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Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country
The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress. Amid the bickering and inertia, the promise of the 1960s -- when we came together as a nation to fight for equality and universal justice -- remains unfulfilled.
As Shelby Steele reveals in Shame , the roots of this impasse can be traced back to that decade of protest, when in the act of uncovering and dismantling our national hypocrisies -- racism, sexism, militarism -- liberals internalized the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern American from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs, such as Affirmative Action. Steele reveals that not only have these programs failed, but they have in almost every case actively harmed America's minorities and poor. Ultimately, Steele argues, post-60s liberalism has utterly failed to achieve its stated true equality. Liberals, intending to atone for our past sins, have ironically perpetuated the exploitation of this country's least fortunate citizens.
It therefore falls to the Right to defend the American dream. Only by reviving our founding principles of individual freedom and merit-based competition can the fraught legacy of American history be redeemed, and only through freedom can we ever hope to reach equality.
Approaching political polarization from a wholly new perspective, Steele offers a rigorous critique of the failures of liberalism and a cogent argument for the relevance and power of conservatism.
As Shelby Steele reveals in Shame , the roots of this impasse can be traced back to that decade of protest, when in the act of uncovering and dismantling our national hypocrisies -- racism, sexism, militarism -- liberals internalized the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern American from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs, such as Affirmative Action. Steele reveals that not only have these programs failed, but they have in almost every case actively harmed America's minorities and poor. Ultimately, Steele argues, post-60s liberalism has utterly failed to achieve its stated true equality. Liberals, intending to atone for our past sins, have ironically perpetuated the exploitation of this country's least fortunate citizens.
It therefore falls to the Right to defend the American dream. Only by reviving our founding principles of individual freedom and merit-based competition can the fraught legacy of American history be redeemed, and only through freedom can we ever hope to reach equality.
Approaching political polarization from a wholly new perspective, Steele offers a rigorous critique of the failures of liberalism and a cogent argument for the relevance and power of conservatism.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published February 24, 2015
161 people are currently reading
2040 people want to read
About the author
Shelby Steele
10 books302 followersShelby Steele (born January 1, 1946) is an African American author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, specialising in the study of race relations, multiculturalism and affirmative action. In 1990, he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in the general nonfiction category for his book The Content of Our Character.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews
January 11, 2016
If you already believe in Right-wing Conservative ideology, you may like this book, but it is actually not that good a defense of those principles. Steele relies almost exclusively on his own personal experiences (which are actually the good part of the book) and platitudes, with no data of any sort, to skewer Liberal principles and support Conservative ones.
His basic premise is that Liberals, in trying to address racism, are simply acting from a base of collective guilt for America's past sins. He contends that the main work of bringing equality to America for Blacks has been accomplished, and that now Liberals need to just back off and stop trying to do things like affirmative action, school integration and welfare programs, because all these programs have done and will continue to do is keep Blacks inferior and dependent. Steele sees Blacks as being lured into a sense of entitlement based on America's past sins.
In making this thesis, Steele completely ignores the fact that racism is not gone due to the Civil Rights triumphs of the 60s, it has just changed its character. There may no longer be Jim Crow, but the War on Drugs disproportionately targets Blacks and Black communities, which has led to a much larger proportion of Black inmates than their share of the population would predict. He also conveniently ignores the numerous studies showing that Blacks who are in every other way equal with Whites of the same socioeconomic category are far less likely to compete well for a job against White applicants, are far less likely to get a home loan, and are far less competitive in almost any other place you want to measure such. Even if they are more highly qualified than a comparable White applicant, they are still likely to lose a job or university slot to the White person.
With personal heroes such as Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, it is no surprise that Steele, like so many Right-wing Conservatives, sees government as the problem, and freedom as the answer. He believes in free markets (whatever that means), a flat tax and apparently little to no government involvement in dealing with issues of racism, sexism and poverty, other than making sure everyone is free to do what they want. All I can say is that his view of Liberals is largely a straw man, and Liberal policies have made progress, and continue to make progress toward solving some of the many social problems our country is still plagued with, and the motivation for Liberalism is not guilt, but rather a moral belief that all people deserve as level a playing field as possible to allow them to succeed.
His basic premise is that Liberals, in trying to address racism, are simply acting from a base of collective guilt for America's past sins. He contends that the main work of bringing equality to America for Blacks has been accomplished, and that now Liberals need to just back off and stop trying to do things like affirmative action, school integration and welfare programs, because all these programs have done and will continue to do is keep Blacks inferior and dependent. Steele sees Blacks as being lured into a sense of entitlement based on America's past sins.
In making this thesis, Steele completely ignores the fact that racism is not gone due to the Civil Rights triumphs of the 60s, it has just changed its character. There may no longer be Jim Crow, but the War on Drugs disproportionately targets Blacks and Black communities, which has led to a much larger proportion of Black inmates than their share of the population would predict. He also conveniently ignores the numerous studies showing that Blacks who are in every other way equal with Whites of the same socioeconomic category are far less likely to compete well for a job against White applicants, are far less likely to get a home loan, and are far less competitive in almost any other place you want to measure such. Even if they are more highly qualified than a comparable White applicant, they are still likely to lose a job or university slot to the White person.
With personal heroes such as Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, it is no surprise that Steele, like so many Right-wing Conservatives, sees government as the problem, and freedom as the answer. He believes in free markets (whatever that means), a flat tax and apparently little to no government involvement in dealing with issues of racism, sexism and poverty, other than making sure everyone is free to do what they want. All I can say is that his view of Liberals is largely a straw man, and Liberal policies have made progress, and continue to make progress toward solving some of the many social problems our country is still plagued with, and the motivation for Liberalism is not guilt, but rather a moral belief that all people deserve as level a playing field as possible to allow them to succeed.
February 11, 2017
Don’t be misled by this small book’s subtitle, or even the title for that matter. Neither reflects Shelby Steele’s thesis that post 1960s Liberalism is built on a house of lies that has relegated many blacks and other minorities to positions “of inferiors and dependents.” (179)
Shame reveals among other things why eight years after the election of the first African-American president, issues around race still divide our country. Steele also explains why Liberalism seems to be more about absolving whites and government from America’s past than helping minorities overcome that past and why conservative commentators are not taken at face value.
To understand Steele’s thesis one needs to start with slavery because slavery was not just an evil in and of itself, it was a black mark against the foundational principle of American exceptionalism––the idea embodied in the Declaration and the Constitution that freedom of the individual is the ideal foundation of a just society. Although some did oppose slavery from the start, it took half a century before it was abolished. Unfortunately, slavery was replaced by another pernicious social institution––Jim Crow, which was based on theories of African-American inferiority. Segregation and its rational survived until the 1960s when the struggle for equality became the central issue of the day and the logic of extending the promise of freedom brought about a massive social upheaval.
Shelby Steele’s contribution to what happened next reflects his experience growing up in an era where America sought to show the world it had broken with its past by instituting a variety of programs designed to remedy that past, including the War on Poverty, affirmative action, racial preferences in hiring, lowered welfare standards, et al. The short-term impact of these programs was to give blacks an opportunity to join the mainstream of American society, but there was an unintended longer-term consequence that both handcuffed blacks and gave rise to the distorted political culture we call Liberalism.
Steele illustrates how blacks have been hampered by these post-Civil Rights policies by citing the case of Clarence Thomas who found getting into Yale Law School undermined people’s willingness to give him credit for his accomplishments. People assumed Thomas only got into Yale because he was black and that his high grades at Yale were not deserved. This “catch 22” still hampers blacks today. One wonders if Barack Obama feared he was only elected president because of his race, and not his qualifications or platform? Does that explain the aloof manner by which he conducted himself as president?
The flip side of the post 1960s liberal equation is that many whites feel they must continually prove they are not racists by asserting that America is a racist society. This despite, as Steele argues, the fact blacks today are “far more likely to receive racial preferences than to suffer racial discrimination.” (17)
The 1960s gave rise to the notion that America was inherently evil as evidenced by its treatment of women, blacks and other minorities, by its disregard for the environment and by its willingness to interfere in third world liberation struggles––the war in Vietnam being the primary example. The remedy was affirmative action on all those issues and in the process discrediting of the notion that a commitment to the freedom of the individual was sufficient. In Steele’s terms, America embarked on a new mission “to establish ‘The Good’ . . . on par with freedom.” The Good requires equal results be guaranteed not just equal opportunity. The purpose of The Good, he writes, “became absolution for the American people and the government, and not actual reform for minorities.” (128)
The Good was a relativistic solution––a commitment to results over process and it required people to dissociate themselves from America’s past. Liberal public policies and programs were promoted as evidence of rejection of America’s evil past and refusal to endorse such programs was seen as lingering affiliation with that past. Belief in America as a city on a hill, as a beacon of freedom for the oppressed peoples of the world, as an exceptional nation was rejected. “American exceptionalism and white supremacy [became] virtually interchangeable.” (164)
Liberalism underscored its commitment to The Good attacking traditional American culture and invading the political arena. To post 1960 liberals the drive for political power was seen as “nothing less than a moral and cultural imperative.” (156)
In order to maintain their political and cultural dominance, liberals have become committed to what Steele calls the ‘poetic truth’ of American society, a false vision that is necessary to support their ideological position. The chickens of that falsity, embodied in academia, big government and groups such as black lives matter, came home to roost in November, 2016 when sixty plus million people rejected the liberal candidate.
Criticism of liberal programs by whites can be dismissed as evidence of a person’s association with pre-1960s America, but it’s harder to make that label stick when the critics are black. Labeling people like Clarence Thomas, Michelle Malkin, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Dr. Ben Carson, and Shelby Steele ‘uncle toms’ only demonstrates how unglued liberals become when confronted with facts that fly in the face of their make believe world.
Sadly books like Shame rarely get the visibility they deserve. I found no reviews in the New York Times or the Washington Post, despite the fact that Steele is a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution and author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book The Content of Our Character (1990).
Shame has only 49 reviews on Amazon and a 4.3 rating while Ta-Hehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me has 3,157 reviews and a 4.6 rating. Coates has received numerous awards for his writing, including a MacArthur “genius grant,” but Coates’ thesis that racism survives because whites are attached to the benefits of being white is a perfect example of what Steele unclothes––a false narrative that is accepted because it re-inforces the story that America is as tainted today as it was in the time of slavery. Coates views “whiteness” as inevitable and permanent but fails to recognize that the price of conflating slavery and segregation, discrimination and unintended bias is that blacks will never be free! That’s where Steele parts company with Coates.
Steele gives us a window into his evolution from a sixties radical to a twenty-first century conservative. The turning point came in 1970 when he and his wife spent several weeks in Africa where he discovered that the revolution the Black Panthers and others were championing was a false and bankrupt dream. His experience reminds me of the degeneration of the civil rights movement in Albany, New York around the same time. I had been involved in the optimistic years before King’s assassination, which understandably caused many to become bitter and the rhetoric of revolution to gain currency. When the Black Panthers came to Albany, however, they sent a heroin dealer as their representative. Apparently at that point anyone willing to spout their revolutionary rhetoric was acceptable.
