Cornel West, the celebrity African-American studies professor, delivers the conventional wisdom when he talks about how the “rage and riots of the 1960s produced America’s landmark civil rights legislation.” In fact, the legislation preceded the riots. The question of why and how the opposite of the truth became a commonplace belief is at the heart of Shelby Steele’s psychologically brilliant “White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era” (HarperCollins, 192 pages, $24.95).

“White Guilt” is an autobiographical meditation on why a significant portion of the black population hasn’t been able to take advantage of the freedoms that belatedly came to it. Mr. Steele, one of our most respected writers on the vexed issues of race, notes that in the segregated post-World War II world, his striving father was accused of “getting above himself.” “Responsibility,” Mr. Steele writes,”made fools of us,” because society quite literally labored to defeat his father’s ambition, even as it left him entirely responsible for his life and family.

In the wake of the 1960s, Mr. Steele explains, the segregated world of responsibility without rights was replaced for blacks by a framework of rights without responsibility.In this reversal, the morally indefensible world of segregation was succeeded not by the responsibility that comes with freedom, but by the destructive assumption, according to Mr. Steele, that African-Americans shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions.

“One has to be grateful to white guilt,” he notes, “for bringing about possibly the greatest social transformation in American history.” But it overshot its mark. The same tide that swept away segregation also took away the institutions and attitudes essential to thriving in freedom.

Whites, in what Mr. Steele calls “disassociation,” strived to separate themselves from what became the stigma of racial bias.But in doing penance for the sins of racism, too many were more concerned with demonstrating their moral purity than with the actual results their policies produced. Good intentions were supposed to be enough.

What followed under the guise of eliminating “institutional racism” was the “redistribution of responsibility.” Under this new dispensation, blacks as a group were considered no more the agents of their own destiny than they had been under slavery. What was different was that their suffering could be converted into political capital and social spending. And the answer to failed social spending was always more social spending.

Failure would only serve as further proof of black victimization, because race, several generations of academics and journalists explained, “was not a mere barrier but the all-determining reality” in which blacks lived.

Mr. Steele remembers a speech he heard in 1967 by the comedian Dick Gregory, who called on his black audience to “get hip” and “raise your consciousness.”Thinking back, Mr. Steele realizes that he was witnessing the birth of what might be called hipster Marxism. The hipster knows the game is rigged but tries to subvert it to his own advantage. Here was an opportunity that most tricksters could only dream of, a chance, Mr. Steele explains, “for working over the master for the rube that he is.”

Like mayors selling poverty to Washington,”the black leadership sold black weakness” to guilty whites looking to buy their redemption.The race hustlers claimed that there were separate “black ways of knowing” and “fad after fad like Ebonics” was an attempt to circumvent the hard work necessary for upward mobility. The idea of free will was taken by university sophisticates to be “largely a delusion of the common man, a kitschy individualism that Americans like to flatter themselves with.” But the determinism was always a game on both sides since the sophisticates saw it as only applying to others.

The black leadership asserted that since racist America has been “responsible for our suffering, why not for our uplift?” But that made no sense logically.How can rest you hopes on whites after having insisted that they are all bred-to-the-bone racists? The answer, Mr. Steele argues, is that the black leadership sold forgiveness to guilty whites, who would turn a blind eye even as black leaders were bilking their own people (as was the case with numerous black mayors).

The role of the race card in sabotaging black-led cities is vividly depicted by two of the best documentary films in recent years.In “Shame of a City,”Tigre Hill captures Philadelphia’s “O.J. Moment,” when the incumbent mayor, an African-American, John Street, manufactured a racist conspiracy in order to salvage his sagging re-election campaign against a Republican reformer, Sam Katz. The opening scenes capture a thuggish Mr. Street, then a council member, shoving an black reporter out of his office for asking tough questions about his questionable ethics. Mr. Street, famous for a brawl in the City Council chambers, developed a smoother style as mayor. But the substance of his approach changed little.

Mr. Street publicly explained that people who wanted to do business with the city would have to “pay to play.” Many businesses chose not to pay the bribes, and Philadelphia under Mr. Street barely benefited from the Clinton boom of the 1990s.

In 2003, Mr. Street was up for re-election and was losing by 6 percentage points to Mr. Katz. Mr. Street outed himself by announcing that he had “discovered” an FBI bug in his office. The Bureau was probing the city’s rich vein of corruption, which would eventually lead to a slew of convictions.

But Mr. Street, who was too adroit to get caught, spun the bug into a massive racist Republican conspiracy to keep down a black man. Without being heavy-handed, Mr. Hill provides viewers with a front seat for Mr. Street’s performance as a wily trickster. Once trailing, Mr. Street went on to an easy victory, while Philadelphia and its largely black population continued their slow slide downhill.

The more hopeful story of a city that may have begun to break with the race game is told by Marshall Curry’s “Street Fight,” nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. It captures the 2002 mayor’s race in Newark, N.J. — a campaign in which Sharpe James, an oldstyle political boss in the mold of Mr. Street, defeated an upstart reform Democrat, Cory Booker. Though Mr. Booker came back in 2006 to win the mayor’s job and defeat the James machine, Mr. Curry’s narrative is an instructive reminder of how the race card can be played even against someone of the same race. To create his own twisted version of the white conspiracy to hold the black man down, Mr. James made an issue of the light skin of the 32-year-old Stanford-educated Mr. Booker, suggesting he wasn’t really black. On camera, Mr. James “played a tale” on Mr. Booker, claiming that the challenger was both “Jewish” and a “KKKer.”

Mr. Curry’s camera documents some of the many attempts by Mr. James and his police force to prevent him from filming on public property. In one scene, a Newark police officer explains, “You’ve been hanging with Cory; he’s not our guy,” as the police “escort” the filmmaker away from a rally for Mr. James. Mr. James made good use of intimidation. He used code violations to close down businesses that supported Mr. Booker, while his police force was openly tearing down posters for Mr. Booker.

Mr. James himself, however, had not been held down.With three homes, several boats, and a small fortune, he had done quite well off the race game, even if the blacks of Newark had not.

There is an old joke in Newark that “the only way an incumbent leaves office is in a casket or to go to jail.” But if Mr. Booker’s term as mayor is a success, his 2006 victory could begin to revise that cynicism. Better yet, it suggests that the tricksters, so adept at the gaming of race, whose debilitating effects Mr. Steele describes, may now have fewer cards to play.

Mr. Siegel is the author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life,” available from Encounter Books.