Shelby Steele
But on this 50th anniversary of the Little Rock crisis, it is important to remember that this evil did happen in America, and that no engineered redemption can make us innocent again. And we might also remember that it is better to be chastened than innocent.Collection: Anniversary
Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that.Collection: Independence
White America's live under this accusation that they're racist, they need to prove that they're not racist. In order to prove that you're not racist, you need to take over the fate of black people and say, go with us, we'll engineer you into the future, we'll engineer you into equality.Collection: Equality
My father bought three ramshackle houses, rebuilt them, rented them out, kept clawing his way up the ladder. A man with a third grade education from the south.Collection: Education
The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle.Collection: History
Especially for blacks, but also for many Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans, group identity is now shaped more by a liberal politics in which past victimization is deferred to, and for which redress is sought with preferential treatment, than by a unified culture.Collection: Politics
America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.
I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there - all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.
I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness - not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.
I have called Mr. Obama a bound man because he cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites.
The great drama at the core of American race relations is always the same: Can black Americans ever be truly equal - are they capable of achieving it and are others capable of accepting it?
Normally, 'black responsibility' is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites.
John McCain is simply a man of considerable character, poor guy. He is utterly bereft of cultural cachet.
Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America.
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs.
As an ideology - and certainly as a political identity - conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for.
Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies.
For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle.
The Achilles' heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces like 'systemic racism' and 'structural inequality.'
Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing.
What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.
Racism and bigotry generally are the great driving engines of modern American liberalism. Even a remote hint of racism can trigger a kind of moral entrepreneurism.
The 'safe spaces' for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment.
Conservatism's vulnerability is simply that it has no way to extract power from the evils America owned up to in the '60s - no way to use the sins of the past to coerce Americans into doing what it wants.
Conservatism is the perfect antidote to underdevelopment. Its commitment to individual responsibility, education, hard work, personal initiative, traditional family values and free markets is a universal formula for success in a free society.
But blacks make little to no progress and, worse, the preoccupation with injustice only leaves them eternally inconsolable and cut off from their own best energies and talents.
Innocents don't learn from their sins; the chastened are informed by them.
By some estimates, 80% of rap music is bought by white youth. And this makes for another irony. The blooming of white alienation has brought us the first generation of black entrepreneurs with wide-open access to the American mainstream.
Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and over-the-top vulgarity. But it is important to remember that this music is a fairly accurate message from a part of society where human connections are fractured and impossible, so fraught with disappointments and pain that only an assault on human feeling itself can assuage.
Rap makes the conservative argument about what happens when family life is eroded either by welfare and drugs, or by the stresses and indulgences of middle-class life.
I do not like the Confederate flag. It excludes me, profoundly. And if many good people fought honorably to defend it, I still experience the sight of it as a little racial aggression against me.
It is quite acceptable for either party to explicitly go after the black, Hispanic, or even the Jewish vote. In fact both parties gain an indispensable moral authority by doing so.
Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil.
I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism.
No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there will never be a satisfying answer for this.
Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood.
If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her.
In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty.
Liberal criticism of George W. Bush's minority cabinet and staff selections reveals just how much the left has come to rely on the manipulation of group identity in America as a means to political power.
Even the humble black grandmother, who sings in the church choir and struggles to raise a grandchild abandoned to her care, must assert ideological liberalism in order to make others comfortable about her blackness.
I know personally that being a conservative minority is a test of character. Identity, after all, is an integral and cherished part of the self.
In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture.
The great white advantage has been living inside history, adapting to its constant demands, nurturing the values and the habits of life that allow one to keep pace. This is the cultural capital that whites too often take for granted and rarely think of insisting on in the former victims of exclusion.
White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West. It makes the First World apologetic. And this, of course, only inflames the narcissism of the ineffectual.
Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win it. Freedom holds us accountable no matter the disadvantages we inherit from the past.
Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism's unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.
White-on-black shootings evoke America's history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair.
Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power - the right to kill - to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women.
Black identity since the '60s has been a totalitarian identity. It's enforced. And if you don't subscribe to the party line, then you are a betrayer and a dissident, and you are treated as dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union.
So white guilt is not a guilt of conscience; it's not something that you get up in the morning and say, my God, I feel guilty about what happened to black Americans. Rather it is the fact that in relation to black Americans you lack moral authority.