"Live" with Shelby Steele (Must Read)

Sixty years ago, Shelby Steele was born to a black truck driver and a white social worker in Chicago. His parents were active in the struggle for civil rights, and encouraged him to make the most of his personal opportunities.

After completing a doctorate in English, Steele taught literature at San Jose State University. In 1990, he received the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for his book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America.

Today, Steele is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he focuses on race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. His next book, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, will be released in May.

TAE: Your parents had a racially mixed marriage. You have a racially mixed marriage. How has that affected your views on race?

STEELE: It has given me a profound advantage, because that entirely demystifies race.

My father was a poor black from the South, born in 1900, with a third-grade education. My mother was raised in Ohio with a decent amount of money, and earned her master’s degree. I suppose my father was the more intellectual of the two—he certainly read more books—but I only knew them as my mother and my father. I didn’t know them as emblems or representatives of a race.

So being raised by them gave me a profound secret that other people who have dealt with race don’t have: I knew that behind the race, there’s nothing other than human beings; that’s why whenever I write about race, my point of departure has always been human nature.

I understand race, but I better understand the basics of humanity—human motivations, human incentives. No matter what the question is, if you look for answers in someone’s race, you’ll never get anywhere. That’s one of the real advantages that my background has given me.

TAE: You say many things in black America have not improved as they should have since the 1960s. What do you think happened?

STEELE: Here we were a people who, during the civil rights movement, took charge, fought out a peaceful revolution, and won against a society in which we were outnumbered ten to one.

We won a personal victory, then turned right around and put our future in the hands of the larger society. To understand that, just consider another theoretical option. What if, in 1965, every black person had left America and started a new nation? We would have put all of our energy into education and development—because we’d have had to become competitive with this huge American country. We would have focused on hard work and conservative values. There’s no doubt that our new nation would have had conservative politics.

But we didn’t leave America. We were smack in the middle of a society that knew what it had done to us before. There was a profound amount of guilt. We knew that guilt was there, and we had a U.S. President who was reeling backwards, putting the responsibility on whites to make things up to us, promising to end poverty. We bought into that, and it made us weak. We bought into precisely the opposite of what we should have done.

Our real problem was a lack of development. We weren’t educated. We weren’t competitive. And so rather than really tackle those problems within our group, we just kept saying, “Well, you guys haven’t given us a good enough school yet. You haven’t given us good enough this, or good enough that.” We had this wonderful excuse.

STEELE: All of these government programs were bound to fail from the start, because the people they were meant to serve had not taken responsibility for using them. If you have a good family with a mother and a father, as I did—and most of the people in the community where I grew up did—you didn’t need these programs.

By accepting the idea that government is somehow going to take over the responsibility that only we can take, we relinquished authority over ourselves. We became child-like, and our families began to fall to pieces. Welfare—which promised a subsistence living for the rest of your days for doing absolutely nothing—provided a perfect incentive to not get married, yet still have babies. Then the babies will be state wards, and their babies, and so forth.

The incentive is just to stay in that rut. And so the goodwill of America finally did do to us what slavery and segregation failed to do. It destroyed our family, destroyed our character, and now black America is in a struggle. We struggle to stand up like men and women and take charge of our lives, and become competitive with other people in the modern world. If we don’t do this, we’ll always be behind. But if we do take charge of our own lives, we’ll be men among men.

STEELE: Absolutely right. This isn’t complicated. If you can’t compete with whites and Asians, you’re going to be an inferior class of people. But we don’t have any of our civil rights leaders telling us that. All they keep doing is making excuses for our failure, for our weakness, for our irresponsibility.

We don’t have white leaders in America telling us that either. President Bush hints at it, but he doesn’t say “Look, I’m talking to you black people. If you want to make it, if you want to stop being behind everybody, you’ve got to become serious about education, without making excuses about bad school districts and how you don’t get the funding.”

For 20 years, I lived on the east side of San Jose, which was a poor black and Hispanic community. When the Vietnamese started moving in, their kids went to the same schools, but these kids—thanks to their parents—were serious about education, and they began getting higher test scores than white kids in Los Altos, the fancy school district.