While post 1960s liberalism has been losing currency at the polls, it still dominates our culture, the entertainment industry, and the news media. Conservatives who reject the relativism of Liberalism, who stand behind the founders’ original insights, have an opportunity to turn the tide. Steele urges conservatives to be sensitive to the “psychological and cultural damage done to minorities by American hypocrisy,” by showing how the original dream of equality for all and a commitment to freedom, is still America’s essential truth. The time to win that war is now.
Shame reveals among other things why eight years after the election of the first African-American president, issues around race still divide our country. Steele also explains why Liberalism seems to be more about absolving whites and government from America’s past than helping minorities overcome that past and why conservative commentators are not taken at face value.
To understand Steele’s thesis one needs to start with slavery because slavery was not just an evil in and of itself, it was a black mark against the foundational principle of American exceptionalism––the idea embodied in the Declaration and the Constitution that freedom of the individual is the ideal foundation of a just society. Although some did oppose slavery from the start, it took half a century before it was abolished. Unfortunately, slavery was replaced by another pernicious social institution––Jim Crow, which was based on theories of African-American inferiority. Segregation and its rational survived until the 1960s when the struggle for equality became the central issue of the day and the logic of extending the promise of freedom brought about a massive social upheaval.
Shelby Steele’s contribution to what happened next reflects his experience growing up in an era where America sought to show the world it had broken with its past by instituting a variety of programs designed to remedy that past, including the War on Poverty, affirmative action, racial preferences in hiring, lowered welfare standards, et al. The short-term impact of these programs was to give blacks an opportunity to join the mainstream of American society, but there was an unintended longer-term consequence that both handcuffed blacks and gave rise to the distorted political culture we call Liberalism.
Steele illustrates how blacks have been hampered by these post-Civil Rights policies by citing the case of Clarence Thomas who found getting into Yale Law School undermined people’s willingness to give him credit for his accomplishments. People assumed Thomas only got into Yale because he was black and that his high grades at Yale were not deserved. This “catch 22” still hampers blacks today. One wonders if Barack Obama feared he was only elected president because of his race, and not his qualifications or platform? Does that explain the aloof manner by which he conducted himself as president?
The flip side of the post 1960s liberal equation is that many whites feel they must continually prove they are not racists by asserting that America is a racist society. This despite, as Steele argues, the fact blacks today are “far more likely to receive racial preferences than to suffer racial discrimination.” (17)
The 1960s gave rise to the notion that America was inherently evil as evidenced by its treatment of women, blacks and other minorities, by its disregard for the environment and by its willingness to interfere in third world liberation struggles––the war in Vietnam being the primary example. The remedy was affirmative action on all those issues and in the process discrediting of the notion that a commitment to the freedom of the individual was sufficient. In Steele’s terms, America embarked on a new mission “to establish ‘The Good’ . . . on par with freedom.” The Good requires equal results be guaranteed not just equal opportunity. The purpose of The Good, he writes, “became absolution for the American people and the government, and not actual reform for minorities.” (128)
The Good was a relativistic solution––a commitment to results over process and it required people to dissociate themselves from America’s past. Liberal public policies and programs were promoted as evidence of rejection of America’s evil past and refusal to endorse such programs was seen as lingering affiliation with that past. Belief in America as a city on a hill, as a beacon of freedom for the oppressed peoples of the world, as an exceptional nation was rejected. “American exceptionalism and white supremacy [became] virtually interchangeable.” (164)
Liberalism underscored its commitment to The Good attacking traditional American culture and invading the political arena. To post 1960 liberals the drive for political power was seen as “nothing less than a moral and cultural imperative.” (156)
In order to maintain their political and cultural dominance, liberals have become committed to what Steele calls the ‘poetic truth’ of American society, a false vision that is necessary to support their ideological position. The chickens of that falsity, embodied in academia, big government and groups such as black lives matter, came home to roost in November, 2016 when sixty plus million people rejected the liberal candidate.
Criticism of liberal programs by whites can be dismissed as evidence of a person’s association with pre-1960s America, but it’s harder to make that label stick when the critics are black. Labeling people like Clarence Thomas, Michelle Malkin, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Dr. Ben Carson, and Shelby Steele ‘uncle toms’ only demonstrates how unglued liberals become when confronted with facts that fly in the face of their make believe world.
Sadly books like Shame rarely get the visibility they deserve. I found no reviews in the New York Times or the Washington Post, despite the fact that Steele is a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution and author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book The Content of Our Character (1990).
Shame has only 49 reviews on Amazon and a 4.3 rating while Ta-Hehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me has 3,157 reviews and a 4.6 rating. Coates has received numerous awards for his writing, including a MacArthur “genius grant,” but Coates’ thesis that racism survives because whites are attached to the benefits of being white is a perfect example of what Steele unclothes––a false narrative that is accepted because it re-inforces the story that America is as tainted today as it was in the time of slavery. Coates views “whiteness” as inevitable and permanent but fails to recognize that the price of conflating slavery and segregation, discrimination and unintended bias is that blacks will never be free! That’s where Steele parts company with Coates.
Steele gives us a window into his evolution from a sixties radical to a twenty-first century conservative. The turning point came in 1970 when he and his wife spent several weeks in Africa where he discovered that the revolution the Black Panthers and others were championing was a false and bankrupt dream. His experience reminds me of the degeneration of the civil rights movement in Albany, New York around the same time. I had been involved in the optimistic years before King’s assassination, which understandably caused many to become bitter and the rhetoric of revolution to gain currency. When the Black Panthers came to Albany, however, they sent a heroin dealer as their representative. Apparently at that point anyone willing to spout their revolutionary rhetoric was acceptable.
While post 1960s liberalism has been losing currency at the polls, it still dominates our culture, the entertainment industry, and the news media. Conservatives who reject the relativism of Liberalism, who stand behind the founders’ original insights, have an opportunity to turn the tide. Steele urges conservatives to be sensitive to the “psychological and cultural damage done to minorities by American hypocrisy,” by showing how the original dream of equality for all and a commitment to freedom, is still America’s essential truth. The time to win that war is now.
February 15, 2023
Shelby Steele's book, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country is a stunning portrayal of America and the shift from Thomas Jefferson's version of liberalism, which included free speech, equality, and freedom to the version of liberalism that emerged in the '60s. Steele summarizes:
This new liberalism which has essentially held America captive since the days of the Johnson administration has only grown and been perpetuated by President Obama and Biden. Steele adds, "It befriends them, promises them all manner of programs and policies. It makes a show of being deferential toward their woundedness, of bowing before their past victimization as before an irrefutable moral authority." In short, new liberalism lies to minorities, short-circuits their path to productivity and success, and curtails their liberty.
Steele's explanation of the scourage of so-called new liberalism continues: "Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequality and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs." The author's excursion into the slough of progressivism helps readers understand why so many people are held captive by this pernicious ideology. It reveals the underbelly of one of the most destructive forces in America, which falls under the banner of the Democratic Party.
Shame is more descriptive than prescriptive, which in no way detracts from the effectiveness of the book. Steele's penetrating insight and analysis of the lie of new liberalism (progressivism) is a welcome addition to the growing number of critiques and will help set the trajectory for a more stable future.
This new liberalism does not pursue the actual uplift of minorities and the poor. It pursues dispensation from America's past sins for whites - the imprimatur of innocence. Minorities and the poor, seduced by all the promises scattered like rose petals in their path, are thus manipulated into bestowing that imprimatur.
This new liberalism which has essentially held America captive since the days of the Johnson administration has only grown and been perpetuated by President Obama and Biden. Steele adds, "It befriends them, promises them all manner of programs and policies. It makes a show of being deferential toward their woundedness, of bowing before their past victimization as before an irrefutable moral authority." In short, new liberalism lies to minorities, short-circuits their path to productivity and success, and curtails their liberty.
Steele's explanation of the scourage of so-called new liberalism continues: "Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequality and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs." The author's excursion into the slough of progressivism helps readers understand why so many people are held captive by this pernicious ideology. It reveals the underbelly of one of the most destructive forces in America, which falls under the banner of the Democratic Party.
Shame is more descriptive than prescriptive, which in no way detracts from the effectiveness of the book. Steele's penetrating insight and analysis of the lie of new liberalism (progressivism) is a welcome addition to the growing number of critiques and will help set the trajectory for a more stable future.
March 26, 2021
I knew very little of Shelby Steele before reading this, but I was in for a treat. The book is concise and compelling. Steele is super smart; some things I had to read several times to understand them.
He argues that the current political divide can be traced to the 1960s. At that time, America was forced to face its hypocrisy, that “liberty and justice for all” was not actually happening. After facing it head on, modern conservatism and liberalism emerged. Conservatism said our founding ideals still mattered even if we didn’t live up to them and we should try to do better. Liberalism said those ideals had failed and had to be scrapped and the country had to start over. Liberalism said women and minorities, especially blacks, were and would always be victims and therefore would have to be compensated forever.
There arose what Mr. Steele calls “poetic truth.” This is what led to political correctness. For example, it’s a poetic truth that a black person is more likely to be killed by a cop than another black person even if crime records prove otherwise. It’s a poetic truth that nuclear power harms the environment more than wind power, even if physics proves the opposite. These poetic truths serve “the Good,” a vision of what ought to be.
Mr. Steele bought into this liberalism as a young man and so visited Africa, which was considered a paradise that America should try to become. He met exiled Black Panther members and saw for himself what it was really like. After years of being pandered to by white liberals, he’d had enough.
I highlighted lots of stuff in the book; it was pretty fascinating.
******************************************
I … define white guilt as the terror of being seen as racist—a terror that has caused whites to act guiltily toward minorities even when they feel no actual guilt. ... This terror—and the lust it has inspired in whites to show themselves innocent of racism—has spawned a new white paternalism toward minorities since the 1960s that, among other things, has damaged the black family more profoundly than segregation ever did.
Post-1960s welfare policies, the proliferation of “identity politics” and group preferences, and all the grandiose social interventions of the War on Poverty and the Great Society—all this was meant to redeem the nation from its bigoted past, but paradoxically, it also invited minorities to make an identity and a politics out of grievance and inferiority. Its seductive whisper to them was that their collective grievance was their entitlement and that protest politics was the best way to cash in on that entitlement—this at the precise moment when America was at last beginning to free up minorities as individual citizens who could pursue their own happiness to the limits of their abilities. Thus, white guilt was a smothering and distracting kindness that enmeshed minorities more in the struggle for white redemption than in their own struggle to develop as individuals capable of competing with all others.
How, then, does it constitute progress for minorities to overcome bigotry as a limit on their freedom only to subjugate themselves to a paternalistic interventionism inspired by white guilt? There is no true freedom either way.
Today the Left and the Right don’t work within a shared understanding of the national purpose; nor do they seek such an understanding. Rather, each seeks to win out over the other and to define the nation by its own terms.
