Shelby Steele Quotes

I just sat there. I just held Shelby's hand. There was no noise, no tremble, just peace. Oh god. I realize as a woman how lucky I am. I was there when that wonderful creature drifted into my life and I was there when she drifted out. It was the most precious moment of my life.

...then we went skinny dippin' and did things that frighten the fish... Character, Shelby Eatonton, from the movie, Steel Magnolias.

Poetic truth—this assertion of a broad characteristic “truth” that invalidates actual truth—is contemporary liberalism’s greatest source of power. It is also liberalism’s most fundamental corruption.

there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands.

I'd rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

It is also the formula that keeps black America underdeveloped even as we enjoy new freedom and a proliferation of opportunity. No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement.

The most striking irony of the age of white guilt is that racism suddenly became valuable to the people who had suffered it.

the fact is that we blacks are free.

The problem is that this “place” is in the past. And it does no good to adapt to a past that is only an echo now. There is no refuge there.

(One of the delights of Marxian-tinged ideas for the young is the unearned sense of superiority they grant.)

It was the first truly profound strategic mistake we made in our long struggle for complete equality. It made us a “contingent people” whose fate depended on what others did for us.

despite all he had endured as a black in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, he taught the boys that America was rich in opportunities for blacks if they were willing to work.

To be a proud and militant black after the sixties, you screamed black power in order to induce the application of white power. And you lived by an ethic that still sees full responsibility as oppression, if not racism, when applied to blacks. Still today, the best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement.

The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism,” wrote Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict. The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.33

For black leaders in the age of white guilt the problem was how to seize all they could get from white guilt without having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer. With it, the smallest racial incident proved the “global truth” of systemic racism.

No,her mother was made for the life. Patient,with a rod of steel beneath the fragile skin. Shelby wouldn't choose it, nor would she let it choose her. She'd love no one who could leave her again so horribly. Letting the conversation flow around her, Shelby tilted back her glass. Her eyes met Alan's. It was there-that quietly brooding patience that promised to last a lifetime.She could almost feel him calmly peeling off layer after layer of whatever bits and pieces made up her personality to get to the tiny core she kept private. You bastard.She nearly said it out loud. Certainly it reflected in her eys for he smiled at her in simple acknowledgement.The siege was definitely under way. She only hoped she had enough provisions to outlast him.

Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations. In the age of racism, whites said blacks were inferior so as not to see their own desire to exploit them, their true motivation. In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.

Moral authority comes to institutions only when they relieve minorities of responsibility (lowered standards, racial preferences). In this age of white guilt responsibility is synonymous with oppression where blacks are concerned. So whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism. This is the formula that locks many whites into publicly supporting affirmative action even as they privately dislike it.

in the age of white guilt, white blindness has been driven not by racism but by the white need to dissociate from racism. Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today not out of bigotry but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority. And when they find a way to dissociate from racism—“diversity,” politically correct language, political liberalism itself—there is little incentive to understand blacks as human beings. Dissociation makes whites human again.

Like most people in the King-era civil rights movement, they were Gandhians because nonviolent passive resistance was the best way to highlight white racism as an immorality. Their rejection of violence, even as a weapon against racial oppression, gave them the extraordinary power of moral witness—the great power of the early civil rights movement. What could America think of itself when passive freedom riders were beaten or when a little black girl in crinoline and pigtails—an image of perfectly conventional human aspiration—had to be escorted into school past a screaming white mob?

anger is never automatic or even inevitable for the oppressed; it is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice. Wounds and injustices create only the potential for anger, but weakness in the oppressor calls out anger even when there is no wound or injustice. In both the best and the worst sense of the word, black rage is always a kind of opportunism.

Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion’s share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late sixties—and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next four decades—grew out of black America’s complete embrace of the latter option.

