Coincidentally, this morning before I got up I was reading Shelby Steele's White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era and this morning the chapter was on how the '60s black power movement set the stage for infantilization and self-infantilization of black people: That they came to align with one of the first tenets of white supremacy: Skin colour is destiny, the first wave of civil rights had finally overcome. Dick Gregory and George Wallace: For once, in agreement with one another. He further notes President Johnson's Great Society launch speech at Howard University in which he 'meticulously spelled out white America's repsonsibility for black uplift," without "a single reference to black responsibility," and notes that no President since then has called blacks to account for their own responsibility.
A point which he'd made in his previous book. 'The Content of Our Character,' in which he argued over and over that whites can't do everything for blacks, that they need to take responsibility to develop themselves and fix the values problems and false beliefs within themselves holding themselves back. Here, about 15 years later, he traces how the bi-racial effort to infantilize blacks came to be.
So far, Shelby Steele's older books are as relevant today as they were when they were written. I highly recommend them, and thank John McWhorter for turning me onto him.
Coincidentally, this morning before I got up I was reading Shelby Steele's White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era and this morning the chapter was on how the '60s black power movement set the stage for infantilization and self-infantilization of black people: That they came to align with one of the first tenets of white supremacy: Skin colour is destiny, the first wave of civil rights had finally overcome. Dick Gregory and George Wallace: For once, in agreement with one another. He further notes President Johnson's Great Society launch speech at Howard University in which he 'meticulously spelled out white America's repsonsibility for black uplift," without "a single reference to black responsibility," and notes that no President since then has called blacks to account for their own responsibility.
A point which he'd made in his previous book. 'The Content of Our Character,' in which he argued over and over that whites can't do everything for blacks, that they need to take responsibility to develop themselves and fix the values problems and false beliefs within themselves holding themselves back. Here, about 15 years later, he traces how the bi-racial effort to infantilize blacks came to be.
So far, Shelby Steele's older books are as relevant today as they were when they were written. I highly recommend them, and thank John McWhorter for turning me onto him.