TAE: Let’s talk more about George Bush and the Republican Party. Bush has promoted the concept of the ownership society, and has helped black homeownership, for instance, reach an all-time high. People who own things tend to be more conservative. And Bush has courted the black vote more aggressively than any other Republican President. Yet he’s still not getting it—why?

I don’t think I’ll live to see it, but I don’t expect anything to change until the current civil rights leadership just dies off. They’re really past their usefulness at this point, and they’ve become part of the problem. They’re concerned with nothing except keeping their people in the Democratic Party.

The best thing Republicans can do is to not pander to black Americans. The Republicans should say, “Look: this is what we represent. These are our values.” Instead of trying to compete for black votes by trying to be Democrats, they need to stand as an alternative. The Republicans need to argue that they’re the party that’s not preoccupied with race. They’re more individualistic. They support ambition—people who want to do things, own things, become educated, move up in this world. That’s what Republicans stand for.

As they emphasize those points they’ll be able to make some inroads to the black community because there are a lot of blacks who really want to be encouraged in that direction. But it’s going to take a very long time for anything much to change.

The funny thing is, when you talk to blacks who do understand the requirements of freedom, they’re Republicans! That’s who black Republicans are.

TAE: If Hillary Clinton runs in 2008, do you think she’ll take the black vote for granted?

STEELE: If she can’t, then she has no hope for the Presidency. She’s totally dependent on the black vote.

TAE: What if Condoleezza Rice were to run against Hillary Clinton? Where would the black vote go?

STEELE: That would be fascinating. If Hillary runs against a man, my guess is there’s a certain women’s vote out there that will go for her, even many Republicans. But if she’s running against Condoleezza Rice, that would disappear. A large bit of the black vote that Democrats are so desperately dependent upon would also disappear. If Condoleezza Rice ran, she could win by simply taking an extra 15 percent of the black vote.

This is, of course, all hypothetical, because Condoleezza Rice has expressed no intention of running. And even if she does, she may be a lousy politician. But when we look at the cultural variables that are in play, she would be an extremely formidable candidate.

STEELE: Politically, black America is almost socialistic. There’s a feeling that the government is the vehicle that’s going to lift us to equality, and without the government, we’ll never make it. Black America has suffered from this delusion since the 1960s. It’s gotten to the point where we’ve now made affiliation with the Democratic Party an aspect of the black American identity. No matter who the Democratic nominee is, they get 90 percent of the black vote in every single election. If you are black and not a Democrat, it’s said you’re not authentically black—the civil rights leadership vigorously enforces that. So you have this disjuncture in black life: we’re culturally conservative, but politically, we are far, far left.

TAE: You say that as long as we have affirmative action, blacks will never be able to take full credit for their own advancement.

Look at me, for example. My enemies say my career would have gone nowhere without affirmative action. I don’t think that’s true, but because there is affirmative action, they can say that. There are no blacks who are free from that stigma, and that’s a terrible thing to do to people who are trying to succeed on their own. I think affirmative action is the worst cruelty blacks have endured since slavery.

At that point, blacks made the worst mistake in our history: putting our faith in the hands of outside saviors. The idea that somebody else can lift you up, can teach you skills, and make you competitive is just ridiculous. That sort of abject dependence has never worked, and it never will.

Blacks do well in sports, music, entertainment, and literature—because there’s absolutely no white intervention, paternalism, affirmative action, or anything else. We’re asked to compete without any assistance, and sure enough, we compete. We succeed. In these areas, whites never intervene, so we ask the best and we get the best. But in colleges and other places, there are a billion excuses. Whites intervene and convince themselves not to ask much of us. It’s the same old vicious cycle.

STEELE: Affirmative action and all of its sundry manifestations should be completely eliminated. It stigmatizes all blacks, and it’s not voluntary. One of the real cruelties of affirmative action is that whether we want it or not, it is imposed on us, simply because of the color of our skin. You don’t get to opt out.

You shouldn’t be able to go onto a campus and have a separate black graduation ceremony, a separate black student union, a black studies department. Why do I get all these racial things, but you can’t have them? Why?

