4um: The harm in 'White Guilt'; New book breaks down major race-relation issues

Title: The harm in 'White Guilt'; New book breaks down major race-relation issues
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Published: Apr 21, 2008
Author: SHELBY STEELE
Post Date: 2008-04-21 08:07:40 by Jethro Tull
Keywords: None
Views: 140
Comments: 10

The harm in 'White Guilt'; New book breaks down major race-relation issues.(NATION)(CULTURE, ET CETERA: Q;A SHELBY STEELE)(Interview)

Byline: Shelley Widhalm, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Shelby Steele, best-selling author of "The Content of Our Character," analyzes the past half-century of American race relations in his latest book, "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era."

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, works on social, political and cultural themes in his Monterey, Calif., office. He and wife, Rita Steele, who have been married for 39 years, have two adult children.

The following are excerpts of an interview with Mr. Steele:

Question: How does the narrative form of a journey reflect the theme of your book?

Answer: It was a journey toward an insight, a journey toward an understanding where there were many digressions and side trips that help you build slowly toward a broad understanding. Most human insight is the result of a journey.

Q: What is your definition of white guilt and how and why does it replace white supremacy?

A: White supremacy was finally defeated in the mid-1960s, not just in America, but all around the world. Those movements flew under the flag of many different ideologies. Some were communistic, some were Gandhi pacifism, some were nationalistic, but all of them were a rebellion against the idea that whiteness constituted a moral authority in and of itself. And those revolutions, they were all victorious. ..

The price that Americans and Europeans paid, the price the Western world has paid for that is to be forevermore stigmatized with the sense of the past, the racism, the imperialism, the colonialism of the past. Whites began to live under the cloud of suspicion that they really were, in their heart and soul, racist, imperialist, sexist and so on. So they had to prove the negative that they weren't this way. .. White guilt is not a guilt of conscience. It's not a guilt of feeling. It is about fighting off a stigma that one is evil, that one is racist in some way, so that one acts guiltily even when one doesn't feel guilty.

Q: Can you explain the white need to disassociate from racism?

A: We, as blacks, were stigmatized as being inferior. We worked hard to prove that we weren't inferior. Now whites are stigmatized as racists, as imperialists. They have worked hard over the years to prove that they weren't. Whites have been so desperate, and our institutions have been so desperate to prove that they're not racist, and they must do this if they're going to have legitimacy.

Q: How have whites lost moral authority on race, equality, social justice, poverty and so on?

A: White guilt is the same thing as black power. It gave us the first power we ever felt in American society. As blacks, before we had nothing, all of a sudden, we had white guilt. We could say, "Unless you disassociate from racism by giving us Great Society programs, welfare, affirmative action and diversity, you're going to be stigmatized as racist and you will lose your moral authority and legitimacy."

Q: Where did the civil rights movement go wrong?

A: The civil rights movement went wrong when it began to use white guilt as black power. Our power as blacks is the fact we could make the president of the United States give us the Great Society, welfare, affirmative action. We were slaves; now we can make the government give us these things. We went for that fool's gold. Since that time, black power or black leadership is totally devoted to the manipulation of white guilt as the way forward for blacks. They should have been saying manipulating white guilt is a waste of time. The only time we'll ever become competitive with other races, other people, is through our own development: educational development, economic development, cultural development.

Q: Are affirmative action and diversity effective tools to give blacks equal opportunities?

A: They're effective tools to help white people disassociate from racism. No one knows if affirmative action works; no one studied it. It's not about blacks, it's about whites.

Q: Why are the arts and sports untouched by the notion of white responsibility toward blacks?

A: If there are no facilities in the inner cities, whites don't care. We take responsibility ourselves. We apply all the usual standards of excellence. If you can't dribble, we don't say, "We have to understand him; he may come from a single-parent family." There are no excuses; you just learn to dribble. When white guilt intervenes, there is nothing but excuses. Inside the school, inside the classroom, when he can't do his multiplication tables, we excuse him for that. On the basketball court, where there is no white guilt. You'd better learn to dribble, or we'll have no respect for you.

Q: What is the real underlying problem of blacks?

A: The underlying problem is we became dependent on white guilt. It made us slaves again. It made us inferior again.

Q: When you were in college, how were you an "exhibit" on a largely white campus?

A: Back in the late '60s and early '70s, up to that point, there hadn't been many blacks on university campuses. Those of us who were there were objects of white guilt. You're just a kid in college or graduate school, and you're called on to represent your whole race. I don't know about my whole race. I'm just me. .. My point is all these group identities really squash, really repress the individual. That's the kind of silliness white guilt gets us into.