Since the 1960s, white racism had lost so much of its authority, power, and legitimacy that it was no longer, in itself, a prohibitive barrier to black advancement. Blacks have now risen to every level of American society, including the presidency. If you are black and you want to be a poet, or a doctor, or a corporate executive, or a movie star, there will surely be barriers to overcome, but white racism will be among the least of them. You will be far more likely to receive racial preferences than to suffer racial discrimination. ... Post-1960s liberalism conflates the past with the present: it argues that today’s racial disparities are caused by precisely the same white racism that caused them in the past … But past oppression cannot be conflated into present-day oppression. It is likely, for example, that today’s racial disparities are due more to dysfunctions with the black community, and—I would argue—to liberal social policies that have encouraged us to trade more on our past victimization than to overcome the damage done by that victimization through dint of our own pride and will.
Liberalism turned to poetic truth when America’s past sins were no longer literally true enough to support liberal policies and the liberal claim on power. The poetic truth of black victimization seeks to compensate for America’s moral evolution. It tries to keep alive the justification for liberal power even as that justification has been greatly nullified by America’s moral development. The poetic idea that America will always be a racist, sexist, imperialistic, and greed-driven society has rescued post-1960s liberalism from the great diminishment that should have been its fate, given the literal truth of America’s remarkable (if incomplete) moral growth.
The great problem with poetic truths is that they are never self-evident in the way, for example, that racial victimization was self-evident in the era of segregation. Today the actual facts fail to support the notion that racial victimization is a prevailing truth of American life. So today, a poetic truth, like “black victimization,” or the ongoing “repression of women,” or the systematic “abuse of the environment,” must be imposed on society not by fact and reason but by some regime of political correctness—some notion of propriety and decency that coerces people into treating such claims as actual fact.
Those poetic truths, and the notions of correctness that force them on society, prevent America from seeing itself accurately. That is their purpose. They pull down the curtain on what is actually true. If decades of government assistance have weakened the black family with dependency and dysfunction, poetic truth argues all the more fervently that blacks are victims and that whites are privileged. Poetic truths stigmatize the actual truth with the sins of America’s past so that truth itself becomes “incorrect.” As America has become more “correct” in relation to its past, it has also become more cut off from the reality of its present. ... If you don’t presume that America’s racism, sexism, warmongering, and environmental disregard are incontrovertible qualities of the American character, then you are you obviously “incorrect” and guilty of fellow traveling with precisely those qualities.
Correctness constitutes a power in itself, a power substantial enough to prevail easily, much of the time, over the actual truth.
Over all these decades, liberalism’s prevailing poetic truth has been that blacks are eternal victims: their problems are always the result of some determinism, some unfairness or injustice that impinges like an ongoing rain out of permanently hostile skies. And in the white liberal imagination, blacks are only victims. Liberalism expresses its inborn racism in the way it overlooks the full human complexity of blacks—the fact that they are more than mere victims—in order to distill and harden the idea of their victimization into a currency of liberal power.
[Lyndon] Johnson rationalized his position [of permanent black welfare] with the poetic truth that blacks were always and only victims. This reductionalism dehumanized blacks, but it served liberal power perfectly. In claiming to uplift blacks—and thus to redeem America’s shame—liberalism could claim a moral authority that translated into real political power. And this is how blacks came to be “mined” by liberalism for the power inherent in their legacy of victimization.
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.
After all, if the 1960s made one overriding point, it was that our great principles and traditions had not saved us from our hypocrisies. If our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, with all its brilliant amendments spelling out a precise discipline of freedom, were the greatest articulations of democratic principles ever written, they had in fact given us only a stunted democracy in which millions languished outside the circle of full freedom.
The 1960s formula for authenticity (dissociation from America’s old hypocrisies) gave America a new cultural idea: that America’s moral authority and legitimacy were linked to the actual rejection of traditional America as a fundamentally hypocritical society. Thus, rebellion is what made you authentic and what opened the way for society to recover moral authority. Rebellion, “revolution,” dissent, civil and uncivil disobedience, “dropping out,” “speaking truth to power”—all this became the moral high ground in the 1960s. In the long run, it would generate a new, alternative American identity, not to mention a new American liberalism.
I have always believed that any attempt to turn race into politics, to seek power through race, is the beginning of evil. And who could know this better than a black American?
What is this [poetic] “truth”? It begins in the assertion that America’s indulgence in so many hypocrisies was not merely an anomaly. America wasn’t a good and fair nation that only gave into hypocrisy here and there, now and then. No, this new “truth” was simply that America was innately—even characterologically—evil.
We were different—and by implication morally superior—because we were the first generation daring enough to acknowledge our country’s evil. It gave my generation a sense of destiny, a job to do in history: to transform America away from its inherent evil. The irony, of course, was that without this evil, the children of the 1960s had no special destiny; we were only ordinary.
We blacks were emerging from segregation and facing a future of considerable possibility, yet the deprivations of segregation had left many of us without the necessary social capital and know-how to exploit those possibilities. This was the circumstance that turned our hard-won freedom into a harsh mistress. Freedom would strip us of excuses for our shortcomings; it would point only to our inadequacies (with no real regard for the oppression that caused them) and give the impression that the stereotype of black “inferiority” was in fact true.
Group identities that compensate for the deprived background of the individual with a grandiose vision of the group always bring forward into new freedom the “poetic truth” that the group’s former oppressor, its old nemesis, is still alive and well. These identities always claim that the oppressor’s evil was an entrenched feature of character rather than a lapse of character. And once the evil is characterological, it is “poetic” and eternal; it is truer than all facts to the contrary. “Neocolonialism,” “structural racism,” “male bias,” and “environmental indifference” are all terms that “poeticize” America’s old evils. And once “poeticized,” they become givens in our conversation. They are reality no matter what the reality actually is. Thus, even in freedom, those who were victimized remain victimized even as most Americans have forsworn any desire to victimize. These identities declare that greater freedom is no harbor from victimization.
A result of this generation’s explicit knowledge of America’s historical evils was to make social and political morality a more important measure of character than private morality. In the 1950s, your private morality was the measure of your character; in the 1960s, your stance against war, racism, and sexism became far more important measures—so important that you were granted considerable license in the private realm.
This charge of evil against the white West is one of the largest and most influential ideas of our age—and this despite the dramatic retreat of America and the West from these evils. The scope and power of this idea—its enormous influence in the world—is not a measure of its truth or accuracy; it is a measure of the great neediness in the world for such an idea, for an idea that lets the formerly oppressed defend their esteem, on the one hand, and pursue power in the name of their past victimization, on the other.
I learned that America, for all its fault and failings, was not intractably evil. In the Black Panther villa in Algiers, ... I spent time with people who had banked their entire lives on America’s inherent evil—and on the inherent evil of capitalism. ... Yet I could see that as human beings they were homesick and in despair. As revolutionaries, they were impotent and hopelessly lost. ... They had no future whatsoever. ... We had all grown up in segregation. We all had war stories. And we all had legitimate beefs against America. But to embrace the idea that America and capitalism were permanent oppressors was self-destructive and indulgent. It cut us off from both the past and the future.
The appeal of affirmative action was not the uplift of blacks and women, but the fact that support for such a policy was a shield against charges of racism and sexism. Virtually all of these “good” reforms failed and mixed us in all manner of unintended consequences. But their failures were beside the point. These policies were expressions of America’s regret over its bigotries and sins. They weren’t policies so much as apologies.
Yale University had no interest in Clarence Thomas the human being, the young man whose life was animated by the struggle not to be given equality, but to literally earn an irrefutable equality. Yale wanted only the black skin, not the human being within that skin, and certainly not that human being’s longing for an unqualified equality. Clarence Thomas became depressed at Yale and seriously transferring to law schools in the South, where his worst threat would be old-fashioned racism—racism, unlike Yale’s liberalism, that at least did not ask blacks to be grateful when they were being patronized.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
He argues that the current political divide can be traced to the 1960s. At that time, America was forced to face its hypocrisy, that “liberty and justice for all” was not actually happening. After facing it head on, modern conservatism and liberalism emerged. Conservatism said our founding ideals still mattered even if we didn’t live up to them and we should try to do better. Liberalism said those ideals had failed and had to be scrapped and the country had to start over. Liberalism said women and minorities, especially blacks, were and would always be victims and therefore would have to be compensated forever.
There arose what Mr. Steele calls “poetic truth.” This is what led to political correctness. For example, it’s a poetic truth that a black person is more likely to be killed by a cop than another black person even if crime records prove otherwise. It’s a poetic truth that nuclear power harms the environment more than wind power, even if physics proves the opposite. These poetic truths serve “the Good,” a vision of what ought to be.
Mr. Steele bought into this liberalism as a young man and so visited Africa, which was considered a paradise that America should try to become. He met exiled Black Panther members and saw for himself what it was really like. After years of being pandered to by white liberals, he’d had enough.
I highlighted lots of stuff in the book; it was pretty fascinating.
******************************************
I … define white guilt as the terror of being seen as racist—a terror that has caused whites to act guiltily toward minorities even when they feel no actual guilt. ... This terror—and the lust it has inspired in whites to show themselves innocent of racism—has spawned a new white paternalism toward minorities since the 1960s that, among other things, has damaged the black family more profoundly than segregation ever did.
Post-1960s welfare policies, the proliferation of “identity politics” and group preferences, and all the grandiose social interventions of the War on Poverty and the Great Society—all this was meant to redeem the nation from its bigoted past, but paradoxically, it also invited minorities to make an identity and a politics out of grievance and inferiority. Its seductive whisper to them was that their collective grievance was their entitlement and that protest politics was the best way to cash in on that entitlement—this at the precise moment when America was at last beginning to free up minorities as individual citizens who could pursue their own happiness to the limits of their abilities. Thus, white guilt was a smothering and distracting kindness that enmeshed minorities more in the struggle for white redemption than in their own struggle to develop as individuals capable of competing with all others.
How, then, does it constitute progress for minorities to overcome bigotry as a limit on their freedom only to subjugate themselves to a paternalistic interventionism inspired by white guilt? There is no true freedom either way.
Today the Left and the Right don’t work within a shared understanding of the national purpose; nor do they seek such an understanding. Rather, each seeks to win out over the other and to define the nation by its own terms.
Since the 1960s, white racism had lost so much of its authority, power, and legitimacy that it was no longer, in itself, a prohibitive barrier to black advancement. Blacks have now risen to every level of American society, including the presidency. If you are black and you want to be a poet, or a doctor, or a corporate executive, or a movie star, there will surely be barriers to overcome, but white racism will be among the least of them. You will be far more likely to receive racial preferences than to suffer racial discrimination. ... Post-1960s liberalism conflates the past with the present: it argues that today’s racial disparities are caused by precisely the same white racism that caused them in the past … But past oppression cannot be conflated into present-day oppression. It is likely, for example, that today’s racial disparities are due more to dysfunctions with the black community, and—I would argue—to liberal social policies that have encouraged us to trade more on our past victimization than to overcome the damage done by that victimization through dint of our own pride and will.
