KEP’s Reviews > The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America – Essays on Identity and Social Justice > Status Update

“Blacks remind them that their racial innocence is questionable, that they are the beneficiaries of past and present racism, and the sins of the father(...)”(145).
“And yet young whites tell themselves that they had nothing to do with the oppression of black people” (Steele 145).
“So they end up in the paradoxical position of being hostile to blacks as defending their own racial innocence”(Steele 145).

“So, the white students I met were not just meeting me; they were also meeting the possibility of their own humanity. And, this I think, is what explains how some young white college in the late eighties could so frankly take part in racially insensitive and outright racist acts. They were expected to be cleaner of racism than any other generation- they were born into the Great Society” (Steele).