554. Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country
Rating: ☆☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Shelby Steele
Genre: Non Fiction, History, Race, Public Policy, Politics
208 pages, published February 24, 2015
Reading Format: Book
Summary
In Shame, Shelby Steele (a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the grandson of a slave) writes about the roots of the polarization that we are experiencing today in the United States. Amid the fighting and mistrust, we have squandered the promise of the 1960s when the nation came together to fight for equality and universal justice. Shelby Steele posits that this impasse can be traced back to the 60’s when we uncovered and dismantled our national hypocrisies of racism, sexism, and militarism which caused liberals to internalize the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern American from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs including Affirmative Action which have not only failed but caused harm to the minorities they were designed to help. Steele argues that only by reviving our founding principles of individual freedom and merit-based competition can the troubling legacy of American history be redeemed, and only through freedom can we ever hope to reach equality.
Quotes
“Poetic truth—this assertion of a broad characteristic “truth” that invalidates actual truth—is contemporary liberalism’s greatest source of power. It is also liberalism’s most fundamental corruption.”
“there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands.”
“It was the first truly profound strategic mistake we made in our long struggle for complete equality. It made us a “contingent people” whose fate depended on what others did for us.”
“despite all he had endured as a black in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, he taught the boys that America was rich in opportunities for blacks if they were willing to work.”
“The problem is that this “place” is in the past. And it does no good to adapt to a past that is only an echo now. There is no refuge there.”
“conservatives suddenly saw that they needed to contest liberalism’s capture of the political and cultural establishment.”
My Take
This was a re-read of Shame in preparation for a Rotary Book Group that I was hosting and I got a lot more out of it on the second time through. After reading two books written by Shelby Steele (White Guilt and Shame), I consider him to be one of the most original and compelling thinkers of the conservative movement. He writes eloquently about the brutal racism his father experienced and the less than brutal, but still direct and odious, racism that he experienced as a young man. In Shame, he explores how liberalism since the 1960’s has sought to capitalize on America’s shameful past of racism, sexism, and less than total fealty to the equality promises contained in our founding documents. However, rather than elevate blacks, the liberal policies of welfare, preferences and affirmative action have hobbled them instead by leading them to believe that they are inferior to whites and need special dispensations to succeed. Steele argues that only when we embrace a truly colorblind society will blacks rise to meet the challenges that freedom bestows on them.