Liberalism turned to poetic truth when America’s past sins were no longer literally true enough to support liberal policies and the liberal claim on power. The poetic truth of black victimization seeks to compensate for America’s moral evolution. It tries to keep alive the justification for liberal power even as that justification has been greatly nullified by America’s moral development. The poetic idea that America will always be a racist, sexist, imperialistic, and greed-driven society has rescued post-1960s liberalism from the great diminishment that should have been its fate, given the literal truth of America’s remarkable (if incomplete) moral growth.
The great problem with poetic truths is that they are never self-evident in the way, for example, that racial victimization was self-evident in the era of segregation. Today the actual facts fail to support the notion that racial victimization is a prevailing truth of American life. So today, a poetic truth, like “black victimization,” or the ongoing “repression of women,” or the systematic “abuse of the environment,” must be imposed on society not by fact and reason but by some regime of political correctness—some notion of propriety and decency that coerces people into treating such claims as actual fact.
Those poetic truths, and the notions of correctness that force them on society, prevent America from seeing itself accurately. That is their purpose. They pull down the curtain on what is actually true. If decades of government assistance have weakened the black family with dependency and dysfunction, poetic truth argues all the more fervently that blacks are victims and that whites are privileged. Poetic truths stigmatize the actual truth with the sins of America’s past so that truth itself becomes “incorrect.” As America has become more “correct” in relation to its past, it has also become more cut off from the reality of its present. ... If you don’t presume that America’s racism, sexism, warmongering, and environmental disregard are incontrovertible qualities of the American character, then you are you obviously “incorrect” and guilty of fellow traveling with precisely those qualities.
Correctness constitutes a power in itself, a power substantial enough to prevail easily, much of the time, over the actual truth.
Over all these decades, liberalism’s prevailing poetic truth has been that blacks are eternal victims: their problems are always the result of some determinism, some unfairness or injustice that impinges like an ongoing rain out of permanently hostile skies. And in the white liberal imagination, blacks are only victims. Liberalism expresses its inborn racism in the way it overlooks the full human complexity of blacks—the fact that they are more than mere victims—in order to distill and harden the idea of their victimization into a currency of liberal power.
[Lyndon] Johnson rationalized his position [of permanent black welfare] with the poetic truth that blacks were always and only victims. This reductionalism dehumanized blacks, but it served liberal power perfectly. In claiming to uplift blacks—and thus to redeem America’s shame—liberalism could claim a moral authority that translated into real political power. And this is how blacks came to be “mined” by liberalism for the power inherent in their legacy of victimization.
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.
After all, if the 1960s made one overriding point, it was that our great principles and traditions had not saved us from our hypocrisies. If our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, with all its brilliant amendments spelling out a precise discipline of freedom, were the greatest articulations of democratic principles ever written, they had in fact given us only a stunted democracy in which millions languished outside the circle of full freedom.
The 1960s formula for authenticity (dissociation from America’s old hypocrisies) gave America a new cultural idea: that America’s moral authority and legitimacy were linked to the actual rejection of traditional America as a fundamentally hypocritical society. Thus, rebellion is what made you authentic and what opened the way for society to recover moral authority. Rebellion, “revolution,” dissent, civil and uncivil disobedience, “dropping out,” “speaking truth to power”—all this became the moral high ground in the 1960s. In the long run, it would generate a new, alternative American identity, not to mention a new American liberalism.
I have always believed that any attempt to turn race into politics, to seek power through race, is the beginning of evil. And who could know this better than a black American?
What is this [poetic] “truth”? It begins in the assertion that America’s indulgence in so many hypocrisies was not merely an anomaly. America wasn’t a good and fair nation that only gave into hypocrisy here and there, now and then. No, this new “truth” was simply that America was innately—even characterologically—evil.
We were different—and by implication morally superior—because we were the first generation daring enough to acknowledge our country’s evil. It gave my generation a sense of destiny, a job to do in history: to transform America away from its inherent evil. The irony, of course, was that without this evil, the children of the 1960s had no special destiny; we were only ordinary.
We blacks were emerging from segregation and facing a future of considerable possibility, yet the deprivations of segregation had left many of us without the necessary social capital and know-how to exploit those possibilities. This was the circumstance that turned our hard-won freedom into a harsh mistress. Freedom would strip us of excuses for our shortcomings; it would point only to our inadequacies (with no real regard for the oppression that caused them) and give the impression that the stereotype of black “inferiority” was in fact true.
Group identities that compensate for the deprived background of the individual with a grandiose vision of the group always bring forward into new freedom the “poetic truth” that the group’s former oppressor, its old nemesis, is still alive and well. These identities always claim that the oppressor’s evil was an entrenched feature of character rather than a lapse of character. And once the evil is characterological, it is “poetic” and eternal; it is truer than all facts to the contrary. “Neocolonialism,” “structural racism,” “male bias,” and “environmental indifference” are all terms that “poeticize” America’s old evils. And once “poeticized,” they become givens in our conversation. They are reality no matter what the reality actually is. Thus, even in freedom, those who were victimized remain victimized even as most Americans have forsworn any desire to victimize. These identities declare that greater freedom is no harbor from victimization.
A result of this generation’s explicit knowledge of America’s historical evils was to make social and political morality a more important measure of character than private morality. In the 1950s, your private morality was the measure of your character; in the 1960s, your stance against war, racism, and sexism became far more important measures—so important that you were granted considerable license in the private realm.
This charge of evil against the white West is one of the largest and most influential ideas of our age—and this despite the dramatic retreat of America and the West from these evils. The scope and power of this idea—its enormous influence in the world—is not a measure of its truth or accuracy; it is a measure of the great neediness in the world for such an idea, for an idea that lets the formerly oppressed defend their esteem, on the one hand, and pursue power in the name of their past victimization, on the other.
I learned that America, for all its fault and failings, was not intractably evil. In the Black Panther villa in Algiers, ... I spent time with people who had banked their entire lives on America’s inherent evil—and on the inherent evil of capitalism. ... Yet I could see that as human beings they were homesick and in despair. As revolutionaries, they were impotent and hopelessly lost. ... They had no future whatsoever. ... We had all grown up in segregation. We all had war stories. And we all had legitimate beefs against America. But to embrace the idea that America and capitalism were permanent oppressors was self-destructive and indulgent. It cut us off from both the past and the future.
The appeal of affirmative action was not the uplift of blacks and women, but the fact that support for such a policy was a shield against charges of racism and sexism. Virtually all of these “good” reforms failed and mixed us in all manner of unintended consequences. But their failures were beside the point. These policies were expressions of America’s regret over its bigotries and sins. They weren’t policies so much as apologies.
Yale University had no interest in Clarence Thomas the human being, the young man whose life was animated by the struggle not to be given equality, but to literally earn an irrefutable equality. Yale wanted only the black skin, not the human being within that skin, and certainly not that human being’s longing for an unqualified equality. Clarence Thomas became depressed at Yale and seriously transferring to law schools in the South, where his worst threat would be old-fashioned racism—racism, unlike Yale’s liberalism, that at least did not ask blacks to be grateful when they were being patronized.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
September 3, 2015
quick read and even so a little numbing in that he says the same things repeatedly. He's right that in some circles (e.g., a lot of universities) it's become countercultural to express conservative views, and his portrait of a cult of diversity that can actually be patronizing to members of minority groups resonates.
would like to see him debate someone rather than carry on so long with his own anecdotes and Reaganesque anti-big-gov't. screeds. For instance, he's not alone in having qualms about affirmative action in hiring and admissions procedures, but in depicting the alternative as simply "individual merit" he's not responsive to a great deal of thoughtful discussion on the other side.
Also, the book is maybe 90% about race and in particular his thesis that post-60's liberal gov't. programs purportedly helpful to Black people are actually aimed mainly at alleviating White guilt -- in a nutshell he's pro-MLK "content of our character" and anti-LBJ (you can't unshackle someone at start of race and expect that a fair competition ensues). when he tries to tie in feminist and environmental movements, it's done in a perfunctory manner without much argument as to what's similar about the scenarios. Should probably either research those issues more or just omit.
would like to see him debate someone rather than carry on so long with his own anecdotes and Reaganesque anti-big-gov't. screeds. For instance, he's not alone in having qualms about affirmative action in hiring and admissions procedures, but in depicting the alternative as simply "individual merit" he's not responsive to a great deal of thoughtful discussion on the other side.
Also, the book is maybe 90% about race and in particular his thesis that post-60's liberal gov't. programs purportedly helpful to Black people are actually aimed mainly at alleviating White guilt -- in a nutshell he's pro-MLK "content of our character" and anti-LBJ (you can't unshackle someone at start of race and expect that a fair competition ensues). when he tries to tie in feminist and environmental movements, it's done in a perfunctory manner without much argument as to what's similar about the scenarios. Should probably either research those issues more or just omit.
August 1, 2018
A profound look at how the Sixties Counter-culture in America evolved into the race- and sex-obsessed, Anti-American Cultural Climate we experience today. Steele traces how guilt and shame have spiritually crippled the United States politically and socially and, especially, how these powerful feelings have shaped the current face and direction of the Democratic Party.
"In the 1960s, liberalism began to offer new narratives of meaning so that the members of almost every group came to have a politicized idea of themselves. And all these narratives were conceived in reaction to the great shames of America's past-- racism, sexism, territorial conquest (manifest destiny), corporate greed, militarism, and so on... The meaning of 'inferiority' changed from something that was the victim's fault to something that was the oppressor's fault... In this new and darker conception of America, there is a broad template that stamps out two kinds of people: they are either victims of America's shames or victimizers who perpetuate those shames."
"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... This liberalism is invested in an overstatement of America's present sinfulness based on the nation's past sins. It conflates the past into the present so that the present is indistinguishable from the ugly past. And so modern liberalism is grounded in a paradox: it tries to be 'progressive' and forward looking by fixing its gaze backward."
"Post-1960s liberalism had SO won over the culture and become SO congealed into the new moral establishment, that conservatism-- as a politics and philosophy-- became a centerpiece in liberalism's iconography of evil. It was demonized and stigmatized as an ideology born of nostalgia for America's past evils-- inequality, oppression, exploitation, warmongering, bigotry, repression and all the rest. Liberalism had won the authority to tell us what things meant and to hold us accountable to those meanings. Conservatism-- liberals believed-- FACILITATED America's moral hypocrisy... And it remains today an ideology branded with America's shames. Liberalism, on the other hand, won for its followers a veil of innocence."
I was in college in the 60s in San Francisco, and involved with a man focused on Black Studies so I personally remember well the developments and attitudes chronicled in this book. I had my own period of radical activism and angst but, fortunately, it never took a destructive turn. Then, in the early 70's I joined a spiritual community and realized that negativity and narrow political thinking would never solve any problems requiring vision and applied hope.
Steele draws the important distinction between "the truth" and "poetic truth" (how we want to imagine reality based on P.C. thinking). "Poetic truths stigmatize the actual truth with the sins of America's past so that truth itself become 'incorrect'". This accurately describes the parallel reality we are living in where everything the other side says is labeled a LIE.
This is a valuable companion piece to Steele's book "White Guilt" (2006). It further develops his perception of the spiritual underpinnings of the sorry state of the United States, exacerbated by 8 years under Obama and the "Race Professionals". Only with such a thoughtful diagnosis of how we got here and how we are all to blame can we expect to throw off the "Shame" that straight-jackets America's true potential and mission.
