Yes, I'm a great admirer of Shelby Steele. I frequently encourage people to listen to his speech or read his book on How WHITE GUILT is Destroying the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement. Any conversation about the current leftist takeover of our institutions must include a discussion about the interplay between race baiters and white g…
Yes, I'm a great admirer of Shelby Steele. I frequently encourage people to listen to his speech or read his book on How WHITE GUILT is Destroying the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement. Any conversation about the current leftist takeover of our institutions must include a discussion about the interplay between race baiters and white guilt. Steele says that since the 60's, black leaders have been devoted almost exclusively to the manipulation of white guilt instead of focusing on the family and education as the road to success. "When all you do is manipulate white guilt, you are stuck. Nothing is available to you but anger and protests and you have to make sure that the white man knows you're angry, and that he's intimidated and scared of you; because if he feels you're not angry he won't give you anything. He won't feel the need to dissociate; and the manipulation of this white guilt has hurt blacks by making them dependent." Steele opines that black culture (and the media et al) honors and elevates angry, protesting, race baiting militant blacks (like Al Sharpton) while denigrating blacks who advocate self sufficiency (Steele), by calling them sellouts and Uncle Toms. Says Steele: "We've got it all backwards because when you rely on the fact that another group of people (whites) has lost its moral authority and say that's my chance and opportunity, now all I have to do is keep working them, then you don't overcome, you begin to decline. And so now because we live in a society that acts guilty towards us all the time, and doesn't feel that it has the moral authority to ever ask anything OF US, we get policies that injure more profoundly than our oppression did." Thank you Beeswax for the documentary recommendation.
Steele's perspective, which you briefly quote here, is fully fleshed out in the documentary. It's uncanny, really, what a textbook case the Michael Brown incident is. Using a historical analysis, Steele demonstrates the long-term devastating effects of white guilt on the black community of Ferguson, Missouri. We see a poor but thriving post-Civil War community of independent, hard-working black people with intact families and equity in their own homes, lose literally everything they had achieved through the imposition of white liberal social policies designed to "help" them (i.e., assuage white guilt). It's brutal to watch, but the historical record is irrefutable.
I'm an old white person who was raised by my left-wing parents to oppose racism, a perspective I've retained all my life. What has changed is that I now see left-wing principles as utopian, tribal, and designed to wreak mayhem. I had to get over my own tribal aversion to the term "conservative," which at the end of the day is just a word, and focus on the pragmatism and humanism of independent black thought coming from outside the woke bubble. Steele is an inspiring example; there are many others.
You express my sentiments perfectly and perhaps better than I'm capable of. My parents were Kennedy Democrats and I saw my father changing a bit when he voted for Reagan. Of course my four liberal sisters (now extreme and angry leftists) began to paint him into the same "you're a racist" box that I see happening today and that happened to me when I dared to challenge the cult playbook. I was a special education teacher for 13 years and then a Chicago Public Defender for the next 30 years and worked feverishly to help all of my diverse student and client populations. I voted Democrat 90% of the time, voted for Obama twice, but began to speak out against him and the Party when they began to manufacture narratives, practice cancel culture tactics, and support attacks on free speech. Thereafter, neither my voting record nor my life's work would prevent my own blood from slandering me as (surprise surprise) a "racist," when I dared to stray from the Party playbook. Yes, cancel culture had come for me in the cruelest way but rather than silence me as intended, this event only served to further motivate me to continue speaking out against these hateful, destructive and divisive forces. God Bless All Americans.
James, I'm terribly sorry that your family members were infected by Trump Derangement Syndrome, a virus more virulent than covid. Given your numerous bona fides, your literal life's work, how absurd that you should be mischaracterized as a racist. The loss of critical thinking skills is a classic symptom of TDS. It has infected my family too, and it makes me despair. But so far, somehow, I've managed to evade their impulse to cancel me outright. They have all the symptoms: monocultural media ingestion, which makes people fat while depriving them of nutrition; robotic shrieking of "dangerous misinformation!" and "white supremacy!"; and a vociferous insistence on demonizing the entire MAGA-hat wearing half of the population of the United States.
Thankfully, during the campaign to cancel Joe Rogan (who, much to my family's shock and horror, I was actually familiar with), I was able to orchestrate a detente around the principle of free speech, by reminding them that forty years ago they supported the First Amendment when we Jews realized that we had to let the nazis march in Skokie, Illinois even though we don't like nazis. Whew. That was close.
James, I don't mean to be snide. This is how I release some of my frustration and sadness. I too voted for Obama twice and had never voted for a Republican until this last election. I left the Left gradually after Trump's election, when the liberal media that I once trusted, specifically the NY Times and NPR, decided to eschew free speech in favor of partisan rhetoric, including but not limited to the denial of the human sexual binary.
I applaud you for sticking to your principles. Granted, it's hard not to, once your eyes are opened. But isolation from the people you love most, because they're too ideologically captured to think clearly, is tragic and frustrating as hell. Hateful, destructive and divisive forces indeed.
I'm not a religious person, but I resonate with the underlying sentiment:
Yes, I'm a great admirer of Shelby Steele. I frequently encourage people to listen to his speech or read his book on How WHITE GUILT is Destroying the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement. Any conversation about the current leftist takeover of our institutions must include a discussion about the interplay between race baiters and white guilt. Steele says that since the 60's, black leaders have been devoted almost exclusively to the manipulation of white guilt instead of focusing on the family and education as the road to success. "When all you do is manipulate white guilt, you are stuck. Nothing is available to you but anger and protests and you have to make sure that the white man knows you're angry, and that he's intimidated and scared of you; because if he feels you're not angry he won't give you anything. He won't feel the need to dissociate; and the manipulation of this white guilt has hurt blacks by making them dependent." Steele opines that black culture (and the media et al) honors and elevates angry, protesting, race baiting militant blacks (like Al Sharpton) while denigrating blacks who advocate self sufficiency (Steele), by calling them sellouts and Uncle Toms. Says Steele: "We've got it all backwards because when you rely on the fact that another group of people (whites) has lost its moral authority and say that's my chance and opportunity, now all I have to do is keep working them, then you don't overcome, you begin to decline. And so now because we live in a society that acts guilty towards us all the time, and doesn't feel that it has the moral authority to ever ask anything OF US, we get policies that injure more profoundly than our oppression did." Thank you Beeswax for the documentary recommendation.
Steele's perspective, which you briefly quote here, is fully fleshed out in the documentary. It's uncanny, really, what a textbook case the Michael Brown incident is. Using a historical analysis, Steele demonstrates the long-term devastating effects of white guilt on the black community of Ferguson, Missouri. We see a poor but thriving post-Civil War community of independent, hard-working black people with intact families and equity in their own homes, lose literally everything they had achieved through the imposition of white liberal social policies designed to "help" them (i.e., assuage white guilt). It's brutal to watch, but the historical record is irrefutable.
I'm an old white person who was raised by my left-wing parents to oppose racism, a perspective I've retained all my life. What has changed is that I now see left-wing principles as utopian, tribal, and designed to wreak mayhem. I had to get over my own tribal aversion to the term "conservative," which at the end of the day is just a word, and focus on the pragmatism and humanism of independent black thought coming from outside the woke bubble. Steele is an inspiring example; there are many others.
You express my sentiments perfectly and perhaps better than I'm capable of. My parents were Kennedy Democrats and I saw my father changing a bit when he voted for Reagan. Of course my four liberal sisters (now extreme and angry leftists) began to paint him into the same "you're a racist" box that I see happening today and that happened to me when I dared to challenge the cult playbook. I was a special education teacher for 13 years and then a Chicago Public Defender for the next 30 years and worked feverishly to help all of my diverse student and client populations. I voted Democrat 90% of the time, voted for Obama twice, but began to speak out against him and the Party when they began to manufacture narratives, practice cancel culture tactics, and support attacks on free speech. Thereafter, neither my voting record nor my life's work would prevent my own blood from slandering me as (surprise surprise) a "racist," when I dared to stray from the Party playbook. Yes, cancel culture had come for me in the cruelest way but rather than silence me as intended, this event only served to further motivate me to continue speaking out against these hateful, destructive and divisive forces. God Bless All Americans.
James, I'm terribly sorry that your family members were infected by Trump Derangement Syndrome, a virus more virulent than covid. Given your numerous bona fides, your literal life's work, how absurd that you should be mischaracterized as a racist. The loss of critical thinking skills is a classic symptom of TDS. It has infected my family too, and it makes me despair. But so far, somehow, I've managed to evade their impulse to cancel me outright. They have all the symptoms: monocultural media ingestion, which makes people fat while depriving them of nutrition; robotic shrieking of "dangerous misinformation!" and "white supremacy!"; and a vociferous insistence on demonizing the entire MAGA-hat wearing half of the population of the United States.
Thankfully, during the campaign to cancel Joe Rogan (who, much to my family's shock and horror, I was actually familiar with), I was able to orchestrate a detente around the principle of free speech, by reminding them that forty years ago they supported the First Amendment when we Jews realized that we had to let the nazis march in Skokie, Illinois even though we don't like nazis. Whew. That was close.
James, I don't mean to be snide. This is how I release some of my frustration and sadness. I too voted for Obama twice and had never voted for a Republican until this last election. I left the Left gradually after Trump's election, when the liberal media that I once trusted, specifically the NY Times and NPR, decided to eschew free speech in favor of partisan rhetoric, including but not limited to the denial of the human sexual binary.
I applaud you for sticking to your principles. Granted, it's hard not to, once your eyes are opened. But isolation from the people you love most, because they're too ideologically captured to think clearly, is tragic and frustrating as hell. Hateful, destructive and divisive forces indeed.
I'm not a religious person, but I resonate with the underlying sentiment:
God Bless All Americans.