Book Recommendation: White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
Steele
is what an intellectual ought to be; a deep thinker who does not just
parrot pablum spoon fed to him. He is also a fine write with a great
command of the language. His accounts of growing up under Jim Crow
racism (he was a bat boy for a white team, but couldn’t travel with
them as the other stadiums didn’t let “coloreds” in) plus his
accounts of being a black radical on campus and working in
“anti-poverty” programs in East Saint Louis (where he saw the
body of one of his good students outside a convenience store), give
his writing on the subject an authority that people living in gated
communities will never have. This “must read” book is his answer
to the current situation, which he believes (rightly I thing) is
devastating for both blacks and whites. He recounts being patronized
by a white liberal professor who assumed he didn’t need to state
his opinions because she knew them because he was black. Some
of the quotes I particularly liked: “One of the delights of
Marxian-tinged ideas for the young is the unearned sense of
superiority they grant.” “I didn’t know it at the time, but it
was my first experience of how group identity can take the place of
accomplishment as a source of individual
esteem.” “When you give a racial preference to the child of two
black professionals with advanced degrees and six-figure incomes—as
entree to a university that has not discriminated against blacks in
more than 60 years—then you are clearly implying an inherent and
irremediable black inferiority.”
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