Shelby Steele Quotes
Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and over-the-top vulgarity. But it is important to remember that this music is a fairly accurate message from a part of society where human connections are fractured and impossible, so fraught with disappointments and pain that only an assault on human feeling itself can assuage.
Steele, Shelby. White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. HarperCollins, 2006.
There are two ethnic groups in Fiji. The indigenous Fijians and immigrants from India and their descendants. The Indians originally came to trade and represent a globalized, mercantile culture whereas the indigenous tribes did not have the tradition of business. Over time, the minority Indians were economically more successful than the majority, which tended to resent the Indians. As the Indians were the political minority with no strong tradition of protection of minority rights, they became victims of discriminatory behavior in a nation where the traditional political structure of tribal chiefs and tribes dominated politics. Religion also separated the Hindu Indians from the Christian tribals. In the early 21st century, an Indian was elected prime minister, but this led to a revolt and coup by some traditional tribals. Finally the coup was put down but the society had been split apart and there was continuous argument over rights and whether the coups plotters should be punished.
This quotation illustrates the degree or irrationality that Southerners practiced in considering racial matters. Lee was stating what virtually all Southern “Gentlemen” believed. Here was a class of people who had hardly worked at day in their lives opining on the work attitudes of the class of people who did most of all the work in the South. The Southern Whites not only expected the Negro slave to do the work, but to be enthusiastic about working. And it never even occurred to Lee and most of the other whites that Negro lack of “disposition” to work was the result of the fact that they were forced to work with the benefits going to someone else. It was a character flaw in Blacks, if they were not enthusiastic and disposed to work when forced to. One of the few ways a slave could register his/her protest was to beat the system now and then and do as little work as possible. Free Blacks in the North were among the hardest and most enthusiastic working people in America—certainly moreso than the Southern white gentlemen.
He was one of the Black intellectuals who criticized the white’s favorite Negro Leader, Booker T. Washington who concentrated his efforts on Black education and self-improvement to make them more acceptable to whites. Trotter was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard University. He was an outspoken critic of President Woodrow Wilson’s policy the for the first time instituted official segregation of Federal Employment and his firing of all Blacks then in executive or white collar positions in the Federal Government. Wilson, for all his supposed modernity, was one of the most racist of all American Presidents.
Shelby Steele is a conservative author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action.