This is a short (198 pages), highly readable volume that I recommend everyone read.
"In the 1960s, liberalism began to offer new narratives of meaning so that the members of almost every group came to have a politicized idea of themselves. And all these narratives were conceived in reaction to the great shames of America's past-- racism, sexism, territorial conquest (manifest destiny), corporate greed, militarism, and so on... The meaning of 'inferiority' changed from something that was the victim's fault to something that was the oppressor's fault... In this new and darker conception of America, there is a broad template that stamps out two kinds of people: they are either victims of America's shames or victimizers who perpetuate those shames."
"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... This liberalism is invested in an overstatement of America's present sinfulness based on the nation's past sins. It conflates the past into the present so that the present is indistinguishable from the ugly past. And so modern liberalism is grounded in a paradox: it tries to be 'progressive' and forward looking by fixing its gaze backward."
"Post-1960s liberalism had SO won over the culture and become SO congealed into the new moral establishment, that conservatism-- as a politics and philosophy-- became a centerpiece in liberalism's iconography of evil. It was demonized and stigmatized as an ideology born of nostalgia for America's past evils-- inequality, oppression, exploitation, warmongering, bigotry, repression and all the rest. Liberalism had won the authority to tell us what things meant and to hold us accountable to those meanings. Conservatism-- liberals believed-- FACILITATED America's moral hypocrisy... And it remains today an ideology branded with America's shames. Liberalism, on the other hand, won for its followers a veil of innocence."
I was in college in the 60s in San Francisco, and involved with a man focused on Black Studies so I personally remember well the developments and attitudes chronicled in this book. I had my own period of radical activism and angst but, fortunately, it never took a destructive turn. Then, in the early 70's I joined a spiritual community and realized that negativity and narrow political thinking would never solve any problems requiring vision and applied hope.
Steele draws the important distinction between "the truth" and "poetic truth" (how we want to imagine reality based on P.C. thinking). "Poetic truths stigmatize the actual truth with the sins of America's past so that truth itself become 'incorrect'". This accurately describes the parallel reality we are living in where everything the other side says is labeled a LIE.
This is a valuable companion piece to Steele's book "White Guilt" (2006). It further develops his perception of the spiritual underpinnings of the sorry state of the United States, exacerbated by 8 years under Obama and the "Race Professionals". Only with such a thoughtful diagnosis of how we got here and how we are all to blame can we expect to throw off the "Shame" that straight-jackets America's true potential and mission.
This is a short (198 pages), highly readable volume that I recommend everyone read.
March 9, 2017
This book makes a powerful and prescient argument for our time: It is time for America to stop feeling guilty for the historic shortcomings of Afro Americans and, for the well-being of the country, we need to move beyond the crippling effects of that guilt.
Once white Americans realized that they were indeed racist and were being hypocritical towards Afro Americans, the effect was a collective psychological guilt. As a result, Congress passed a number of laws including affirmative action and civil rights laws whose objective was to make blacks equal to whites. The narrative goes something like this: America is guilty of racism but white people were unwilling to accept their racist past for a long time. Once they are shown and made to affirm that ugly past, it is like looking in the mirror and realizing that you are not the person you thought you were, you are basically a hypocrite. And to realize that you are a hypocrite, is the worst thing because now you are guilty and you have to make amends for your past mistakes. And that is exactly what America did, according to Shelby Steele, with the reforms from the 1960s, as an attempt to rectify past wrongs. But for the left, the issue is not only about fixing a racist past, it is about the inherent racism, imperialism and exploitation in America's DNA. Therefore, the left makes up a narrative he calls "poetic truth" to constantly remind America what it owes to blacks and to ignore the evident progress that has been achieved. This poetic truth is not based on evidence but on an emotional illusion of perfection that America must meet in order to redeem itself in the eyes of blacks, minorities and women.
What is worst, according to Steel, the poetic justice that liberals have tried to implement in black communities has only resulted in complete failures. Blacks are worse off now in many respects than before the civil rights movement. Programs like welfare have resulted in a skyrocketing of black births to single women from 26 to 72 percent. Those policies have the effect of discouraging marriage and in the break up families. For Steele, legal freedom is all what blacks need and it has been established and, as a result, America has righted its wrongs to blacks. Freedom and equality under the law is all that America should have done from the beginning and allow blacks to compete freely with others. But the poetic truth for liberals is an affirmation that America is inherently evil and in order to rectify that imperfection it was necessary to implement policies that promote equality over freedom. As a result, blacks don't enjoy a better situation by most measures, instead they have become pawns of contrite whites and liberals who used them as victims to justify failed government programs to remain in power.
Superb and sophisticated thesis, well argued and well written. A book that all minorities should read to realize that supporting Democrats and liberals is a pact with the devil. They don't care about our well being, they only care about treating us as victims who need to be taken care of by government, and not free individuals who are the masters of our destiny. We will never be free until we accept that it is in our power to have control of our lives without expecting government handouts. Handouts don't make us free but quite the opposite, they make us wards of the state without dignity and without pride.
Once white Americans realized that they were indeed racist and were being hypocritical towards Afro Americans, the effect was a collective psychological guilt. As a result, Congress passed a number of laws including affirmative action and civil rights laws whose objective was to make blacks equal to whites. The narrative goes something like this: America is guilty of racism but white people were unwilling to accept their racist past for a long time. Once they are shown and made to affirm that ugly past, it is like looking in the mirror and realizing that you are not the person you thought you were, you are basically a hypocrite. And to realize that you are a hypocrite, is the worst thing because now you are guilty and you have to make amends for your past mistakes. And that is exactly what America did, according to Shelby Steele, with the reforms from the 1960s, as an attempt to rectify past wrongs. But for the left, the issue is not only about fixing a racist past, it is about the inherent racism, imperialism and exploitation in America's DNA. Therefore, the left makes up a narrative he calls "poetic truth" to constantly remind America what it owes to blacks and to ignore the evident progress that has been achieved. This poetic truth is not based on evidence but on an emotional illusion of perfection that America must meet in order to redeem itself in the eyes of blacks, minorities and women.
What is worst, according to Steel, the poetic justice that liberals have tried to implement in black communities has only resulted in complete failures. Blacks are worse off now in many respects than before the civil rights movement. Programs like welfare have resulted in a skyrocketing of black births to single women from 26 to 72 percent. Those policies have the effect of discouraging marriage and in the break up families. For Steele, legal freedom is all what blacks need and it has been established and, as a result, America has righted its wrongs to blacks. Freedom and equality under the law is all that America should have done from the beginning and allow blacks to compete freely with others. But the poetic truth for liberals is an affirmation that America is inherently evil and in order to rectify that imperfection it was necessary to implement policies that promote equality over freedom. As a result, blacks don't enjoy a better situation by most measures, instead they have become pawns of contrite whites and liberals who used them as victims to justify failed government programs to remain in power.
Superb and sophisticated thesis, well argued and well written. A book that all minorities should read to realize that supporting Democrats and liberals is a pact with the devil. They don't care about our well being, they only care about treating us as victims who need to be taken care of by government, and not free individuals who are the masters of our destiny. We will never be free until we accept that it is in our power to have control of our lives without expecting government handouts. Handouts don't make us free but quite the opposite, they make us wards of the state without dignity and without pride.
October 5, 2020
I don’t buy all of Steele’s diagnoses and prescriptions, and I believe he overstates his case at times, but his insights are often trenchant and thought-provoking. I will be reflecting on this book for some time.
July 21, 2020
This is not easy reading but it has a lot of history from the perspective of a black conservative. I learned a lot which was my intention in reading it!
July 24, 2019
This book speaks to my own experience in 1968-70 in the poverty program living in the black community in north Baton Rouge. I was uncomfortable with a leadership role I was pressed into because I was a white college grad who could open the door for the black community. Fortunately I had a two black men who helped keep me grounded. One a radically-oriented professor at Southern University who shook me to the core and the other an innovative community leader with Peace Core experience (his valiant efforts got him falsely arrested for, what would become a national story, a laughable conspiracy to assassinate the mayor and took 10 years to resolve).
Here are a couple bits in Steel's book that confirmed the view I learned from those two men:
"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. I did not understand at the time that this was a fool's bargain, a formula for self-defeat—that it drew minorities into a Faustian pact by which we put our fate in the hands of contrite white people.
"The problem was that in taking this route, we relinquished considerable control over our own destiny. Rather than seizing as much control over our fate as possible after our civil rights victories of the 1960s, we turned around and looked to the government for the grand schemes that would result in our uplift. 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." [Chapter 17, pg. 7]
Here are a couple bits in Steel's book that confirmed the view I learned from those two men:
"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. I did not understand at the time that this was a fool's bargain, a formula for self-defeat—that it drew minorities into a Faustian pact by which we put our fate in the hands of contrite white people.
"The problem was that in taking this route, we relinquished considerable control over our own destiny. Rather than seizing as much control over our fate as possible after our civil rights victories of the 1960s, we turned around and looked to the government for the grand schemes that would result in our uplift. 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." [Chapter 17, pg. 7]
March 3, 2019
SHAME
How America's Past Sins Have
Polarized Our Country
SHELBY STEELE
Review by Roy Murry, Author
Mr. Steele's raconteuring of the past sins in the USA from the 1960s to the present highlights the culture wars of Liberalism vs. Conservatism, which Liberalism won. Those wars ended with a great divide that continues today.
Referring to manipulating of Black culture, he states, "This liberalism is invested in an overstatement of America's present sinfulness based on the nation's past sins." These confrontations cannot continue, is my understanding of his discourse.
Mr. Steele tells a few stories to make his case of this hypocrisy of the left's philosophy. One is that of Justice Clarence Thomas, who graduated from Yale Law School. Did the institution treat him as a man or as a 'black man'?
According to Mr. Steele, the Justice's Yale diploma is not on his office wall. You decide after reading the story.
The writing was clear and precise. You don't need a college degree to understand Mr. Steele's thoughts, but you will have to be open-minded to agree or disagree with his treatise.
Good intellectual read.
How America's Past Sins Have
Polarized Our Country
SHELBY STEELE
Review by Roy Murry, Author
Mr. Steele's raconteuring of the past sins in the USA from the 1960s to the present highlights the culture wars of Liberalism vs. Conservatism, which Liberalism won. Those wars ended with a great divide that continues today.
Referring to manipulating of Black culture, he states, "This liberalism is invested in an overstatement of America's present sinfulness based on the nation's past sins." These confrontations cannot continue, is my understanding of his discourse.
Mr. Steele tells a few stories to make his case of this hypocrisy of the left's philosophy. One is that of Justice Clarence Thomas, who graduated from Yale Law School. Did the institution treat him as a man or as a 'black man'?
According to Mr. Steele, the Justice's Yale diploma is not on his office wall. You decide after reading the story.
The writing was clear and precise. You don't need a college degree to understand Mr. Steele's thoughts, but you will have to be open-minded to agree or disagree with his treatise.