Q: What is your vision for a new approach to issues of race and equality?

A: I think that we still have a big mountain to climb here in America, and that mountain is, we have to understand race is a very minor feature in the human condition. And our challenge is not to acknowledge or be tolerant of racial difference; our challenge is to know each other as human beings.

Q: What is your advice?

A: Stop believing so much in group identities. Stop rewarding group identities. Leave it as a private matter for individuals. Stop having double standards. Have single standards for everyone. Start expecting the same thing of minorities that we expect of everyone else. Reject all public policy that rewards group identity: affirmative action, "diversity," racial preferences.

CAPTION(S):

[Shelby Steele. NO CREDIT]

White guilt is not a guilt of conscience. It's not a guilt of feeling. It is about fighting off a stigma that one is evil, that one is racist in some way, so that one acts guiltily even when one doesn't feel guilty (1 image)

White guilt is the out growth of political correctness ...PC came into being as a counter to American Exceptionalism (very different to todays understanding of this concept) Earl Warren then sealed the deal with the passage of One Man One Vote!...the rest they say is history the poster child for this thing called white guilt is a country now called Zimbabwe!

Robby, you've been saying this for years and time has proven you dead on accurate. The entire concept comes at us from the hard political left, but for reasons I don't understand, some would rather disregard the right/left paradigm in favor of some new abstract political construct that would join the R/L against the Elite. It's a nice concept, but lefties make me urp and I'd no sooner link arms w/them than I would Satan himself.

There is no real difference between hard left and hard right recently Hillary went to the far right of George Bush when she used the concept of exceptionalism to justify the defense of Israel .....below are the two camps both have something in common....neither is good

Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973), was a German-born Jewish-American political philosopher who specialized in the study of classical political philosophy. He spent most of his career as a Political Science Professor at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books. Since his death, he has come to be regarded as one of the intellectual fathers of neoconservatism in the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss

The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist critical theory, social research, and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany when Max Horkheimer became the Institute's director in 1930. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or influenced by them. It is not the title of any institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to describe themselves.

Good info and links, thanks. The influence of Strauss is missed by 99.9% of the Rs.

I consider neos as hard left and ironically the hard left considers them to be on the hard right. Neos are in both wings of our National party, with the neo Ds hiding beneath a Fabian mask.

I'd consider Le Pen from France, or any American First nationalist here, to be the political right.

On race relations Steele is a self-described Black conservative.[2] He opposes movements such as affirmative action, which he considers to be unsuccessful liberal campaigns to promote equal opportunity for African-Americans. He contends that blacks have been "twice betrayed": first, by slavery and oppression, and second, by group preferences mandated by the government that cause blacks to lose their self- esteem.[3]

“ The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks.[3] ”

Steele believes that the use of victimization is the greatest hindrance for black Americans. In his view, white Americans see blacks as victims to ease their guilty conscience, while blacks attempt to turn their status as victims into a kind of currency with no purchasing power. Therefore, he claims, blacks must stop "buying into this zero-sum game" by adopting a "culture of excellence and achievement" without relying on "set-asides and entitlements."[3]

[edit] On Barack Obama Steele has written a short book which contains Steele's analysis of Barack Obama's character as a child born to a mixed couple who then has to grow as a black man.[4] Steele then concludes that Barack Obama is a "bound man" to his "black identity." Steele gives this description of his conclusion:

"There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a racial identity as politicized and demanding as today’s black identity. This identity wants to take over a greater proportion of the self than other racial identities do. It wants to have its collective truth-its defining ideas of grievance and protest- become personal truth.... These are the identity pressures that Barack Obama lives within. He is vulnerable to them because he has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life. He needs to 'be black.' And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness."

Don Wycliff, editor of the Chicago Tribune, reviewed Steele's book[5] and disagreed with his analysis of Obama noting that:

"[as] I read his essay, I found myself thinking that Steele was trapped in a time warp, that his knowledge of the currents of thought and attitude among black people stopped sometime around 1990. Less charitably, I found myself thinking that the egregious Al Sharpton is not the only one with an investment in a static view of American race relations....It apparently never occurs to Steele that for a man a generation younger than himself the terms of blackness might be different, that the “totalitarian” demands he [Steele] encountered in the ’60s might no longer prevail, that Barack Obama’s mixed-race experience might actually be different than Shelby Steele’s."[5]

Q: Why will Obama make a great American President?
A: He's the only candidate with menagerial talent.