I call it redemptive liberalism . And my point is that that liberalism and the racial policies particularly the form of welfare that we began to implement in the early 70s, affirmative action and so forth really had more to do with the redemption of the moral authority that white America and American institutions had lost than they did with the actual uplift of this race that had been kept down for three centuries. Let s go back. The whites in effect, feeling ashamed because of the past racism in the society felt a sense for their own moral redemption and to do that embraced policies that were not really going to solve the problems of blacks in terms of helping their development. And I think they re right in many ways.
Many whites don t feel it.
It has come to be a stigma, though, and it s just out of the fate of history that whites, when blacks became equal, had to admit that in the past there had been these wrongs. And if they step over the line just that much, we can say, that s racism. If they start talking about self-help in relation to blacks or responsibility in relation to blacks, we can say you are a racist. And that throws them back on the defensive. And so whites are in this position of always having to prove a negative that I m not a racist and these policies, I think, come out of that.