Posted by
Rogue Historian on Friday, February 23, 2007 3:11:07 PM
Shelby Steele has a new book out. It is titled, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Steele's previous efforts, The Content of Our Character and A Dream Deferred offered genuine insight into America's most difficult issue. In a sense, both works suffered under a tedious burden: the author, a non-expert in public policy, had to blend personal insight into facts without sacrificing credibility. That he mostly succeeded illuminates not only his intelligence and honesty, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the extent to which the issue of race has been obscured by academic and phenotypic specialisms.
My first impression of The Content of Our Character was incredulity. Not since Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman, had the work of a generalist (or at least one directed at a subject matter outside of the author's primary specialty) had greater impact. Steele's latest contribution takes a decidedly different path. Steele is, by profession, an expert on literature. White Guilt departs from his previous efforts in attempting to stand more upon literary than expository merit. This exposes strengths and weaknesses in Steele's world view. One unfamiliar with Steele's other work might suppose these weaknesses to be newly exposed. The truth is that the most glaring problems though more evident in this book were evident earlier. The primary example of which is Steele's view of the role of Constitutional Law and the Supreme Court in both creating and perpetuating America's racial malaise. But the exposure of this weakness is a small price to pay for Steele's deep and shockingly clear insights into the psychological origins of the same.