Free Republic

More than 40 African American intellectuals are asking Smith College to end the “forced, accusatory ‘anti-bias’ training” that was mandated for campus service workers after a student falsely accused some workers of racially-profiling her. The letter, obtained by National Review, was sent on Monday to Smith College president Kathleen McCartney by Bob Woodson, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and founder of “1776 Unites,” and 44 fellow black intellectuals. The signatories ask McCartney to “rethink how you have handled” the fallout over an alleged incident of racial profiling in the summer of 2018, and urge her to “publicly apologize”...

The first time Shelby Steele used the word “equity” in one of his books—“White Guilt,” published in 2006—he was referring to the value his father had accrued in restoring “three ramshackle homes to neat lower-middle-class acceptability.” This was in 1950s Chicago, a city the author describes as “virulently segregated.” Shelby Steele Sr., a Southern-born black truck driver who’d left school in third grade to work the fields, concealed his homeownership from his white employer. He was afraid he’d be fired for “getting above himself.” No bank would loan the elder Steele money, so he used bricks, discarded lumber, and cast-off...

"Unfortunately, we have found that your title doesn't meet Prime Video's content quality expectations and is not eligible for publishing on the service at the time," an Amazon spokesperson informed Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele last week. "We will not be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed," the email continued. "We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause." Fortunately for the viewers and for Amazon, its brass had a change of heart. "They acknowledged what happened and said they would work to improve and prevent incidences like this one from happening again," said...

August was the sixth anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the black teenager who was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. The incident, and the nationwide coverage it attracted, marked the beginning of a period of mass protests against police, which culminated (let’s hope) after the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis this May. The fashionable explanation for what happened to Brown, Floyd and others—such as Freddie Gray in 2015 and Philando Castile in 2016—is so-called systemic racism. The activist left and the mainstream media insist that law enforcement targeted these men because they...

"And so when people start to talk about systemic racism built into the system, what they're really doing is expanding the territory of 'entitlement,'" Steele said. "[I]t's a corruption because the truth of the matter is, blacks have never been less oppressed than they are today. Opportunity is around every corner," he explained, adding that the activists in this case rarely make time for self-reflection. Steele asked rhetorically whether those who feel oppressed or underprivileged have taken "some responsibility" and taking positive action like examining the education system in their neighborhoods or whether they are pursuing a tangible goal for...

In a remarkable soliloquy, Shelby Steele dominated his interview with Mark Levin with an excoriation of the riots and looting that have taken place over the past couple of weeks. Steele, an African-American veteran of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and a best-selling author, appeared on the June 7 episode of Life, Liberty, and Levin to say the protesters have nothing new to say, and that blacks have never been less oppressed in American society. Steele fully rejects the concept of systemic racism. Steele held court for the first eight minutes and fifty seconds of the program, and...

The NFL protests were not really about injustice. Instead such protests are usually genuflections to today’s victim-focused black identity. Protest is the action arm of this identity. It is not seeking a new and better world; it merely wants documentation that the old racist world still exists. It wants an excuse. For any formerly oppressed group, there will be an expectation that the past will somehow be an excuse for difficulties in the present. This is the expectation behind the NFL protests and the many protests of groups like Black Lives Matter. The near-hysteria around the deaths of Trayvon Martin,...

Shelby Steele, a prolific author and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, warns liberalism is the biggest threat to American culture and breaks down race relation issues the country faces in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Liberalism is our biggest threat to our culture and our way of life,” says Steele, the author of five books. For those who succumb to liberalism’s group identity, he says, it can retard human development for those claiming victimhood, while falsely elevating those who wrap themselves in empty idealisms and popularized notions like “diversity, “multiculturalism” and “inclusion.” As a personal...

“We like to say that the real black is the black on the street corner doing drugs, selling drugs and shooting each other,” Steele said. “We don’t question their blackness, but we question the blackness of those who climb out of those situations, who join the American mainstream, who become successful.” Modern liberalism, he continued, rewards failure and breeds bad faith in people and in America. The more inferior a black person is, he said, the more “black” that person is considered. This cultural dynamic encourages a sense of helplessness, and the helpless like to be surrounded by others who...

WASHINGTON -- African-American writer and social critic Shelby Steele argued on Thursday that black oppression is over in the U.S., while calling on blacks to stop blaming racism for their own inability to harness freedom. In a pointed speech at the Heritage Foundation, Stanford University Hoover Institution senior fellow Steele also described the Black Lives Matter movement as “a comfort zone where people land because they are afraid of freedom.” “Liberalism, I think, has effectively become the new racism,” Steele said. “It mimics segregation by seeing blacks as helpless inferiors. Black inferiority is its greatest sort of cause … and...

I was recently invited to make some remarks at a charity dinner for a cause that I strongly support. The organizers worried that, because their cause affected only Third World nations, they would have a hard time raising money from an American audience. Localism, it seemed, in everything from farm produce to charity giving, was the new vogue. People wanted to see their dollars at work locally rather than watch them disappear into the coffers of some international organization. Could I help them make the case for international giving? On the night of the dinner it occurred to me to...

In an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s radio program on Tuesday, Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele elaborated on a Monday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday arguing that the so-called civil rights establishment is in decline, as seen when the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial failed to create a significant reaction. “I think probably, you know, the attempts to have big supportive rallies for Trayvon Martin and for the idea of him as a victim of white racism, has come to different cities around the country to put together these marchers and so forth — they have...

The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America's civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like "diversity" and "inclusiveness" simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock. On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But...

The idea that the problem is Israel, that the problem is the Jews, protects Palestinians from having to confront that inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world. It is not an idle thing. Our facts and our reason are not going to penetrate easily that definition or make any progress. “The question is, how do they get away...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now here's Shelby Steele, and you will recognize that you've heard much of this on this program, but I love this. It's in the Wall Street Journal, and as you know, every time Shelby Steele writes on this subject, I trumpet it; share it with you almost verbatim. He writes, " If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly < character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's...

If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there. Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism...

Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline. If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there. ........................................................< As a president, Barack Obama has been a force...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: An AP-GfK poll: "Obama Faces Trouble with Key Voters -- Whites and women..." It's an AP story, by the way. "Whites and women are a re-election problem for President Barack Obama. Younger voters and liberals, too, but to a lesser extent. All are important Democratic constituencies that helped him win the White House in 2008 and whose support he'll need to keep it next year. An analysis of Associated Press-GfK polls, including the latest survey released last week, shows that Obama has lost ground among all those groups since he took office. ... The nation's high unemployment...

Many of the Republican presidential hopefuls should be able to beat President Obama in 2012. This president has a track record now and, thus, many vulnerabilities. If he is not our "worst president," as Donald Trump would have it, his sweeping domestic initiatives—especially his stimulus package and health-care reform—were so jerry-built and high-handed that they generated a virtual revolution in America's normally subdued middle class. The president's success in having Osama bin Laden killed is an exception to a pattern of excruciatingly humble and hesitant leadership abroad. Mr. Obama has been deeply ambivalent about the application of American power, as...

Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the "transformative" aspirations of the Obama presidency—the special promise of this first black president to "change" us into a better society—are much less likely to materialize. There will be enough Republican gains to make the "no" in the "party of no" even more formidable, if not definitive. But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.) His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were...