Why are you taking Shelby Steele seriously?
Shelby Steele’s White Guilt and the Western Past has garnered quite a reaction. Conservatives hail the justification for the reassumption of the White Man’s Burden…nevermind that all of Europe and most of the USofA has had quite enough of it. Progressives are angry…frankly, because they overlooked the key fallacy that let him align white guilt (which, sadly, all of you including Conservatives, are reacting to) with White Supremacy.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes–here racism and imperialism–lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.
It’s not guilt if you don’t feel guilty.
I went into this at a bit more length at Prometheus 6. I don’t intend to duplicate it all, though I will tweak the nose of Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom for writing this precious bit of nonsense.
As I’ve mentioned here on numerous occasions, the first fight we must win is internally and domestically. And it is a fight for the soul of classical liberalism, which is being undercut (in my estimation) by nearly 40 years of a concerted effort by those whose goal is power and control to relativize meaning and deconstruct, through incoherent linguistic assertions that have unfortunately been widely adopted out of self-satisfied feel-goodism (specifically, an ostensible deference to the Other that allows us to convince ourselves we are “tolerant” and “diverse,” when in fact we have created the conditions to turn those ideas into something approximating their exact opposites).
Talk about “incoherent linguistic assertions.” Really funny, since he’s basing it on a false linguistic assertion Shelby Steele created on the fly.
What does Goldberg do for a living, anyway? He’s not an historian…
Taking back the grounds for meaning—and being willing to fight for those grounds against those who try to shame us out of reasserting them—is the first step toward the recovery of our belief in our strong and generous national character. To that end, we should draw a lesson from the charges of Bill Bennett’s “racism”—cast by those who don’t believe Bennett intended to say anything racist, but who insist, rather, that his words themselves were racist (an idea that grants that public perception is the locus of meaning, and that the utterer can be held accountable for the public perception). Such a dismissal of the importance of intent has led, predictably, to a rhetorical condition wherein those who protest the loudest (and can play to our emotions) will have effectively seized control of “history” as it is constructed and disseminated through language.
…or he’d know the intent test he misses so much was banned from law by Dixicrats and their ilk. He’d know the control of the language lies with the mainstream, not minorities. He’s know he’s talking out of his hat. But he’s not an historian…
Anyway, forget Shelby Steele. This nonsense will have the short life span that 95 out of 100 editorials have.
May 2nd, 2006 at 8:16 pm
I am looking forward to the first fight won internally. And it will be a victory for the soul of classical liberalism, which I should mention I have mentioned many times before () Italics. Emphasis mine . Or something.
May 2nd, 2006 at 9:07 pm
Make that “Jeff Goldstein talks out of his asshat.”
May 3rd, 2006 at 1:50 am
To be fair, he admitted his understanding is open to dispute when he visted P6 a moment ago.
And to be fair to me, this is what I said:
Aren’t you guilty of that in your reading of Steele’s article?
What is his meaning? What is his intent? You would have called it "liberal guilt" rather than "white guilt"…why? And why did he call it "white guilt"?
I have the same issue with his formulation that I have with the "acting white" construct. It was created to inflame. And if you treat it as though it wasn’t you are seperating meaning and intent. You’re not fighting fire with fire, you’re fighting it with gasoline.
Dude, you’re talking to a Black guy. This mechanism is VERY familiar…and you’re going for it again. Or spreading it…"from wherever it stems" is an evasion when discussing an article which purports to describe where it came from.
Tell me where it came from, Jeff…then tell me you still agree with what Steele wrote.
Truth to tell, though, I LOVE seeing the mechanism work on white folks, and seeing a Black guy flex it on you rather than vice versa. More proof (which, absurdly, we must provide far too often in Dobbsian discussions) that we’re all the same machine.
You cannot identify white guilt with white supremacy without some serious psychic gymnastics. The cheery impact of Steele’s entire article, White Guilt and the Western Past, evaporates if you don’t accept that faulty link.
May 3rd, 2006 at 1:33 pm
I forgot to mention in my previous comment that I quit listening to Shelby Steele after I read The Content of Our Character sixteen years ago. Imagine an
Oreo baked by Julia Child. That’s Shelby.
May 7th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Yes, yes, Let’s forget anything that doesn’t agree to our open-minded, “I know better” prima-donna intellect.
By the way, can anyone tell me why Pol Pot - a far left winger responsible for the death of about 3 million of his own people - was allowed to die in peace, while Pinochet - a far right winger responsible for the death of about 3 thousand of his own people -is being hounded and prosecuted to the grave??? They both “resurfaced” at the same time?
Oh silly me, I forgot…Pol Pot is a leftist who killed anyone with ANY contact with the decadent West - even wearing eyeglasses was a justifiable reason to “purge” you. Afterall, we must cleanse the people of all the bad influneces before a perfect world can be built.
And Pinochet? Well, after a coup to depose an elected marxist government that was driving the country into abysmal poverty, he killed Leftists he thought a threat. A totally unforgivable sin, and total justification for a Leftist Spanish judge to misuse international law to arrest him while he was in England. Never mind the fact that he willingly gave up power years earlier, after being granted immunity by Chile’s Senate.
It all makes PERFECT sense, doesn’t it???
I don’t defend Pinochet, I condemn the liberal mindset that allows the Pol Pots of the world to escape…and defends the Lenin’s and Stalin’s with words like “Oh, what he did was bad, but he only did what was necessary at the time. It wasn’t Socialism / Communism that failed, it just wasn’t implemented correctly.” Blood and lies to defend an teminally faulty theory.
Sorry, I got of track…I just get sick and tired of the self-righteous - and terminally stupid - blindness of the liberal mindset. Their fatal limitation is: They are blind to their limitations.
Every solution presents new problems. There is no Utopia.