Good intellectual read.
June 17, 2020
Shelby Steele is a brilliant conservative black man who has recently been interviewed several times on cable news. This book has been sitting on my shelf for the past couple of years so I decided to pick it up and see what makes Mr. Steele tick. Well....he has experienced his share of racism and his share of exploitation through affirmative action and other so called assistance from the government. He relates an antidote about Clarence Thomas which sums up his personal philosophy. Thomas worked incredibly hard to receive a law degree by taking the most difficult courses. Since he graduated from Yale, the law firms assumed that he only received his degree because of affirmative action, thus they refused to hire him. Yale was notorious for being liberal so it was assumed any black who graduated was given the degree. The book will probably remain with me since his arguments are incredibly thought-provoking.
March 27, 2018
We need voices like Shelby Steele. I ponder through out his short book a certain motive of the author. To me I think he is clear in his identity and political position. He is smart and thoughtful. I go through writing thinking he is trying to weed out the people who are unmovable in their own political stand. He is clearly saying for a majority of this book is about disassociation and relativism. That liberals have white guilt and make African Americans are worse off by giving away programs to make white people feel better. To Shelby what really makes any individual worthy is by their own merit and ability. The kind of way liberal policy treats equality actually hinders any progress African Americans are making. There is much history to explain the current world view in this book worth reading.
I first heard Shelby Steele on a podcast called Uncommon Knowledge. I got really interested in his writings and point of view. I wanted to read books in alignment with Black History month as well.
I first heard Shelby Steele on a podcast called Uncommon Knowledge. I got really interested in his writings and point of view. I wanted to read books in alignment with Black History month as well.
July 2, 2020
Mind blowing!
July 10, 2020
My mind is still spinning, trying to piece together everything Steele lays out in these short 200 pages. This should be required reading!
March 11, 2020
This little book packed more of a punch than I was expecting. I listened on Audible, and found myself bookmarking and pausing to take notes far too often. In this 200-page essay, Steele provides some profound social analysis with illuminating illustrations from his personal experience. At the center of the book is the story of America's great "Fall" in the 1960s: how the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Women's Rights movement exposed America's hypocrisies in devastating fashion, and how the fallout from this gave us both a new kind of Liberalism and new levels of cultural and political polarization.
Steele gives us a window into his experience grappling with questions of identity, national character, and racial injustice as a young black man coming of age in those years and, eventually, modifying his views toward the Conservatism that he is know for. While those on the left will find much to dispute here, I think readers across the political spectrum would find resonance in his perceptive analysis of the 60s.
Consistent with my M.O. as a lazy reviewer, here are a few juicy samples:
“In the 1960s, America underwent what can only be described as an archetypal 'fall' — a descent from innocence into an excruciating and inescapable self-knowledge. This innocence had always been a delusion. 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 all of this came under profound challenge in the 1960s as one form of American hypocrisy after another — from racism to the second class treatment of women to Vietnam and our neglect of the environment — came to light and further cracked the veneer of American innocence.”
--------------------------------------------------
"We spawned a liberalism that made this evil characterological, a poetic truth immune to all the actual truth that contradicted it. As such, America's evil would always provide us with a sense of purpose and destiny and even moral superiority. It would also inspire, and justify, many forms of radicalism, from the political to the person. After all, the greater the scope of American evil, the more we were called to radicalism. We couldn't reform our way past this evil: we had t assault it radically. And for many in my generation, radicalism became a high calling. It was integrity itself."
--------------------------------------------------
“When I traveled to Africa back in 1970, it was partly because I had been more and more seduced by this great looming idea of America’s characterological evil. It was such a summary judgment, and, at the time, still new and audacious. It had not existed in the original civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr. had never charged America with an inherent and intractable evil. He had lived in good faith with America, believing in reform and the innate goodwill of the American character, even as he also lived under constant threat of assassination. Still, when his assassination actually came to pass—with almost macabre predictability—young blacks, like myself (and many whites as well), saw it as a final straw. The evil character of America would always prevail over decency.
I came of age—in my early twenties—precisely when this idea began to take hold. Suddenly it was everywhere among the young. Belief in America’s evil was the new faith that launched you into a sophistication that your parents could never understand.
...
In this striking vision of the white Western world as characterologically evil, both the former dark-skinned victims of this evil and its former white perpetrators found a common idea out of which to negotiate a future. This vision restored esteem to the victims (simply by acknowledging that they were victims rather than inferiors) and gave them a means to power; likewise, it opened a road to redemption and power for the former white perpetrators. This notion of America’s characterological evil became the basis of a new social contract in America."
------------------------------------------
The clarity I found that trip was based on one realization: I learned that America, for all its faults failings, was not intractably evil. In the Black Panther villa in Algiers, on those balmy afternoons eating the local shrimp, I spent time with the people who banked their entire lives on America’s inherent evil—and on the inherent evil of capitalism. On one level, they were glamorous figures, revolutionaries ensconced in a lavish villa provided by the new radical government of Algeria. The impression was of a new and more perfect world order just around the corner, and these special people with the moral imagination to see it coming would soon be marching in victory.
Yet I could see that as human beings they were homesick and in despair. As revolutionaries, they were impotent and hopelessly lost. It was like seeing a pretty woman whose smile unfolds to reveal teeth black with rot. They had no future whatsoever, and so they were chilling to behold. We had all grown up in segregation. We all had war stories. And we all had legitimate beefs against America. But to embrace the idea that America and capitalism were permanent oppressors was self-destructive and indulgent. It cut us off from both the past and the future. It left us in the cul-de-sac of placelessness, though I could not have described this way at the time.
...
I was lucky. After one of my radical kitchen-table rants against America toward the end of the 1960s, my father—the son of a man born in slavery—had said to me: 'You know, you shouldn’t underestimate America. This is a strong country.' I protested, started on racism once again. He said, 'No, it’s strong enough to change. You can’t imagine the amount of change I’ve seen in my own lifetime.'”
-----------------------------------------------------
"Post-1960s welfare policies, the proliferation of 'identity politics' and group preferences, and all the grandiose social interventions of the War on Poverty and the Great Society-all this was meant to redeem the nation from its bigoted past, but paradoxically, it also invited minorities to make an identity and a politics out of grievance and inferiority. Its seductive whisper to them was that their collective grievance was their entitlement and that protest politics was the best way to cash in on that entitlement-this at the precise moment when America was at last beginning to free up minorities as individual citizens who could pursue their own happiness to the limits of their abilities. Thus, white guilt was a smothering and distracting kindness that enmeshed minorities more in the struggle for white redemption than in their own struggle to develop as individuals capable of competing with all others.
Of course, this was a mouthful, and something close to sacrilege at the liberal-leaning Aspen Institute. I had set out only to say what I truly meant, not to be provocative or to discomfit a retired Supreme Court justice. Yet I had been provocative all the same, and I may have also discomfited Justice O'Connor-not because I intended either outcome, but simply because I had offered up what was considered to be a "conservative" analysis of race in America.
The real provocation was in the very idea of looking at race in America through a lens of 'classic Jeffersonian liberalism-that liberalism which sought freedom for the individual above all else. This was the liberalism that had actually given us the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. In that era, Martin Luther King Jr. was already recognizable as an American archetype precisely because he was so aligned with the central principle of this liberalism: individual freedom. I wanted to celebrate this liberalism and argue that a free society-not necessarily free of all bigotry, but certainly free of all illegal discrimination-was what America owed minorities. After that we minorities should simply be left alone. We should not be smothered, as we have been, by the new paternalistic liberalism that emerged in the mid-1960s-a guilt-driven liberalism that has imposed itself through a series of ineffective and even destructive government programs and policies. We should be left to find our own way as free men and women in this fast-paced and highly competitive society.
In many ways the minority struggle for freedom-just like white America's long-ago struggle for freedom from British rule-has been a battle to have no oppressive or capricious power intervene between the individual and his pursuit of happiness. How, then, does it constitute progress for minorities to overcome bigotry as a limit on their freedom only to subjugate themselves to a paternalistic interventionism inspired by white guilt? There is no true freedom either way."
Steele gives us a window into his experience grappling with questions of identity, national character, and racial injustice as a young black man coming of age in those years and, eventually, modifying his views toward the Conservatism that he is know for. While those on the left will find much to dispute here, I think readers across the political spectrum would find resonance in his perceptive analysis of the 60s.
Consistent with my M.O. as a lazy reviewer, here are a few juicy samples:
“In the 1960s, America underwent what can only be described as an archetypal 'fall' — a descent from innocence into an excruciating and inescapable self-knowledge. This innocence had always been a delusion. 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 all of this came under profound challenge in the 1960s as one form of American hypocrisy after another — from racism to the second class treatment of women to Vietnam and our neglect of the environment — came to light and further cracked the veneer of American innocence.”
--------------------------------------------------
"We spawned a liberalism that made this evil characterological, a poetic truth immune to all the actual truth that contradicted it. As such, America's evil would always provide us with a sense of purpose and destiny and even moral superiority. It would also inspire, and justify, many forms of radicalism, from the political to the person. After all, the greater the scope of American evil, the more we were called to radicalism. We couldn't reform our way past this evil: we had t assault it radically. And for many in my generation, radicalism became a high calling. It was integrity itself."
--------------------------------------------------
“When I traveled to Africa back in 1970, it was partly because I had been more and more seduced by this great looming idea of America’s characterological evil. It was such a summary judgment, and, at the time, still new and audacious. It had not existed in the original civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Martin Luther King Jr. had never charged America with an inherent and intractable evil. He had lived in good faith with America, believing in reform and the innate goodwill of the American character, even as he also lived under constant threat of assassination. Still, when his assassination actually came to pass—with almost macabre predictability—young blacks, like myself (and many whites as well), saw it as a final straw. The evil character of America would always prevail over decency.
I came of age—in my early twenties—precisely when this idea began to take hold. Suddenly it was everywhere among the young. Belief in America’s evil was the new faith that launched you into a sophistication that your parents could never understand.
...
In this striking vision of the white Western world as characterologically evil, both the former dark-skinned victims of this evil and its former white perpetrators found a common idea out of which to negotiate a future. This vision restored esteem to the victims (simply by acknowledging that they were victims rather than inferiors) and gave them a means to power; likewise, it opened a road to redemption and power for the former white perpetrators. This notion of America’s characterological evil became the basis of a new social contract in America."
------------------------------------------
The clarity I found that trip was based on one realization: I learned that America, for all its faults failings, was not intractably evil. In the Black Panther villa in Algiers, on those balmy afternoons eating the local shrimp, I spent time with the people who banked their entire lives on America’s inherent evil—and on the inherent evil of capitalism. On one level, they were glamorous figures, revolutionaries ensconced in a lavish villa provided by the new radical government of Algeria. The impression was of a new and more perfect world order just around the corner, and these special people with the moral imagination to see it coming would soon be marching in victory.
