There are plenty of interpretations going around regarding Shelby Steele's recent op-ed in the WSJ.
Shelby Steele impressed me once. A long time ago basically with his one article in Harper's "The Content of our Character" - long before the book was published. Since then, not. I haven't reviewed his work and probably won't. Interestingly enough, I dismissed him much in the same way some liberals have attempted to dismiss me, through a rationale that said he had 'problems' with being black. Then again, I was a Progressive myself at the time, and I had not yet started to play fast and loose with black identity.
I happen to know that Shelby's twin brother is Claude Steele, the originator of the theory of 'Stereotype Threat' and that colleagues of mine in the academy rapped with him. It was through this part of the Kwaku Network that I discovered that Shelby... well he got slapped on the back of the head for having a name like Shelby. Of course, this is entirely unfair, but that's how identity politics works - first determine that 'authenticity' of the messenger...
In the end, I tended to dismiss him on the basis of his comparatively lame academic career as an associate prof at a state school, and thus headed into the long and troublesome romances with Cornel West and Bell Hooks (er excuse me) bell hooks.
Steele's mojo is, of course, assuaging white guilt. I would bet that he's halfway right. But since I don't like his style, I pay him little mind. He's too squishy anyway. If it aint hardball politics and economics, I'm not particularly interested.
The broad white acknowledgment of racism meant that whites would be responsible both for overcoming their racism and for ending black poverty because, after all, their racism had so obviously caused that poverty.
This is a perfect thumbnail description of white liberalism of the sort that is like thumbnails on the chalkboard to me. And it is because Shelby Steele attacks this obvious (to me) fallacy almost exclusively, he is relatively worthless.
One of the places I start is with Glenn Loury's thesis, which is that colorblindness is insufficient to correct the legacy of white supremacy. The (to borrow a term) STRUCTURAL RACISM of the construction of ghetto plantations, puts many blacks in a hole. Just because nobody is digging new holes doesn't mean the playing field is level. There are still lots of blacks in the hole. Colorblindness doesn't fill the hole.
Steele's dialect fails to acknowledge that there are better reasons to fill the holes in the ghetto. It doesn't matter who lives or lived in New Orleans, the dikes should be repaired, the neighborhoods rebuilt, the holes filled up. But continuing the trope of white guilt and black responsibility begs questions of black economies and white economies, as if it were America's business to keep two separate balance sheets.
Steele concludes somewhere strange and unusual:
And our open acknowledgment of our underdevelopment will clearly give whites a power of witness over us. It will mean that whites can hold us accountable for overcoming inferiority as we hold them to accountable for overcoming racism. They will be able to openly shame us when we are not fully at war with our underdevelopment, just as Bill Bennett was shamed for no more than giving a false impression of racism. If this prospect feels terrifying to many blacks, we have to remember that whites witness and judge us anyway, just as we have witnessed and judged their shame for so long. Mutual witness will go on no matter what balances of power we strike. It is best to be open, and allow the "other's" witness to inspire rather than shame.
This is an argument that obviously has some currency in the annals of 'race relations' but what it is supposed to mean is completely alien to me. What blacks owe themselves is the willingness to understand their capacities under the premise of liberty that citizenship grants. How much of this effort is wasted in matters of exorcising ghosts of whitefolks' assessments can only be testament to internal demons best explained by psychiatrists. That any of this touchy feely accounting translates into political influence is testament to all the things that are wrong with identity politics be they white or black. So no prescriptions or adjustments to such psychic ledgers are going to get us any closer to the nation needs. We need people with houses not made of the strawmen of racial identity politics, but of the bricks of bankable skills bound by the mortar of our educational and economic infrastructure.
Methinks Shelby Steele doth huff and puff too much.
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