Tag Archives: Shelby Steele

White Guilt. Shelby Steele.

 

Shelby Steele

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.Shelby Steele . HarperCollins, 2006.

March 24, 2009

The 2006 approval by voters of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative merely marks another step along the path of a much deeper cultural shift on the part of blacks and whites. The old formulas have not worked, are not working, and definitely never will work. In his bookWhite Guilt, Shelby Steele tells us why, explains the sorry spectacle of over forty years of misguided government intervention in the lives of black people and the social devastation and erosion that “redemptive liberals,” white and black, have wreaked upon a people, undermining their earlier comparable independence and social cohesion….

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

Incidentally, I participated in a panel discussion on MCRI at Wayne State University Law School, October 26, 2006. See Ending Racial Preferences: The Michigan Story. 2008. by Carol M. Allen and William B. Allen. I highly recommend their book on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative.

Frederick Glaysher

Editor, Robert Hayden’s Collected Prose. University of Michigan Press, 1984.
Alumnus ’80 & ’81

Why Voters Should Approve MCRI
www.fglaysher.com/MCRI/

 

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A Dream Deferred. Shelby Steele.

Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele

A Dream Deferred : The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. Shelby Steele.

Reawakening the Dream…. December 7, 2000

This morning, sometime around three or four AM, I woke up thinking about Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred. I read it a number of months ago and have been wanting to write a brief note about it. There are so few intelligent, reasonable, sane voices speaking about racial matters in America I feel it as a duty to try to acknowledge those who are so scorned by the forces of both white and black extremist liberalism. The thought that impelled me out of bed was that I owe it to my memory of the best friend I’ve ever had in my life, who happened to be black, long deceased and sorely missed. So I struggle for words, knowing I will never meet that high mark. Others may criticize Mr. Steele for emphasizing this and underplaying that, but I want to praise his thoughtful probing of the dynamics of affirmative action and how it assuages white guilt while keeping some black people from developing their highest potential. As a former college English instructor, I occasionally had minority students who were accustomed to being handed A’s and were shocked to receive C’s. Repeated experience convinced me that affirmative action was part of the problem. They lacked the self-discipline and responsibility that Steele extolls: “Very often those who educate poor blacks feel excused from the responsibilities of high expectations and academic rigor by the very conditions that make such expectations mandatory….”

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

Frederick Glaysher

 

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Filed under Race in America