Yet I could see that as human beings they were homesick and in despair. As revolutionaries, they were impotent and hopelessly lost. It was like seeing a pretty woman whose smile unfolds to reveal teeth black with rot. They had no future whatsoever, and so they were chilling to behold. We had all grown up in segregation. We all had war stories. And we all had legitimate beefs against America. But to embrace the idea that America and capitalism were permanent oppressors was self-destructive and indulgent. It cut us off from both the past and the future. It left us in the cul-de-sac of placelessness, though I could not have described this way at the time.
...
I was lucky. After one of my radical kitchen-table rants against America toward the end of the 1960s, my father—the son of a man born in slavery—had said to me: 'You know, you shouldn’t underestimate America. This is a strong country.' I protested, started on racism once again. He said, 'No, it’s strong enough to change. You can’t imagine the amount of change I’ve seen in my own lifetime.'”
-----------------------------------------------------
"Post-1960s welfare policies, the proliferation of 'identity politics' and group preferences, and all the grandiose social interventions of the War on Poverty and the Great Society-all this was meant to redeem the nation from its bigoted past, but paradoxically, it also invited minorities to make an identity and a politics out of grievance and inferiority. Its seductive whisper to them was that their collective grievance was their entitlement and that protest politics was the best way to cash in on that entitlement-this at the precise moment when America was at last beginning to free up minorities as individual citizens who could pursue their own happiness to the limits of their abilities. Thus, white guilt was a smothering and distracting kindness that enmeshed minorities more in the struggle for white redemption than in their own struggle to develop as individuals capable of competing with all others.
Of course, this was a mouthful, and something close to sacrilege at the liberal-leaning Aspen Institute. I had set out only to say what I truly meant, not to be provocative or to discomfit a retired Supreme Court justice. Yet I had been provocative all the same, and I may have also discomfited Justice O'Connor-not because I intended either outcome, but simply because I had offered up what was considered to be a "conservative" analysis of race in America.
The real provocation was in the very idea of looking at race in America through a lens of 'classic Jeffersonian liberalism-that liberalism which sought freedom for the individual above all else. This was the liberalism that had actually given us the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. In that era, Martin Luther King Jr. was already recognizable as an American archetype precisely because he was so aligned with the central principle of this liberalism: individual freedom. I wanted to celebrate this liberalism and argue that a free society-not necessarily free of all bigotry, but certainly free of all illegal discrimination-was what America owed minorities. After that we minorities should simply be left alone. We should not be smothered, as we have been, by the new paternalistic liberalism that emerged in the mid-1960s-a guilt-driven liberalism that has imposed itself through a series of ineffective and even destructive government programs and policies. We should be left to find our own way as free men and women in this fast-paced and highly competitive society.
In many ways the minority struggle for freedom-just like white America's long-ago struggle for freedom from British rule-has been a battle to have no oppressive or capricious power intervene between the individual and his pursuit of happiness. How, then, does it constitute progress for minorities to overcome bigotry as a limit on their freedom only to subjugate themselves to a paternalistic interventionism inspired by white guilt? There is no true freedom either way."
April 23, 2015
The subtitle says it all. Liberal "guilt" over past racism, sexism, etc. has caused them to pursue policies that utterly destroy the people they are trying to help. In attempting to prop up blacks in this country, liberals have "spawned a new white paternalism toward minorities . . . that has damaged the black family more profoundly than segregation ever did." A few minutes in the inner-city of any major American metropolis will confirm this fact. If only liberals didn't constantly see everything through a lens of minority oppression, they would actually free minorities to rise or fall on their own merits--what MLK wanted all along. Steele writes that a "free society--not necessarily free of all bigotry, but certainly free of all illegal discrimination--was what America owed minorities. After that we minorities should simply be left alone." Steele writes that liberals "smother" minorities by their guilt-driven efforts. A few minutes in the student union of any major American university will confirm this fact.
It's this simple: it's not racists that keep the specter of racism alive in America. It's liberals. They're the ones obsessed with it. Same with sexism. You can't criticize Obama without being labeled a "racist" eventually. Do you really think it will be any different with Hillary?
Steele's book is autobiographical in many ways. He reflects on coming of age in the '60s and '70s, and how in the end he became disillusioned with liberals because they claimed they wanted to help, but all they ever did was get in the way. There are a lot of "money" quotes I could mention. He speaks of how liberals often "spoke out of a genuine historical grievance [yet] they all too often lapsed into hollow sanctimony" (here he mentions Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, "shrill feminists" and "zealous environmentalists").
At heart, liberals look at the past sins of this country and think they have to repudiate everything this country stands for. Conservatives look back at the past sins of this country and see that they are a betrayal of what this country was founded to represent. So rescue will come in greater affirmation of everything this country stands for, not rejection. Liberals seek to blame conservatives for these shortcomings: "This ability to taint conservatism--its principles, policies, and personalities--with America's past shames has been, for the Left, a seemingly endless font of power."
Nevertheless, Steele is optimistic. After all, the "Left has made government intervention the redemption from old America and the road to a new and better America. And this is the Right's opportunity, because the government is guaranteed failure." So what must the Right do? It "struggles more than it should because it has failed to show how principles--rather than 'moral' activism--are America's only defense against hypocrisy." So we will have to fight against the entrenched conventional wisdom and show how our "ideas can constitute a redemption--an American dream truly open to everyone."
The Left wants to control this dream; the Right wants to set it free.
It's this simple: it's not racists that keep the specter of racism alive in America. It's liberals. They're the ones obsessed with it. Same with sexism. You can't criticize Obama without being labeled a "racist" eventually. Do you really think it will be any different with Hillary?
Steele's book is autobiographical in many ways. He reflects on coming of age in the '60s and '70s, and how in the end he became disillusioned with liberals because they claimed they wanted to help, but all they ever did was get in the way. There are a lot of "money" quotes I could mention. He speaks of how liberals often "spoke out of a genuine historical grievance [yet] they all too often lapsed into hollow sanctimony" (here he mentions Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, "shrill feminists" and "zealous environmentalists").
At heart, liberals look at the past sins of this country and think they have to repudiate everything this country stands for. Conservatives look back at the past sins of this country and see that they are a betrayal of what this country was founded to represent. So rescue will come in greater affirmation of everything this country stands for, not rejection. Liberals seek to blame conservatives for these shortcomings: "This ability to taint conservatism--its principles, policies, and personalities--with America's past shames has been, for the Left, a seemingly endless font of power."
Nevertheless, Steele is optimistic. After all, the "Left has made government intervention the redemption from old America and the road to a new and better America. And this is the Right's opportunity, because the government is guaranteed failure." So what must the Right do? It "struggles more than it should because it has failed to show how principles--rather than 'moral' activism--are America's only defense against hypocrisy." So we will have to fight against the entrenched conventional wisdom and show how our "ideas can constitute a redemption--an American dream truly open to everyone."
The Left wants to control this dream; the Right wants to set it free.
March 12, 2019
If you haven't read any book by Shelby Steele you need to find one of his books and read it as soon as possible, I recommend Shame. Steele's writing presents clear and engaging arguments, intermixed with personal stories that illustrate the philosophical undergirding of his message. The chapters are brief but concise. I always equate books with brief chapters that keep me focused because they carry like a Mike Tyson like punch with the information it presents. Shame is short, brief, condensed but powerful in impact. I can confidently say that this is hands down one of the best books I have ever read that explains the hypocrisy and lunacy of modern day liberalism. Steele lays out a sound groundwork through the lens of critical thinking that is absent in today's politics. This book will explain the craziness of modern liberalism; it is a must read!
Steele’s journey from his youthful close-up flirtation with the Black Panthers to his travels in Africa to his observations of America's journey during it's last 50 years, all the way to his current views that faithful adherence to the original ideals of our republic are best for all people, are what makes this book such a great read. His description of how poetic truth masks and ultimately steals from real truth is something I will never forget.
One passage I found interesting was Steele's discussion about Reagan's take on racial issues. "Reagan truly believed that blacks and other minorities were in fact equal to white Americans, and that in a society committed to flat freedom, they could compete with all others. Liberalism was wobbly on this matter; its policies always compensated for the possibility of real black inferiority. Reagan's conservatism -- his idealism -- was based on a conviction that blacks were fundamentally equal to all other races."
Steele’s journey from his youthful close-up flirtation with the Black Panthers to his travels in Africa to his observations of America's journey during it's last 50 years, all the way to his current views that faithful adherence to the original ideals of our republic are best for all people, are what makes this book such a great read. His description of how poetic truth masks and ultimately steals from real truth is something I will never forget.
One passage I found interesting was Steele's discussion about Reagan's take on racial issues. "Reagan truly believed that blacks and other minorities were in fact equal to white Americans, and that in a society committed to flat freedom, they could compete with all others. Liberalism was wobbly on this matter; its policies always compensated for the possibility of real black inferiority. Reagan's conservatism -- his idealism -- was based on a conviction that blacks were fundamentally equal to all other races."
September 18, 2021
Shelby Steele's philosophical look at American racial relations and white society's reaction and attempts to repair past "sins" is the subject matter of his thoughtful essay. In Shame, he uses his personal experiences to trace the American Civil Rights Movement, the reactions to the movement by whites and blacks, and the impact of resulting government programs. His argument is that government programs designed to help minorities have been initiated to assuage white guilt and have actually hindered the advancement of blacks in modern society. He acknowledges the cultural divide in the United States that is fueled by a "poetic" rather than an "actual" truth and enforced by political correctness. Doctor Steele writes that the "counter-cultural" conservative movement demanding personal responsibility will eventually prevail and offer all people, including minorities, true freedom and opportunity. While many Americans may not share Doctor Steele's thesis, it is extremely important that it receive reasoned consideration as his insights provide a valuable contribution to the discussion.
September 10, 2019
Can I give it 0 stars? That's what it deserved. Steele is racist, conservative and has no idea how Liberals think. He also has no reality of the black world or the world we live in. Don't waste your time with this one!
November 30, 2022
This book came so close to being decent on numerous occasions throughout the read, but it kept failing repeatedly. If you look at the title, clearly the author presents this book as though he’s going to explain why we’re polarized. Unfortunately, his entire thesis is “why that side polarized us and my side didn’t.”
Shelby Steele is a Black conservative who grew up in the 60s and definitely experienced racism, which you learn due to this being a partial memoir. The book comes out the gate with a first chapter that’s the longest chapter, and it completely poisons the well. Throughout it’s entirety, he repeats over (and over and over and over) that the left doesn’t care about the truth or reality while giving maybe one example. This is a hack move for any author because you’re completely poisoning the well before you even try to argue your point.
The author argues that affirmative action and other race-based policies are actually holding Black people back. He makes a ton of great points that I’ve often contemplated, such as Black people being looked down upon as though they didn’t earn anything based on merit. He also has an interesting story about visiting Africa.
But although he makes some good arguments here and there, he keeps coming back to ridiculous conspiracy theories about the left and ends the book with one that made me audibly laugh out loud. He does this strange dot connecting saying that the left only tries to help Black people as an ultimate move for power and control based on moral authority.
It’s all really strange, and this could have been such a good book. I maybe would have enjoyed the book more if the title of the book wasn’t trying to act like it was about the overall polarization as a whole and not just do what we see every day, which is both sides blaming each other for the current mess we’re in.
