Shelby Steele Quotes
Rap makes the conservative argument about what happens when family life is eroded either by welfare and drugs, or by the stresses and indulgences of middle-class life.
Steele, Shelby. A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. HarperCollins, 1998.
The authors were physicians of the city health department. The violence to which the report referred were the Civil War Draft Riots. These were so bad that the Federal Troops returning from the Battle of Gettysburg were ordered to restore order. This was one of the first official notices of the relationships between poverty, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions and crime.
Note that under the rubric of protecting children, this organization was advocating the forced sterilization of people who their primitive and unreliable instruments and biases determined were “feeble minded”. Although many states actually did this for a few decades with the conservative Supreme Court approval at the time, and the gross immorality, the method of forced sterilization is genetically flawed and did not even work to achieve their own objectives. Also not their “image” of the “feeble minded” that appeared on the cover of this report. Virginia did not repeal their law mandating forced sterilization until 1974.
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.