White paternalism and guilt is behind it, because it allows whites to effectively take credit for our advancement. Just like slavery, affirmative action allows blacks to be used, and bestows on us a stigma of being inferior. It’s a stunning cruelty. We ought to be marching on Washington to end paternalism and affirmative action; not marching to keep it.

TAE: My daughters go to a public elementary school in Oakland, and sometimes they come home and tell me how they’ve learned about the litany of horrible things that whites are doing to blacks in America. What can white parents do to combat this without being branded racist?

STEELE: There’s no easy way out of that. That ideology is dominant in most urban public schools, and that’s certainly a factor in why most whites have left such schools, heading to the suburbs, private schools, and parochial schools. The educational system has been taken over by identity politics, and every identity’s wonderful except the white one. Whites have no right to an identity, to a racial identity. To say I’m white and I’m proud is to be a Klansman. But we encourage precisely that kind of thinking in minorities. How often do you hear, “I’m black and I’m proud?” So white kids are in a very difficult circumstance.

STEELE: Political correctness is an outgrowth of white guilt. It’s a way for guilty-feeling whites to constantly indicate that they’re not racist, not colonialists, not imperialists, not warmongers, and so on. It’s a kind of ritualization of life by which some whites free themselves of the stigma that history has left them. History has left whites stigmatized as racists, just like blacks were stigmatized as inferior. Both of those are irrational conclusions, but that’s how stigma works. And political correctness is a way to address that.

TAE: The race card seems to show up everywhere. Right now, for instance, any number of liberal writers are saying the reason the U.S. wants to control the flow of immigrants from Mexico is because we’re a racist culture.

White guilt, which I think defines liberalism, is a response to the stigma that white Americans bear for practicing racism for four centuries. Whites live with this constant pressure of having to demonstrate to the world that they’re not bigots, and this manifests itself in many facets of American life. You see it in our politics, you see it in war, you see it in our immigration debates—the real topic at hand is always secondary, because we’re first trying to prove we’re not racist.

So you can’t even get to the problem of immigration and what we’re going to do about people streaming across the borders. On Iraq, a lot of the anti-war movement is so concerned that America not appear to be a racist country fighting poor brown people that they can’t even think about whether we need to be at war. So even the debate on the war on terror is tainted by white guilt.

TAE: Did the civil rights movement take a wrong fork in the road? If Martin Luther King was alive, do you think he would accept all of this liberal paternalism toward blacks?

STEELE: I don’t know. That’s a big debate. In hindsight, it’s easy to look back and see that we made a wrong turn. But at the time, it was hard to see. I didn’t see it, and I don’t think King saw it. But I understand why we made the mistake. The wealthiest society in the world was saying, “Look, we’re going to fix this for you. You’re going to be equal.” Not once did we ask ourselves what we needed to do for this dream to be realized.

TAE: That’s kind of ironic, because for years blacks had learned not to take what white people said at face value. So why suddenly believe them?

STEELE: I’ll give you my bottom line: We’ve done worse in freedom than we did in segregation. It’s abominable that we made more advances between 1945 and 1965 than we have since, but it’s the truth. According to studies by Stanford’s Thomas Sowell and Harvard’s Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom, we made up more ground with whites in the 1950s than in other decades. This is something I’m writing about in my next book.

Something people overlook is the shock of becoming free. When an oppressor finally takes his foot off your neck—whether it’s the European powers withdrawing from their colonies, or whites in America passing civil rights legislation and starting a Great Society—the group that has created an entire culture to cope with oppression is suddenly disoriented. Becoming free can give a profound shock. We don’t have the values in place for dealing with it. We don’t have the ideas. We have the mechanisms for wearing masks, for manipulating an oppressor, for surviving under harsh circumstances; we’ve become geniuses at that. But we don’t know what to do with freedom.

So when we come to freedom, we experience it as a humiliation, as an embarrassment, as a shame. Now, for the first time, we see how far behind we actually are. We see how long it’ll take to catch up with the people we suddenly have to compete with. And in some cases, we lock up in terror.