Shelby Steele is a Black conservative who grew up in the 60s and definitely experienced racism, which you learn due to this being a partial memoir. The book comes out the gate with a first chapter that’s the longest chapter, and it completely poisons the well. Throughout it’s entirety, he repeats over (and over and over and over) that the left doesn’t care about the truth or reality while giving maybe one example. This is a hack move for any author because you’re completely poisoning the well before you even try to argue your point.
The author argues that affirmative action and other race-based policies are actually holding Black people back. He makes a ton of great points that I’ve often contemplated, such as Black people being looked down upon as though they didn’t earn anything based on merit. He also has an interesting story about visiting Africa.
But although he makes some good arguments here and there, he keeps coming back to ridiculous conspiracy theories about the left and ends the book with one that made me audibly laugh out loud. He does this strange dot connecting saying that the left only tries to help Black people as an ultimate move for power and control based on moral authority.
It’s all really strange, and this could have been such a good book. I maybe would have enjoyed the book more if the title of the book wasn’t trying to act like it was about the overall polarization as a whole and not just do what we see every day, which is both sides blaming each other for the current mess we’re in.
Read
May 26, 2021I'm not really sure what to say. Steele's writing is sharp and full of paragraphs that need to be picked apart. More so than with any other book I have read since last year, I have felt the privilege and the shame that comes with the past---and my identity--- while reading this book.
And yet, I wanted more. More citations. I want the stats on his claim regarding abortion statistics(when it is harder to get and less legal, after all, how do we measure?) A link to that interview with Baldwin(why read the text when you can watch it?).
I want a dialogue. Between Steele, Kendi, Sowell, Coates, Riley, Alexander, Carol Swain, and Austin Channing Brown. I entered this conversation to learn. Education and experience, especially this year, has taught me to do more listening to, and less discounting of expressed observations different than mine. I'd even settle for the old repeating column in the opinion section of the newspaper. Any way I can get it, that is my current dream. But I shall probably have to make do with books.
And yet, I wanted more. More citations. I want the stats on his claim regarding abortion statistics(when it is harder to get and less legal, after all, how do we measure?) A link to that interview with Baldwin(why read the text when you can watch it?).
I want a dialogue. Between Steele, Kendi, Sowell, Coates, Riley, Alexander, Carol Swain, and Austin Channing Brown. I entered this conversation to learn. Education and experience, especially this year, has taught me to do more listening to, and less discounting of expressed observations different than mine. I'd even settle for the old repeating column in the opinion section of the newspaper. Any way I can get it, that is my current dream. But I shall probably have to make do with books.
February 4, 2025
Jesus. Gaslighting and victim-blaming at its finest. If you’re looking to further cushion white guilt, then happy reading.
March 21, 2021
Gaslighting
June 22, 2021
This book was assigned reading for me and … not what I had expected, so I’m glad I checked it out from the library instead of purchasing it. Frankly, I had to wade through a LOT of gaslighting and tedious repetition to get to any nuggets of truth that resonated with me. I’m a cis white female leftist, not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe I wasn’t the intended audience.
The overuse of the word “merit” and similar concepts came across to me as very ableist and classist/elitist, and there were several references to the inferiority of female-headed households which came across rather sexist (and the author did acknowledge this). There was reference made to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the author’s own personal successes, but no mention of all the people that conservative capitalism throws away, of all the people that work their asses off their entire lives and never “make it.”
One point of agreement that I found was the thread of critique around liberalism’s paternalistic approach to racism, white supremacy, etc. Liberalism has gotten some things right and a lot of things wrong, and has had both positive impact and harm. It SHOULD be interrogated, and libs have to reckon with this, and there is “white guilt” operating in liberal spaces. Absolutely agree on that. But the author appears to insist that racism basically ended with the civil rights movement of the 60s and that people who point out how white supremacy continues to operate should quit their whining. (Wonder where the author stands now, though I don’t wonder enough to look it up)
I would have appreciated some citations to back up some of the author’s specific claims, but we honestly have very different worldviews. I don’t think humans have to make everything a supposedly “merit”-based competition; or that people can only succeed by someone else losing. I think that we can share abundance and resources with one another so that everyone’s needs get met; so that no one is considered disposable or burdensome; and so that both individual and collective freedom can be found through interdependence and solidarity with our fellow humans. And my worldview includes a critical lens around how the concept and history of race, racism, and white supremacy continue to operate systematically and systemically in American society and government; the author essentially denies this, and I just didn’t find that he backed that claim up satisfactorily, or even slightly, in this book.
The overuse of the word “merit” and similar concepts came across to me as very ableist and classist/elitist, and there were several references to the inferiority of female-headed households which came across rather sexist (and the author did acknowledge this). There was reference made to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the author’s own personal successes, but no mention of all the people that conservative capitalism throws away, of all the people that work their asses off their entire lives and never “make it.”
One point of agreement that I found was the thread of critique around liberalism’s paternalistic approach to racism, white supremacy, etc. Liberalism has gotten some things right and a lot of things wrong, and has had both positive impact and harm. It SHOULD be interrogated, and libs have to reckon with this, and there is “white guilt” operating in liberal spaces. Absolutely agree on that. But the author appears to insist that racism basically ended with the civil rights movement of the 60s and that people who point out how white supremacy continues to operate should quit their whining. (Wonder where the author stands now, though I don’t wonder enough to look it up)
I would have appreciated some citations to back up some of the author’s specific claims, but we honestly have very different worldviews. I don’t think humans have to make everything a supposedly “merit”-based competition; or that people can only succeed by someone else losing. I think that we can share abundance and resources with one another so that everyone’s needs get met; so that no one is considered disposable or burdensome; and so that both individual and collective freedom can be found through interdependence and solidarity with our fellow humans. And my worldview includes a critical lens around how the concept and history of race, racism, and white supremacy continue to operate systematically and systemically in American society and government; the author essentially denies this, and I just didn’t find that he backed that claim up satisfactorily, or even slightly, in this book.
October 5, 2020
I think if I had read this when it came out my white guilt would have exploded with vitriol and, well, shame. I think reading Kendi and Saad now has given me the proper mindset to read this book, because Shelby gets in some good shots at white progressives that have since become part of antiracist work.
The common former hippie Boomer tropes - how government action was great and necessary until, say, 1964, and then everything after that is useless and worse, counterproductive; how everyone understands what you mean when you say "merit" - were just frustrating, and undercut Shelby's larger point. Not to mention his avoidance of any discussion of why so many Black families are single-parent, matriarchal homes. He puts scare quotes around systemic racism, but then doesn't bring any proof or evidence that it doesn't exist.
Which leads me to the last point. In a book that makes so many inferential leaps and assumptions, "of course"s, and "no doubt"s, there is not a single footnote. How are we supposed to verify what he's saying? It just opens Shelby up to questions about what is supporting his assertions, and without those citations, it just seems like these are his impressions. And for a topic like systemic racism, that's just not enough.
The common former hippie Boomer tropes - how government action was great and necessary until, say, 1964, and then everything after that is useless and worse, counterproductive; how everyone understands what you mean when you say "merit" - were just frustrating, and undercut Shelby's larger point. Not to mention his avoidance of any discussion of why so many Black families are single-parent, matriarchal homes. He puts scare quotes around systemic racism, but then doesn't bring any proof or evidence that it doesn't exist.
Which leads me to the last point. In a book that makes so many inferential leaps and assumptions, "of course"s, and "no doubt"s, there is not a single footnote. How are we supposed to verify what he's saying? It just opens Shelby up to questions about what is supporting his assertions, and without those citations, it just seems like these are his impressions. And for a topic like systemic racism, that's just not enough.
July 18, 2020
Every American Concerned About Racism Should Read This Book
Shelby Steele exposes the last 50 years of white liberalism for the hypocrisy that it has been not just for blacks, but also for well meaning gullible whites who do not understand what freedom really requires of all people no matter their color. He gives clarity to what George W. Bush meant about the " benign bigotry of low expectations. " Too bad the so called woke white intelligentsia are too egotistical in their self righteousness to even read Shame with an open mind. It is a viewpoint that will truly enhance their intellect, so they can celebrate black people succeeding on their own merits rather than only succeeding because of the largesse of liberal whites like themselves. However, to do so would require them to give up the power that their benign bigotry gives them. Hopefully, more and more African Americans like Steele will finally realize they don't need white generosity to succeed, they only need to use the God given gifts that they already have as Americans. Thanks to Mr. Steele for laying this fact out so clearly in this book.
Shelby Steele exposes the last 50 years of white liberalism for the hypocrisy that it has been not just for blacks, but also for well meaning gullible whites who do not understand what freedom really requires of all people no matter their color. He gives clarity to what George W. Bush meant about the " benign bigotry of low expectations. " Too bad the so called woke white intelligentsia are too egotistical in their self righteousness to even read Shame with an open mind. It is a viewpoint that will truly enhance their intellect, so they can celebrate black people succeeding on their own merits rather than only succeeding because of the largesse of liberal whites like themselves. However, to do so would require them to give up the power that their benign bigotry gives them. Hopefully, more and more African Americans like Steele will finally realize they don't need white generosity to succeed, they only need to use the God given gifts that they already have as Americans. Thanks to Mr. Steele for laying this fact out so clearly in this book.
March 27, 2015
An eloquent and well thought out analysis of the birth of modern liberalism in the turbulent culture clashes of the 1960s and its subsequent treatment (mistreatment?) of racial equity issues since then, "Shame" examines the unspoken assumptions behind the social programs initiated after the triumph of the civil rights movement that intended to establish racial equity. Steele somewhat surprisingly portrays these programs as just another form of oppression that do no favors for their intended beneficiaries and, in fact, do them grievous harm. Along the way he chronicles his own journey from "the borderline between liberalism and radicalism" to his conservative outlook now, shedding a personal light on the issues he presents. A quick read, but well worth serious consideration, this book might change your mind about a few things.
February 15, 2017
This was a very well presented look into a view of liberal vs. conservatism ideology. Steele's viewpoint is a black viewpoint from a family that raised him with typical 50's work ethic. His attraction to the 60's black movement and his personal account of his travels to Africa to find his roots and witness the route that the newly independent African countries were adopting were personal and interesting. Having been a bit young and sheltered at that point in history, I find this very interesting. This is a personal recounting of his journey, none of it can be discounted.
There are several parts of this book that I found worthwhile. One being Chapter 13 "The Good". This book begs a re-read.
There are several parts of this book that I found worthwhile. One being Chapter 13 "The Good". This book begs a re-read.
April 20, 2015
A profound book for those seeking to understand the turmoil that is politics in America today. It is not for zealots on the left, because they will not like what it has to say and in their response will reinforce Steele's central premise that zealotry and inflexibility on the left regarding their worship of the truth of America's irredeemable fallen nature drives them toward governmental intrusion in the lives of Americans to rid this land of the stench of its former sins. Zealots of the right will also have a difficult time with Steele's outline of the sins of America which the left has been taking advantage since the '60's. Thinking individuals will be enlightened.
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