Author Shelby Steele, one of America’s most insightful commentators on race relations, notes that whites have been looking for some time for a black leader who has credibility within the black community and yet can offer whites racial absolution. This should not be taken too cynically. Many whites genuinely espouse an idealism that seeks to move beyond race, and they recognize that it’s going to take a black spokesman to make this case on a national level and help to get us there. Steele notes bluntly that this idealism cannot be divorced from a powerful sense of white racial guilt. We have to get beyond race because America’s past racial history has become such an embarrassment. Now the black leader that whites are looking for does not actually have to issue indulgences in the manner of the medieval papacy; rather, by his words and deeds, he can signal to white America that whites are no longer on the hook for past racism. In Steele’s view, whites have been eagerly, hungrily awaiting the black leader who would give them a chance, through their support of his leadership, not merely to say to others but to feel, in their innermost being, “Whew, I am not a racist.” Steele speculated that whites may be willing to pay heavily both in money and in political support if such a candidate appeared on the horizon. He would truly be the anointed one.11 Obama’s ingenuity was to recognize that this unique opportunity required a black man of a kind not seen in American politics before. Such a man would have to look black but act white.

Usually adolescent rebels are quickly humbled because they overestimate their own truth and underestimate the truth of their elders. As Mark Twain famously put it, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one’s self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. One opposes it to discover its logic and validity for one’s self. And by failing to defeat it, one comes to it, and to greater maturity, through experience rather than mere received wisdom. Of course, every new generation alters the adult authority it ultimately joins. But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past. The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. Baby boomers, already rather inflated from growing up in the unparalleled prosperity of postwar America, were inflated further by an adult authority that often backed down in the face of their rebellion. It doesn’t matter, for example, that there was honor in America’s acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgement of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority—and, thus, adult authority—despite the good it achieved.

I'd rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.-Shelby played by Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias

What exactly is going on?” Resignation clouded Mary Beth’s cute face. “You know men, always looking out for us.” Anger lit like a match inside Maddie as she turned narrowed eyes on Mitch through the windows. She didn’t know what was going on, but she was in the mood for a fight, and this was the perfect excuse to have one. He gave her a sheepish look, and Maddie wanted to throttle him. She turned away. Her veins practically raced with adrenaline. She’d been tamping down her temper so long she’d forgotten how intoxicating it was to let it rise to the surface. How much effort did she spend repressing her emotions? The better question was, why did she continue? She stiffened her spine. Not anymore. Through gritted teeth she said, “Yes, I know.” Mary Beth’s expression turned consoling and she made some motherly “tsk” noises, even though she couldn’t be much older than Maddie. “They can’t help themselves. It’s in their nature, but obviously execution is not their strong suit.” Maddie turned her attention to the woman. She’d deal with Mitch Riley later.     “What in the hell is going on in there?” Mitch cursed. This was the worst thought-out plan in the world. Why did he leave the details up to Tommy? He knew better. He scowled at the mechanic. “You can’t lie for shit.” Tommy shot him a droll look. “What about you? You could have jumped in any time, but no, you just stood there like an idiot.” “I hired you to lie to her so I wouldn’t have to, dumbass.” With his jaw clenched, the words came out like a growl. Tommy jabbed a finger in his direction. “Ha! I knew you were pussy-whipped.” “I’m not pussy-whipped.” One had to have sex to be pussy-whipped. Not that Mitch was about to volunteer that information. “I just don’t want to lie to her.” “Same difference, dickhead.” Irrational anger flared hot in his blood. God, he wanted to take someone out. He was so fucked. “If you’d thought of a halfway decent story, this wouldn’t be happening.” “How in the hell was I supposed to know she’d know anything about cars?” “She has brothers.” “Yeah, well, you could have mentioned that.” Through the glass window, Maddie shot him a death glare. Yep, totally fucked. He shouldn’t have told her about his past; it was another strike against him, one he knew from experience couldn’t be overlooked. Between tarnishing his knight-in-shining-armor image and the subterfuge, somehow he didn’t think he’d be granted a third strike. They watched the women. Mitch tried to decipher the expressions playing across Maddie’s features and finally gave up, resigned to his fate. Ten excruciating minutes later, the door opened, and Mitch steeled himself for the fight that was sure to come. He didn’t care how he managed it, but she wasn’t leaving. Maddie walked across the dark gray, grease-stained floor, and unable to stand it any longer, he said, “Now, Maddie, I can explain.” “There’s no need.” Her voice held no trace of emotion. Not good. “But—” he started, but before he could say any more, Maddie flung herself into his arms. Shocked, he caught her and held tight. He raised a questioning eyebrow at Mary Beth, and a satisfied smirk curled over her lips. “I told Maddie how her transmission blew,” Mary Beth said in a pleased tone. “And how it cost twenty-five hundred dollars, but Tommy knows this guy over in Shelby who can trade him for a sixty-five Corvette carburetor so it would only cost her around four hundred. Unfortunately, I had to explain how Tommy was doing you a huge, gigantic favor so you agreed to represent Luke in his legal troubles.” While

respected for their talent rather than endured for their color and that they would be read by all our students on a regular basis. An

Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise.

this reform answers white stigma before all else, it has an indifference, if not resistance, to the true needs of blacks that mimics the indifference of oppression. Diversity, multiculturalism, affirmative action, and the propriety of political correctness are all icons of white racial virtuousness that never engage the independent will, character, or determination of blacks. With deference and license they try to buy white moral authority. And in these iconographic schemes, blacks themselves are often mere icons, carriers of white virtuousness, brought in to “diversify” an environment. They are as humanly invisible to the purveyors of diversity as they were to the segregationists of old.

it was slavish to think that black advancement was somehow dependent on the good offices of a white man without half the gravitas of black leaders like King or James Farmer or Malcolm X.

Now I could shame and silence whites at will. With this moral authority there was the power to better defend myself against racism, but there was also a new, abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me—a power of racial privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin. This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new “black power.

conservatives suddenly saw that they needed to contest liberalism’s capture of the political and cultural establishment.

Chautauqua,

was largely a response to white guilt. This guilt is the vacuum in moral authority created by all of white America’s moral failings and infidelities to democracy: racism, sexism, imperialism, materialism, conformity, environmental indifference, educational inequality, superficiality, greed, and so on.

Another black, Shelby Steele, argues that affirmative action encourages blacks to invest in their status as victims, because it is as victims that they reap the benefits of race-based preferences. Power comes from portraying oneself as “oppressed,” not from work or achievement. “When power itself grows out of suffering,” he writes, “blacks are encouraged to expand the boundaries of what qualifies as racial oppression, a situation that can lead us to paint our victimization in vivid colors even as we receive the benefits of preference.

was almost formulaic: independence, a quick lull in which high hopes prevailed, and then years, if not decades, of civil war, strongmen dictators, atrocities, and coups.

But of course this only tries to make a magic out of being black, as if racial self-love and solidarity were the same thing as individual will and character—as if “black pride” could do the individual’s hard work of developing into a person who can compete successfully in the modern world.

As the formerly oppressed move into greater and greater freedom, they are often more wedded to the idea of themselves as oppressed than to the reality that they are freer than ever.

However, by relegating The Good to the government, and making it a matter of public policy, we transformed it from an earnest and personal moral struggle into a glib cultural symbolism.

Virtually all these “good” reforms failed and mired us in all manner of unintended consequences.

Through this liberalism, the government took a kind of benevolent dominion over the fate of minorities and the poor, not to genuinely help them (which would require asking from them the hard work and sacrifice that real development requires), but to achieve immunity for the government from the taint of the past.

Buckley was not dismissive of this outrage; he simply proceeded as if it were interesting but not really relevant.

The victim of oppression is always, and understandably, startled and resentful of the anxieties and burdens that new freedom entails—its call to greater responsibility, discipline, and sacrifice. But there it is.

But in fact, blacks ran into all manner of discrimination in sports and music. They simply would not be deterred. Their excellence and merit ultimately prevailed over all else.

Diversity is about dissociation and legitimacy for American institutions, not the development of former victims.

Thus, in a culture won over by dissociation, conservatism seems to be in association with America’s evil past.

Could a public official, for example, discuss the weakening of personal responsibility and the work ethic (two timeless values) in some segments of the black community as even a partial cause of the academic achievement gap between blacks and whites in American schools? Of course not. It is simply unthinkable.

It was far more a cultivated ignorance of America’s sins than innocence of them, and this ignorance was helped along by a culturally embedded pattern of rationalizations, bigotries, stereotypes, and lies.