Freedom has just terrorized black Americans. We are scared to death of it. And rather than admit that, we say we’re still living in a racist society, or that the government isn’t doing its job. We make excuse after excuse after excuse. But the bottom line is that we have failed to stand up to the challenges of freedom. And that’s terrifying because it shows us just how much work lies ahead of us.

STEELE: The great promise of the United States of America lies in the wonderful interplay between individual freedom and individual responsibility. That’s the secret of our greatness; it always has been, and it always will be.

That’s why I hate to see identity politics come in, because then we’re evaluated on the color of our skin, or the group we’re supposed to belong to. If America loses that, then we’re in trouble.

Freedom is the most wonderful thing there is, but it’s also a burden, a responsibility, a struggle. When I was growing up, it was made clear to me that life was going to be exactly what I created of it. Today’s blacks don’t have that idea. Because of white guilt, we excuse failure in our black communities.

I look at black people and say, the thing you just don’t see is that you are absolutely free. There’s no excuse any more for not doing well in this society. People from other countries with language barriers and every other problem can come over here and thrive in a single generation—and you can’t because you don’t yet know how to be responsible in freedom.

No one wants to say the problem with black America is a lack of responsibility for ourselves. If you say that and you’re white, you’re going to be called a racist. If you say that and you’re black, you’re going to be called an Uncle Tom. But that’s the truth.

STEELE: Whites don’t understand this because they have always lived in freedom. They’ve got the ideas and values for it. Blacks, on the other hand, don’t know what to do with freedom. When I talk to black groups about the early years of a child’s life—what they should do when their children are born, how they should talk to their children, how they should point to colors and teach them numbers—I get blank looks. They don’t do any of the things a mother and father should do.

That’s why at the age of two there is already a divergence in I.Q. between black kids and white kids. It’s no mystery. Go to a white neighborhood and you see all these mothers with their babies in strollers with mobiles over their heads—because they want to stimulate the child’s brain. These are people who understand freedom!

STEELE: Sure, they may have taken it too far. But they’re serious about their kids becoming competitive in an extremely competitive world. And that’s why their kids succeed.

TAE: When you look at Bill Cosby being called an Uncle Tom for preaching the importance of education and telling blacks to get out of the ghetto, what do you think?

STEELE: It’s amazing. In today’s black community, a leader is only a real black if he’s angry at white America. But if I’m an angry black man who’s independent—and thinks we have to help ourselves in order to become self-sufficient—then I’m an Uncle Tom.

Bill Cosby exemplifies this better than anyone else. Here’s a guy who has given millions in donations to black colleges, so he’s got a right to speak. But by being critical and judgmental of black America, and demanding an end to excuses, he’s a threat to the black leadership. And he gets attacked.

Many black people know that Bill Cosby is absolutely right. But the black leadership will make sure he’s punished for it—just like the people who are labeled black conservatives.

TAE: Every day, we see people come out of ghettos, graduate from college, and make something impressive of their lives. So we know it can be done. But it’s so much harder if you’re the child of a single mother, living on mean streets.

STEELE: Well, when you have an illegitimacy rate of 70 percent—which is what black America has today—then you’re going to have serious social problems, and they’re going to last for generations.

But what can white America do about that? If black parents don’t take the time to educate their child, get their child ready for school, introduce him to cultural life, and develop his mind, then that child will never catch up. At that point, there’s very little that schools can do to make up for the deficit that’s already there.

Simply put, the illegitimacy rate consigns blacks to decades and decades of backwardness and inferiority. You need two parents to help you compete in today’s world.

TAE: Black leaders blamed George Bush for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, saying he allowed it to happen because he’s a racist. What is your reaction?

STEELE: I think New Orleans shamed black America. I was in Europe when it happened, and we saw all these images of “deep intractable poverty.” For generation after generation, New Orleans was full of human despair and backwardness. The flood just brought to the surface what had been there for so long, so we could see it on TV every night. And black America was truly shamed—just ask blacks and they’ll tell you. The whole world finally saw how hopeless and desperate the poorest blacks are. So then the question becomes, what do we do?

