White Guilt:
How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
by Shelby Steele
One of the best books you will ever read about the contemporary race situation in the U.S.
Posted on 04/05/2012 7:26:31 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.
...The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
” There is now a long litany of racial dust-ups—from Tawana Brawley to the Duke University lacrosse players to the white Cambridge police officer who arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates a summer ago—in which the poetic truth of white racism and black victimization is invoked so that the actual truth becomes dismissible as yet more racism.
When the Cambridge cop or the Duke lacrosse players or the men accused of raping Tawana Brawley tried to defend themselves, they were already so stained by poetic truth as to never be entirely redeemed. No matter the facts—whether Trayvon Martin was his victim or his assailant—George Zimmerman will also never be entirely redeemed.”
Hmmm.
This is a lie. Trayvon Martin was committing assault when he was shot dead. He got what he deserved.
I was thinking about how people dress and act when I was in the Walmart recently. If we’re all racist, why don’t I feel threatened by a middle-aged black man, in jeans and a family-reunion t-shirt, picking out produce? Or a teenage boy in the local charter school’s uniform, shopping with his mother? Or black men at the door, in coat and tie ... the Jehovah’s Witness missionaries?
However, I do make sure the garage door is down and the van is locked when my neighbor’s son - the one with the felony record - has his friends hanging around, in falling-down pants and ski caps in summer. And they’re all white.
I’m tired of all the qualification that goes on even by people who try to be a bit more objective, as if they feel they must apologise in his way for their truthfulness. I’m also tired of the white-on-black violent crime statistics never being mentioned, as they are more relevant to the point that white racism is hardly pervasive in this country. Indeed, crime statistics show quite the opposite, if the mere fact of an interracial crime proves racism.
Ignoring these statistics also seems to say that white people are expendable. The falsity of that statement will become clear as soon as the are no longer enough white taxpayers to pull the wagon. It’s already quite clear in places such as Detroit and Birmingham.
I saw this in the WSJ earlier. It isn’t a “brilliant” analysis. It shows a lack of acquaintance with facts that are now known and appears to be a deliberate effort by Steele to soft-pedal the emerging picture of Martin as a young thug in training who deserved to get capped. Steele almost certainly is worried about getting too far off the plantation - he wants to go far enough to maintain his brand as a semi-conservative, but not so far as to be seen as rejecting conventional racial pieties.
"I'll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years."
-- Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson
"I did not lie awake at night worrying about the problems of Negroes."
-- Democrat Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."
-- Democrat Senator Lyndon B. Johnson
“Segregation Forever!!”
– Democrat Governor George Wallace campaign slogan
"You'd find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva."
-- Democrat Senator Fritz Hollings
"I am a former kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County and the adjoining counties of the state .... The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia .... It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state of the Union. Will you please inform me as to the possibilities of rebuilding the Klan in the Realm of W. Va .... I hope that you will find it convenient to answer my letter in regards to future possibilities."
-- Democrat US Senator Robert Byrd
"White folks was in caves while we was building empires... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it."
-- Democrat Al Sharpton
“white-on-black”
That should have been “black-on-white”, obviously.
I still believe this whole Trayvon Martin incident was at least in part orchestrated by the White House. It took nearly a month for the race baiters to even show up...typically they would be there as quick as flies on dog turds. The timing and the location..Florida...a battleground state. The facts on the case will likely cause it not to even go to trial...not like a Rodney King case. This is part of Obama’s campaign.
That’s a very good point.
The great trick of poetic truth is to pass itself off as the deep and essential truth so that hard facts that refute it must be dismissed in the name of truth.The true greatness of this single sentence is more recognizable if you read the entire article.
The article is great.
This sentence is epic.
I think most people react to behavioral cues, including dress and posture, rather than skin color. My neighborhood is perhaps 20% black, including immigrants from Africa, and it doesn’t matter when HOA committees are formed, or when it’s time for the neighborhood cleanup, or when people are out walking in the evenings, what color anyone is.
Nobody’s going to look twice at the Deputy Sheriff on a constitutional with his teenage daughter, or the Eritrean grandparents and some kids, or the JW ladies in their sharp exercise outfits ... but if it’s a group of thug-dressed teens, loud voices and profanity, that posture everyone recognizes as antisocial ... race doesn’t matter, and the whole neighborhood hates it, including their parents.
Excellent point.
What kind of BS is this? "On the hunt," "clichés of menace'? "Skittles and ice tea in hand?" Steele seems to be making a lot of assumptions that don't comport with the facts as we know them from police reports and the 911 calls.
Other than that, Steele has done a good job of exposing the race hustlers like Obama, Jackson, and Sharpton who exploit such tragic events for their own purposes and willingly distort the truth and ignore facts.
It does not bother me as much that he believes this, as the fact that he does not promote science and math to TODAY'S black youth.
If you get good grades in school you get ostracized by fellow blacks for "actin' white"
Great set of quotes, thanks.
Martin will win a victory of sorts even though he is dead--Zimmerman is likely to be killed sooner or later by someone seeking to "avenge" Martin's death.
Besides constructing a false narrative of what happened, the media gave lots of publicity to the NBPP offer of a reward for anyone who captured Zimmerman "dead or alive" so if he is killed it will be partly the media's fault.
