White Guilt - by Shelby Steele
Review by Diane Carey: Despite growing up in an ethnic family of immigrant Assyrians, with a sprinkle of poor-white Arkansas on my dad’s side, I have been lumped all my life into the category of “white.” My mother’s culture was that of a dusky-skinned, dark-haired Middle-Easter people. My full-blood sister has olive skin, black eyes and black hair, but I favor my dad’s Irish/Welsh ivory skin and brown hair. Even though I grew up with a foreign language, foreign music and dancing, ultimately learned to play the Scottish Highland bagpipes and American Indian cedar flute and sing songs in native Hawaiian and Gaelic, I am not “diverse” in the politically correct sense. I have white skin, and am therefore devoid of “diversity.” According to this skin-deep template, 10 white people around a table--or 10,000 on a campus--will have zero diversity of experience, culture, opinion, or philosophy. All “whites” are the same. “Diversity” is not cultural variation; “diversity” is just skin color.
Of course, this is silly. I didn’t know at the time what it was called, but I felt “white guilt” imposed upon me in the mid-1960’s, and I have carried it until yesterday, when I finished reading Shelby Steele’s important new work on race relations, WHITE GUILT. The book is important secondarily because Shelby Steele is black and once embraced the destructive practice which this book decries, but primarily for its even-tempered clarity and blunt analysis of a touchy subject. Steele has identified the social load carried by American “whites” (as if we are a homogenous unit)—the tendency to apply the disclaimer, “I’m not a racist, but--” in front of every sentence that beseeches our black fellow-Americans to stop destroying themselves by economically burdening America’s taxpayers. Steele identifies white society as a psychologically harnessed enabler, feeding an obese person we claim to love until he can’t stand up at all and sleeps in his own urine.
All my life I’ve heard the hesitant pleas, silenced to private murmurs: “I’m not a racist, but stand on your own two feet and be responsible for your own life. I’m not a racist, but speak English correctly for your children’s sake, and so you can get a better job. I’m not a racist, but stop telling me I am one if I don’t give you whatever you want. I’m not a racist, but please take advantage of 12 years of free education, work hard, and get a job. I’m not a racist, but get married before you have babies, and don’t create babies before you can support them. I’m not a racist, but quit committing crimes like an animal eating itself.”
America in general, white or otherwise, has been in the grip of “white guilt” for decades, keeping us from saying to American blacks what we would consider kind, solid advice to anybody else, including our own children. Now—finally--Shelby Steele’s book has freed us from the caveat, “I’m not a racist, but.” We can morally make those statements without qualification, and know that the statements themselves are tough love for the black community, which has been destroyed by white society’s chin-tucked desperation to demonstrate that we’re not racists by coddling the black community down the yellow brick road to ruin.
See significant quotations from WHITE GUILT in our Quotable Quotes section. Please search for "White Guilt" or "Shelby Steele."
Diane Carey's List of MUST READs (in no particular order. Additions will be put at the top of the list):
The "I Have a Dream" Speech, in its entirety, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Affirmative Action Around the World, by Thomas Sowell
Uncle Sam's Plantation, by Star Parker
A Dream Deferred, by Shelby Steele
Anything ever written by Booker T. Washington
Anything ever written by Walter E. Williams
Anything ever written by Milton Friedman
Losing the Race, by John McWhorter
Winning the Race, by John McWhorter
Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity, by John Stossel
Ten Things You Can't Say In America, by Larry Elder
White Guilt, by Shelby Steele
Creating Equal, by Ward Connerly
Illiberal Education, by Dinesh D'Souza
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, by Kenneth Timmerman
The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, by Robert J. Samuelson
Race and Culture, by Thomas Sowell