But hypocrisy is established when evil is clearly visible through the fog of rationalization—when rationalization is seen for what it is. So hypocrisy is not an act of evil; it is the pretense of innocence even as one is clearly in league with evil, and with all the duplicities and deceptions that serve evil.

When I called him a racist, I shocked him with what was then still a novel idea in race relations: that racism thrived by passing itself off as a kind of decency, a noblesse oblige.

had shown a light on his little evil through the fog of his rationalizations.

white guilt was now a greater problem for minorities than white racism. He wanted to reassure them that blacks

Poetic truths defend the sovereignty of one’s ideological identity by taking license with reality and fact. They work by moral intimidation rather than by reason, so that even to question them is heresy.

You will be far more likely to receive racial preferences than to suffer racial discrimination.

One of the more pernicious corruptions of post-1960s liberalism is that it undermined the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility in precisely the people it sought to uplift.

Political correctness is the enforcement arm of poetic truth. It coerces people into suspending their own judgment on matters of racial equality, women’s rights, war, and the environment in deference to some prescribed “correct” view on these matters that will distance them from the stigma of America’s sinful past.

the benevolent paternalism of white guilt, I said, had injured the self-esteem, if not the souls, of minorities in ways that the malevolent paternalism of white racism never had.

gives us a road to the decency and legitimacy we want while sparing us the difficulty and struggle of true virtue. Dissociation turns virtue into a mask. It gives us the means to construct a “face of The Good.” It counts the mere mouthing of glossy ideas of The Good the same as an honest struggle toward what is actually possible.

Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs.

And so modern liberalism is grounded in a paradox: it tries to be “progressive” and forward looking by fixing its gaze backward. It insists that America’s shameful past is the best explanation of its current social problems. It looks at the present, but it sees only the past.

In other words, there were clear cultural patterns within the black community itself—having nothing to do with racism or discrimination in the 1960s—that would keep blacks from achieving true parity with whites.

The new liberalism that emerged in the 1960s actually coveted responsibility for black problems—or at least the illusion of responsibility—because there was so much moral and political power in the idea of delivering blacks from their tragic past. This

Moynihan’s unpardonable sin was to threaten liberal power by working from the assumption that blacks could be the agents of their own fates despite all the victimization they had endured.

Moynihan’s literal truth—that family breakdown would stymie black advancement even as racism and discrimination declined—is simply irrefutable today, nearly fifty years after his report.

It is often the victim’s fate to be victimized a second time by the moral neediness of his former victimizer. One can chalk up many of black America’s problems since the 1960s precisely to this phenomenon. The larger society around us—having acknowledged its abuse of us—wants to take charge of our fate in order to redeem itself, thus smothering us in social programs and policies that rob us of full autonomy all over again.

Perhaps the finest--and certainly the most eloquent--discussion of the dilemma of victimism is Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character, in which he describes the central tragedy of relations between blacks and whites. While one's victim status confers a sense of moral innocence and entitlement, Steele writes, "it is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim". As potent as victim politics has proved to be, "It is primarily a victim's power, grounded too deeply in the entitlement derived from past injustice . . .".

The American democracy simply could not move forward after the civil rights era without adding to its great democratic principles an explicit social morality based on the insight that racism is immoral.

Like racism, white guilt not only generates new social customs, redefines the way institutions function, gives us new law, and reorients our national politics; it also, in a sense, makes a new world by forever altering our idea of virtue. It says that white supremacy is not a moral truth that decency requires us to observe, but rather an evil that decency requires us to condemn. This new virtue demands that whites condemn the idea of their own racial superiority. So white guilt means that white skin now subtracts moral authority from rather than adds it to people and, thus, imposes humility where it once granted superiority.

King had argued that whites were obligated to morality and democratic principles. But white guilt meant they were obligated to black people because they needed the moral authority only black people could bestow. Only the people themselves—meaning of course the black leadership—could vet the white moral redemption, the white deliverance from racism. Thus, white guilt made racism into a valuable currency for black Americans—a currency that enmeshed whites (and especially American institutions) in obligation not to principles but to black people as a class.

