidity a part of the classroom lore, and very quickly I in fact became stupid. I all but lost the ability to read and found the simplest math beyond me. His punishments for my errors rose in meanness until one day he ordered me to pick up all of the broken glass on the playground with my bare hands. Of course, this would have to be the age of the pop bottle, and there were sections of this playground that glared like a mirror in sunlight. After half an hour’s labor I sat down on strike, more out of despair than rebellion.
Again, cruelty was no more than a vibration in this man, and so without even a show of anger he commandeered a bicycle, handed it to an 8th grader--one of his lieutenants--and told the boy to run me around the school grounds “until he passes out.” The boy was also given a baseball bat to “use on him when he slows down.” I ran two laps, about a mile, and then pretended to pass out. The 8th grader knew I was playing possum but could not bring himself to hit me and finally rode off. I exited the school yard through an adjoining cornfield and never returned.
I mention this experience as an example of how one’s innate capacity for insecurity is expanded and deepened, of how a disbelieving part of the self is brought to life and forever joined to the believing self. As children we are all wounded in some way and to some degree by the wild world we encounter. From these wounds a disbelieving anti-self is born, an internal antagonist and saboteur that embraces the world’s negative view of us, that believes our wounds are justified by our own unworthiness, and that entrenches itself as a lifelong voice of doubt.
This anti-self is a hidden aggressive force that scours the world for fresh evidence of our unworthiness. When the believing self announces its aspirations, the anti-self always argues against them, but never on their merits (this is a healthy function of the believing self). It argues instead against our worthiness to pursue these aspirations and, by its lights, we are never worthy of even our smallest dreams. The mission of the anti-self is to deflate the believing self and, thus, draw it down into inertia, passivity, and faithlessness.
The anti-self is the unseen agent of low self-esteem; it is a catalytic energy that tries to induce low self-esteem in the believing self, as though it were the complete truth of the personality. The anti-self can only be contained by the strength of the believing self: and this is where one’s early environment becomes crucial. If the childhood environment is stable and positive, the family whole and loving, the schools good, the community safe, then the believing self will be reinforced and made strong. If the family is shattered, the schools indifferent, the neighborhood a minefield of dangers, the anti-self will find evidence everywhere with which to deflate the believing self.
This does not mean that a bad childhood cannot be overcome. But it does mean--as I have experienced and observed--that one’s capacity for self-doubt and self-belief are roughly the same from childhood on, so that years later when the believing self may have strengthened enough to control the anti-self, one will still have the same capacity for doubt, whether or not one has the actual doubt. I think it is this struggle between our capacities for doubt and belief that gives our personalities one of their peculiar tensions and, in this way, marks our character.
My own anti-self was given new scope and power by this teacher’s persecution, and it was so successful in deflating my believing self that I secretly vowed never to tell my parents what was happening to me. The anti-self had all but sold my believing self on the idea that I was stupid, and I did not want to feel that shame before my parents. It was my brother who finally told them, and his disclosure led to a boycott that closed the school and eventually won the dismissal of my teacher and several others. But my anti-self transformed even this act of rescue into a cause of shame-if there wasn’t something wrong with me, why did I have to be rescued? The anti-self follows only the logic of self-condemnation.
But there was another dimension to this experience that my anti-self was only too happy to seize upon. It was my race that landed me in this segregated school and, as many adults made clear to me, my persecution followed a timeless pattern of racial persecution. The implications of this were rich food for the anti-self-my race was so despised that it had to be segregated; as a black my education was so unimportant that even unbalanced teachers without college degrees were adequate; ignorance and cruelty that would be intolerable in a classroom of whites was perfectly all right in a classroom of blacks. The anti-self saw no injustice in any of this, but instead took it all as confirmation of a racial inferiority that it could now add to the well of personal doubt I already had. When the adults thought they were consoling me--"Don’t worry. They treat all blacks this way"- -they were also deepening the wound and expanding my capacity for doubt.
And this is the point. The condition of being black in America means that one will likely endure more wounds to one’s self-esteem than others and that the capacity for self-doubt born of these wounds will be compounded and expanded by the black race’s reputation of inferiority. The anti-self will most likely have more ammunition with which to deflate the believing self and its aspirations. And the universal human struggle to have belief win out over doubt will be more difficult.
More than difficult, it is also made inescapable by the fact of skin color, which, in America, works as a visual invocation of the problem. Black skin has more dehumanizing stereotypes associated with it than any other skin color in America, if not the world. When a black presents himself in an integrated situation, he knows that his skin alone may bring these stereotypes to life in the minds of those he meets and that he, as an individual, may be diminished by his race before he has a chance to reveal a single aspect of his personality.