A Dream Deferred by Shelby Steele
By Lise Funderburg
October 1998
Amazon.com
Shelby Steele's first book, The Content of Our Character, sparked outrage over
its indictment of liberal American policies and attitudes towards race. A Dream
Deferred expands Steele's critique, comparing government interventions (like
affirmative action) to the most damaging practices of slavery and segregation,
Soviet Communism, and Nazi Germany.
While Steele zealously praises civil rights victories, terming the movement that
effected them "the greatest nonviolent revolution in American history (one
of the greatest in all history)," he concludes that a simultaneous outcome--the
stigmatization of whiteness--has led to disaster. Shamed whites try to prove
their innocence through redemptive acts, according to Steele, and he has always
disdained the "moral self-preoccupation" of post-'60s white liberals,
which "made them dangerous to blacks--ready to give them over to an 'otherness'
in which nothing is expected of them."
Steele, a self-described black conservative, complains, "The great ingenuity
of interventions like affirmative action has not been that they give Americans
a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way
to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks." He contends
that victimization is the greatest hindrance for black Americans: while white
liberals see blacks as victims to assuage guilty consciences, blacks parlay their
status as victims into a currency that turns out to have no long-term buying
power. Steele's conclusion: the only way for blacks to stop buying into this
zero-sum game is to adopt a culture of excellence and achievement untrammeled
by set-asides and entitlements.