White racism had made my race the limit of my individuality. But now the new black consciousness I was learning from people like Gregory wanted me to voluntarily, even proudly, do the same thing that racism had done: make my race more important than my individuality

This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new “black power.” Then, as this power supported the next generation of civil rights leaders, it evolved into what we call today “the race card.” But back on that hot August night I only felt a weight drop from my shoulders as I began to understand that my country was now repentant before me. I now possessed a separate power that it could only appeal to, appease, or placate. Now America had to prove itself to me. I have already discussed the narcotic effect of all this. This was the inflation that, months later, would lead me to spill cigarette ashes on Dr. McCabe’s fine carpet. But far more important, this great infusion of moral authority gave blacks the power to imprint the national consciousness with a profound new edict, an unwritten law more enforceable than many actual laws: that no black problem—whether high crime rates, poor academic performance, or high illegitimacy rates—could be defined as largely a black responsibility, because it was an injustice to make victims responsible for their own problems. To do so would be to “blame the victim,” thereby repeating his victimization.

In a democracy, the legitimacy of institutions and of government itself is earned and sustained through fidelity to a discipline of democratic principles. These principles strive to ensure the ennobling conditions that free societies aspire: to freedom for the individual, the same rights for all individuals, equality under the law, equality of opportunity, and an inherent right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Freedom, then, is not a state-imposed vision of the social good (say, a classless society); rather, it is the absence of any imposed vision that would infringe on the rights and freedom of individuals. In a true democracy, freedom is a higher priority than the social good.

Dowd illustrates the great internal contradiction of white liberalism: that its paternalism, its focus on whites rather than on blacks as the agents of change, allows white supremacy to slip in the back door and once again define the fundamental relationship between whites and blacks. So the very structure of the liberal faith—that whites and “society” must facilitate black uplift—locks white liberals into an unexamined white supremacy. They can’t really believe in blacks but they must believe in whites. Whites are agents; blacks are agented.

People wrongly dismiss black achievement in these areas for reasons that can be ascribed only to racism—that our compelling excellence follows from a mere genetic advantage. The fact is that we are good at sports and music because we subject ourselves to unforgiving standards of excellence and then work ferociously to meet those standards. Ruthlessly, we allow absolutely no excuses.

But without white supremacy as a source of moral authority, the reverse began to happen. The loss of moral authority went too far the other way, not only denying legitimacy to the plunder of the nonwhite world but also denying it to that entire set of difficult “character” principles that bring coherence and even greatness to free societies: personal responsibility, hard work, individual initiative, delayed gratification, commitment to excellence, competition by merit, the honor in achievement, and so on. How could these principles be important when they had coexisted so easily with racism?

By the night of my encounter with Dick Gregory the goal of the civil rights movement had escalated from a simple demand for equal rights to a demand for the redistribution of responsibility for black advancement from black to white America, from the “victims” to the “guilty.” This marked a profound—and I believe tragic—turning point in the long struggle of black Americans for a better life.

The Sambo doll, as an image of grotesque black inferiority sold to whites in homage to their superiority, is an ominous and recurring image in Invisible Man, a novel set in the era of segregation. Yet, even today, when people argue for diversity and, thus, for racial preferences, black students are effectively Sambo-ized. They are assigned an inferiority so intractable that nothing overcomes it, not even good schools and high family incomes.

The leverage we gained by relying on America’s sense of fallenness came at the price of taking on, and then living with, an identity of grievance and entitlement.

It left us pleading with the government, not for freedom, which we had already won, but for “programs” and “preferences” that would be a ladder to full equality.

over one hundred American institutions—universities, corporations, the military, state and local governments—submitted briefs to the Supreme Court in the Michigan case supporting racial preferences. Yet, despite all this commitment to diversity and racial preferences, I am not aware of a single institution that based its call for preferences on a careful analysis of why so many minorities were not competitive enough to win places in their institutions unaided by racial preferences. Again, if we can’t specifically name the problems that make so many minorities noncompetitive, how can we argue that racial preferences are a remedy?

President Johnson’s Great Society, for example, was created—above all else—to meet this new contingency of dissociating American power from the nation’s racist past. American legitimacy was the Great Society’s most important purpose. And it achieved this purpose through a dissociation from the ill will toward blacks that had characterized all of American history. The Great Society was essentially an apology for the racism that had made the American democracy illegitimate.