White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.* White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele HarperCollins, May 2006 $24.95, ISBN 0-060-57862-9 The long subtitle of White Guilt lays bare Shelby Steele's intentions, though his name is enough to tell us all we need to know about where he stands on race relations. Ever since he exploded on the public intellectual scene with The Content of Our Character (St. Martin's Press, 1990), Steele has declared an unabashed allegiance to the conservative ranks, and this latest book further confirms that association. Even before I read the book, I watched him on Book TV, and the buzzwords Early Buzzwords Some of the major buzzwords in the past were MIS in the 1970s, distributed computing in the 1980s and LAN and client/server in the 1990s. The last half of the 1990s brought us all the Internet and Web terms, including Java, intranet and e-commerce. More Recent Following are buzzwords of the late 1990s and early 2000s that continue to persist: scalable, ASP, CRM, middleware, solutions provider, XML, Web services and business intelligence. of his ideological underpinnings--"black accountability," "psychology of dependency" and "victimization"--were spewed without interruption as he talked to caller after caller. "Minister Farrakhan is a demagogue," he told one caller. "He has not succeeded in demonstrating the importance of individual responsibility." "Responsibility" is a relative word, and one might level the same charge at Steele in as much as he seems irresponsible in placing most of the blame on African Americans and white liberals for the failures of governmental policies. What Steele put forth on television is faithfully reinforced in White Guilt, in which he contends that white leaders must stop using minorities as a device to impose their moral authority and black leaders should cease indulging them. It is this pact between them that for Steele has eroded and offset the promise of the Civil Rights Movement. It is amazing how such a good writer can arrive at such warped and addled conclusions his--elegant prose and analysis are at their best when he dissects Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to make a point. Steele earns his keep at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, but he might have more to offer in the realm of literature, where he is a better thinker, less contentious and much more responsible. --Reviewed by Herb Boyd |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion