Inside Racism

...Afraid of failure, afraid somewhere inside that the racists might be right, many blacks, says Steele, pass up real opportunity-be it graduating from college or opening a neighborhood store...

...If she put my change on the counter rather than in my hand, I’d have all the evidence I needed to close the case against her and the New South to boot...

...He thanks his wife, who is white and a clinical psychologist, for helping him sort through his past...

...I’m not into it like the white boys...

...blind antipoverty programs...

...Even after the woman behind the counter hands him his change with the same pained, corporate cheerfulness she extends towards whites, he has to keep saying to himself “It doesn’t really matter what Southern accents in southern airports make me remember...

...They have never experienced racial discrimination, have never been stopped by their race on any path they have chosen to follow...

...News & World Report and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The typical political scientist or economist might dismiss his memoir-essays as mushy, but they aren’t...

...Star search So what’s the alternative to affirmative action...

...seems indistinguishable from that of their white colleagues, and it neither demoralizes other blacks nor confirms the racist stereotypes of whites...

...Recently, Steele produced a solid documentary on the Bensonhurst murder for Public Broadcasting...

...Still, their society now tells them that if they will only designate themselves as black on their college applications, they will likely do better in the college lottery than if they conceal this fact...

...Instead of rehashing policy debates over topics such as welfare dependency, Steele scrutinizes the inner lives of blacks and whites...

...The doubt takes many forms, not just in Henry’s aversion to opportunity but in “hyperbolic” claims of black pride...

...Clearly, the man can report from the streets as well as the heart...

...Instead, thanks to the pressure not just to make “minority hires” but to make hires that can shine during crucial ratings periods, their race is a win-win proposition...

...Emotions like anger and guilt interest him far more than AFDC or the Bakke decision...

...Two years ago, Paul Glastris looked at his own reaction to his limb-damaging injuries to show where the disability rights movement went wrong [“The Case for Denial,” December 19881...

...Inside Racism Shelby Steele argues that for blacks, self-doubt is a bigger enemy than white hatred by Matthew Cooper Two years ago Shelby Steele was an obscure english professor...

...Essays like these, far from hardening the heart towards blacks or whites, evoke enormous empathy...

...In its invocation of the glories of a remote African past and its wistful suggestion of homeland, this name denies the doubt that black Americans have about their contemporary situation in America...

...Indeed, Steele is just the person to get at one of the least explored areas of black life: the fact that so many blacks work for government...

...Because government promoted something resembling equal opportunity at a time when private employers and unions discriminated with abandon, blacks naturally found greater employment opportunities in the public sector...

...While Steele’s politics are vastly different, The Content of Our Character is more reminiscent of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice than a monograph from the American Enterprise Institute...

...I’m my own first target,” he told The New York Times...

...What really distinguishes him from these other black policy thinkers is that he’s getting at issues that transcend policy altogether...

...The quality that earns us preferential treatment is an implied inferiority...

...One need only recall the hype surrounding Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth or George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty...

...Their presence, as Steele says of “The Cosby Show,” “like a priest, absolves [their] white viewers, forgives and forgets the sins of the past...

...When I worked for the U.S...

...Possibly we are ready for a new name, but I think ‘black’ has been our most powerful name yet because it so frankly called out our shame and doubt and helped others to accept ourselves...

...Civil Rights Commission and saw firsthand the absurd creation of special voting districts that isolated blacks into rotten boroughs and lily-white districts, I was sympathetic to the “colorblind” position...

...His politics are difficult to discern, but, like William Julius Wilson, he supports colorMatthew Cooper is the Atlanta bureau chief of US...

...Today, he teaches at California’s San Jose State...

...But what Shelby Steele and the rest of us need to do is to sort out those rare, sensible forms of racial preference from all-too-common monstrosities like Penn State’s cash-for-C’s program...

...Man, I just want to hold on, get a job that doesn’t work me too hard, and do a lot of fishing,” he told Steele...

...Steele has brought this kind of reflection to bear on his own 44 years...

...Other writers, as diverse as Betty Friedan and George Orwell, have looked to themselves for answers...

...Doubt is a demon: “The internal racist is not restricted by law, morality, or social decorum...

...Their performance in cities such as Atlanta, New York, and Washington D.C...

...More important, advocates of the “color-blind” vision run up against what might be called the TV anchor question...

...For the most part he’s said more about race-and in less space-than anyone in recent memory...

...Because he is critical of affirmative action, Steele has been lumped together with black conservatives, such as economists Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury...

...Despite being bright and savvy, Henry had limited aspirations...

...Affirmative action programs that lower standards help soothe white guilt, he contends, but they actually hurt blacks...

...I don’t think so...

...For Steele, the passage of civil rights laws inflamed rather than alleviated that doubt, “because freedom offered blacks a brutal proposition: If you’re not inferior, prove it...

...In “The Memory of Enemies,” Steele recounts how, traveling through a southem airport, he became possessed by the Dixie drawl of a white cashier...

...He wrote a lengthy piece for the Times magazine, the Times ran a lengthy profile of him, and he was featured prominently in the Sunday “Week in Review”all within a month...

...Since then my views have changed...

...In part, it’s simple resignation...

...However this inferiority is explained-and it is easily enough explained by the myriad of deprivations that grew out of our oppression-it is still inferiority...

...Among numerous examples, he cites an outrageous program at Penn State where black students were paid cash rewards for a C average: “What better way to drive home the nail of infeOf course, Steele is not the first black to question the merits of affirmative action, but few writers have addressed the subject with such clarity...

...Having grown up in a black working-class suburb of Chicago, he entered the white world, attending college in Iowa and graduate school in Utah...