Instead of saying what we should have said—which is that this was an extraordinary wake-up call to black America, and we’ve got to make some profound changes in our way of life—we said, “George Bush is a racist.” Then we weren’t shamed any more. He did it. He’s the bad guy. He’s the problem. And, once again, we’re victims of white racism. We pulled out that old trustworthy excuse that has served us so well for 40 years. We blamed our problems on white people. And it works.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve got a black mayor who’s obviously incompetent. Bush is the fall guy because he’s white. And no American politician ever asks black America what they’re going to do. Whites just accept the excuses. That’s why Bush is just going to dump a lot of money into New Orleans.

TAE: If you’re a white person and you turn on a gangster rap song, you see guys preaching violence, talking about bustin’ a cap, slappin’ a bitch. Do they want you to be scared?

STEELE: I’m scared of them when I see them. But I often try to find some way to talk to them. I’ll give you an example. About a month ago, I saw three guys—maybe 14 or 15 years old—with the do-rags on, the jewelry, the huge pants, and everything else. So I went up to one of these kids and said, “Listen, can you tell me where Del Monte Street is?”

Now, this was in my community, so I knew exactly where to find Del Monte Street. But I’m testing. And one kid goes, “Yes sir, if you just go down there and turn”—he’s the sweetest kid in the world.

But is he going to get a job dressed like that? Am I going to hire him in my business to serve my customers? Of course not. When you dress like a gangster, you portray an image of aggression, hostility, and criminality. The truth is, most blacks who dress like gangsters are not criminals. But black culture has allowed these images to prevail.

STEELE: I’m old enough to remember segregation. Where I grew up, whites had no shame about being racist. They used to come up to me and explain that racism and segregation were God’s will. And they were perfectly comfortable with it.

Today, there’s no white person that could do that. Among whites, things have changed. No one wants white supremacists around. Sure, there are some, but America’s transformation is just amazing. It’s just amazing.

Now it’s time for blacks to make a similar transformation, to grow up, and take responsibility for their own future. If they don’t do it, they’re not going to have prospects that amount to very much. If they do do it, they’ll be able to succeed. We’ve come to a place in our history where the real onus for change is on black Americans.

Great, great interview. I think he is spot on in his analysis.

And I do not say that because his central theme happens to be my personal belief too and my username. I say it because he is right.

His central theme is ff you take responsibility for your own life you can change things. When you depend on government to do it for you government does what it does best....mess things up.

Good read.

I have a kind, legitimate question for FReepers to consider.

Shelby's parents were 'black' male and 'white' female. He apparently considers himself 'black.'

Shelby has a fine marriage with a white woman. As a couple, they have children.

Question: what race are their children?

I ask this question in reaction to a long-discarded Louisiana law used to actively discriminate against "colored". If one's lineage was demonstrably 1/24th [IIRC] "colored" then one was still "colored."

There are today many mixed race marriages with mixed raced children who will grow up and marry other mixed race individuals. My hope is that we can indeed leave definitive skin-colour delineations behind.

It is truly amazing how simple the truth is - when you get to hear it. The one addition I would make, is that correcting these problems will take a generation of hard work - but only a generation. We have had two since the great civil rights victories of the 70s. It will take time.

His children are white, just as Tiger Woods is Asian. Liberals still follow the "one drop law" so anybody with one drop of Negro blood is still black for their purposes, thats why Tiger, who is 1/8th to 1/4 black is considered our greatest "black" golf star, when he is actually 50% Asian. Shelby Steele could also choose to call himself a mixed ,white man.

I read an interesting study back in the early 90's that compared test scores in racially mixed children. Children with white mothers and black fathers had very similar scores to white children. Children with black mothers and white fathers had scores very similar to black children.

This shows a correlation to a cultural difference in raising children for success.

Most people know that the first five years of a child's life plays a tremendous role in the success of that child. Bill Cosby and Mr. Steele are speaking out and trying to make others understand. Sadly, many don't.

This Steele piece is positively superb. I took much from it, and I think everyone who reads it will gain some great perspective.

President Bush hints at it, but he doesn’t say “Look, I’m talking to you black people. If you want to make it, if you want to stop being behind everybody, you’ve got to become serious about education, without making excuses about bad school districts and how you don’t get the funding.”

Reality rears it's ugly head...

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