When I sent my son off to Coe College in the 90s I gave him a copy of Shelby Steele’s book, “The Content of our Character” which I had read. Steele was a Coe graduate who left college a liberal but with enough critical education that after working in programs left by Johnson’s Great Society, realized the falsehood of the path he had chosen.
He is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute along with Thomas Sowell who gets a lot of coverage here.
"I want to go up to the closest white person and say: 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health."
-- Democrat Charles Barron, New York City Councilman
"Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them."
-- Democrat Mary Frances Berry, Chairwoman, US Commission on Civil Rights
(I) "will not let the white boys win in this election."
-- Democrat Donna Brazile, Al Gore's Campaign Manager
"The Medicaid system must have been developed by a white male slave owner. It pays for you to be pregnant and have a baby, but it won't pay for much family planning."
-- Democrat Jocelyn Elders, Surgeon General
"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion."
-- Democrat Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
"I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter] that he would have been a great senator at any moment. . . . He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation."
--Democrat Senator Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), 2004
"I mean, you got the first mainstream African American [Barack Obama] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy."
-- Democrat Senator Joseph Biden Jr., (D., Del.), 2006-07
"I don't care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be."
-- Democrat Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin
White Guilt:
How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
by Shelby Steele
One of the best books you will ever read about the contemporary race situation in the U.S.
Another good short article by Steele was when Time interviewed a number of Conservatives about why they were conservatives.
It is here:
http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/02/what-is-a-conservative/#what-does-a-conservative-believe-2
Exactly....Dress for success: Wall Street or the Hood?
Agreed.
“Black Thinker”? Really?
Not absurd if one considers their true motive. Tools of the the Marxist puppet masters such as Jackson and Sharpton deliberately further Obama's Marxist agenda by using such "anomalies" to incite further divisions between the races.
Insightful and well-put.
I know that characterizing or categorizing someone by their race is really something that can be a stunningly unconservative thing to do, but there are times when it serves a purpose.
I shared an office for a time in 2008 with a young black engineer who grew up in the heart of Detroit. He was a conservative from his highschool years after watching what the left had done to his community. He was maturing and wanting something beyond what he could get from talk radio. He wanted that knowledge to help him communicate with his extended family and those he grew up with.
I laid out the long list of conservatives who happened to be black who fall into the list of conservative writers and thinkers. He knew Walter Williams and Larry Elder from their radio work but didn’t yet know of Sowell, Steele, Watts, and others that are great thinkers in the pantheon of conservative writers.
I like to know of great thinkers from Kansas City, or of English or German ancestry. It isn’t that I ignore others, but it is that connective bond of community and family that conservatives always describe as being the true strength of the individual and his heritage.
LOL! For the first two years of high school, our youngest son attended an all boys Catholic prep school. Our two older boys graduated from there, and it's a good school, but our younger son used to get so annoyed by the white middle class kids in the school 'acting ghetto'. What's funny was that the black middle class kids DIDN'T act that way!
And it goes back to that wise and wonderful truth expressed eloquently by Martin Luther King: a person should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin.
And that's how Zimmerman and Trayvon should be judged! But the media is doing to Zimmerman supporters exactly what they have done to opponents of Obama: putting the lens of COLOR and not CHARCTER in front of us because a judgment of character assume a standard of right/wrong, good/evil, that they have are VERY uncomfortable with, and consistently try to belittle as being "conservative" and/or "fundamenalist".
That's why they are so eager to portray Conservatives as judging Obama on the basis skin color, and not character content.
Personally, I as a Conservative will respect the President ONLY because of the Office he holds; but do not ask me to automatically respect the content of his character because of the color of his skin!
Because that is RACIST!
Excellent follow up to an excellent post.
Like OJ Simpson?
After the '60s—in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake.It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt.
IMO, it is this victim mentality that has all but destroyed the Black culture in America.
When I was in school, you got ostracized by fellow whites for being a bookworm(nerd, for you younger folks).
Reads like a Bill Cosby moment. Sadly, this will be discarded. Jackson, and Sharpton already made their con-hate-dough over the last week.
Shelby Steele is very wise.
The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead.
This is a lie. Trayvon Martin was committing assault when he was shot dead. He got what he deserved.”””
AMEN.
Kid bit off far more than he could handle.
In spite of the outcome it seems obvious, given what we know, that Martin was not out looking for trouble.
Nah, I was just thinking that the Polo logo is a polo player; the alligator is Lacoste.
“Polo shirt” is a style: knit, 3-button tab, small collar. They can be in Polo brand, Izod brand, Walmart brand ...
Ah, gotcha.
“Hipsters” do not wear them, even if their mom is having a cow over the awful things they’re trying to wear to church!
Around here, we call them wiggers.
I think that’s different. There is a very precise entomology of stylistic subgroups among young men.
When ever I go into my classifying young people, per dress, ie hipsters, etc, my daughter tells me the equivalent.
I think “hipsters” are something to do with “alternative” rock, whatever that is. Bands that are so creative that they have only four listeners, maybe.
My oldest boy (18 tomorrow) is so fashion-forward that I don’t know what he is. The second (15) is “gamer-geek,” which even I recognize.
As you say, there are many subgroups. My daughter tried to explain to me the difference between a New York Hipster, West Coast hipster and retro-hipster (there may have been some others).
Fortunately, she thinks they’re all poseurs. Of course she gets mad if I try to classify her style.
It’s all the same to me.
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