Most racial issues would disappear.
The great Shelby Steele, in an illuminating interview.
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.
Do read it all.
Comments