...The cashier’s southern accent carried with it echoes of the segregationist past...

...Steele has many ideas about what hinders racial progress, but at the core of his thinking is this provocative notion: Racism persists, but he and his fellow blacks are shackled more by self-doubt than by anything else...

...What’s important is that I can travel...

...Of the move to adopt the moniker “AfricanAmerican,” Steele writes: “This self-conscious reaching for pride through nomenclature suggests nothing so much as a despair over the possibility of gaining the less conspicuous pride that follows real advancement...

...This is a good deal for all concerned...

...He’s done something in his essays, now assembled in this slender volume,* that seemed almost impossible: He’s found new things to say about America’s race problems...

...He knows that feelings like this won’t fade easily-not even for him, a prosperous professor with a white wife...

...There’s an almost irresistible temptation to be skeptical about a thinker who becomes this hot this quickly...

...In virtually every large city, television stations have made it a point to put both black and white anchors at the head of their local newscasts...

...This is a Faustian bargain...

...Steele’s book is a triumph, but I hope in his next go-round he trains his discerning eye on other hindrances to racial progress...

...But like a lot of people, I’m a tower of Jell-0 on this issue, and I have trouble with Steele’s blanket condemnation of affirmative action...

...Henry wasn’t uninterested in ambition, Steele recalls, he was afraid of it...

...Is such race consciousness improper...

...Indeed, the success of blacks as measured by the tough standards of the military, arguably the closest thing America has to a color-blind arena, suggests that without any breaks blacks can make the grade in any forum at any time...

...He speculates about his children and what will face them when they apply to college...

...But the attention lavished on Steele is different, because it is deserved...

...Occasionally, Steele’s lack of interest in the nitty-gritty of policy-which programs work and which don’t-prevents his vision from encompassing even more of the problems that confound race relations today...

...If she was anything less than gracious to me as the lone black in line, I knew my defenses would come alive...

...He writes that blacks, himself included, have on some level absorbed the hateful and wrong message instilled over 350 years that they are inferior...

...Unlike black college entrants, who as a group drop out at a rate five times that of whites, black anchors are ready for the work...

...This spring he won The New York Times triple crown...

...Steele is kind enough to recognize that there is “a little of Henry in most people,” but courageous enough to argue that “blacks as a group have hesitated on the brink of new opportunities that we made enormous sacrifices to win for ourselves...

...Whites often stopped to look at us in amazement and we let our strength in this area soothe the anxiety that other areas of school brought us...

...We’ve all read ponderous op-ed pieces about black teenagers lacking self-esteem...

...Only two days ago, I was called ‘nigger’ from a passing car,” he said recently...

...Drawing his title from Martin Luther King’s plea that blacks be judged by “the content of our character,” Steele understands, as King did, that racial progress will come as much from hearts and minds as from laws or policies...

...But Steele’s tone is not condemning...

...Surely the collapse of the manufacturing economy is as significant as the collapse of self-esteem...

...Martin’s, $15.95...

...Onward and inward Of course, the idea of looking inward to understand the world is hardly new, and it’s an approach that has long been advocated by this magazine...

...His essays on race have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Harper’s...

...What caused this “exaggerated and wasteful defensiveness,” writes Steele, was the memory of enemies...

...The badge of being an affirmative action recruit will haunt them...

...Steele could work his magic on a topic like this...

...On the level of politics, the memory of enemies leads to even staid civil rights leaders like the NAACP’s Benjamin Hooks finding “racism” in the indictment of Marion Barry...

...He’s done “Nightline...

...The affirmative action bureaucracy in both the public and private sectors is here to stay, despite the pleas of a Shelby Steele or even the much-feared Supreme Court rulings, which, in the end, merely raised the evidentiary standards required to implement race-conscious plans, barely curtailing their proliferation...

...Today, that leaves blacks disproportionately vulnerable to government layoffs and, perhaps, to a less-than-entrepreneurial ethic that befalls so many civil servants, black or white...

...Steele takes this buzzword and makes it real...

...It benefits the station, which needs to grab black-audience share...

...Steele and liberals like William Julius Wilson and Nicholas Lemann are right to insist that we’re better off avoiding the tangle of racial preferences and, instead, helping blacks and whites on the basis of individual need...

...The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America...

...Give my children fairness, give disadvantaged children a better shot at development-better elementary and secondary schools, job training, safer neighborhoods, better financial assistance, and so on...

...Dancing was a manifestation of soul and cool and, as such, it was, among many other things, an advertisement for the race, a visible superiority...

...In his own high school, “one of the worst sins a black student could be guilty of was not dancing well...

...Steele writes with equal sympathy about his black graduate school friend whom he calls “Henry...

...Again, I think Steele is basically right about affirmative action, which, all too often, abandons the hard work of developing people’s talents and instead simply relies on a quick racial fix...

...But that’s a quibble...

...But Steele doesn’t let whites off the hook...

...Far more invidious than epithets, he feels, is the liberal condescension towards blacks...

...That is a mistake...

...One of the worst aspects of oppression,” he writes, “is that it never ends when the oppressor begins to repent...

...Steele persuasively argues that this expect-the-worst reaction runs deep in blacks, that it can be triggered by everything from Caucasian-colored Band-Aids to white skin itself, and that it has dire consequences...

...In his autobiography, Tilting at Windmills, Charles Peters recounts how his struggles with his own snobbery at Columbia University in the 1950s led him to see how snobbery could be such a divisive force in American life...

...Now he’s everywhere...

...The results of his journey are essays with provocative titles like “Being Black and Feeling Blue” or “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent...

...riority...

...Henry went on to a life of mid-level administrative and teaching jobs, mainly in black studies programs...