"I think many of my books have been critical of White America."
Photo Source: C-Span2, BookTV
Shelby Steele holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah, an M.A. in sociology from Southern Illinois University, and a B.A. in political science from Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. He was appointed a Hoover fellow in 1994.
Steele received the National Book Critic's Circle Award in 1990 in the general nonfiction category for his book The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. He also has written extensively for major publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He also is a contributing editor at Harper's magazine., and his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Newsweek, and the Washington Post, among many other publications.
For his work on the PBS television documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst, he was recognized with both an Emmy Award and a Writers Guild Award. In 2004 President George W. Bush, citing Steele's "learned examinations of race relations and cultural issues," honored him with the National Humanities Medal. He lives in California.
Read an intriguing interview with Shelby Steele (February 2008)
A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about
Obama And Why He Can't Win
Click to order via Amazon
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Free Press (December 4, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1416559175
ISBN-13: 978-1416559177
Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
In Shelby Steele's beautifully wrought and thought provoking new book, A Bound Man, the award-winning and bestselling author of The Content of Our Character attests that Senator Barack Obama's groundbreaking quest for the highest office in the land is fast becoming a galvanizing occasion beyond mere presidential politics, one that is forcing a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America. Says Steele, poverty and inequality usually are the focus of such dialogues, but Obama's bid for so high an office pushes the conversation to a more abstract level where race is a politics of guilt and innocence generated by our painful racial history -- a kind of morality play between (and within) the races in which innocence is power and guilt is impotence.
Steele writes of how Obama is caught between the two classic postures that blacks have always used to make their way in the white American mainstream: bargaining and challenging. Bargainers strike a "bargain" with white America in which they say, I will not rub America's ugly history of racism in your face if you will not hold my race against me. Challengers do the opposite of bargainers. They charge whites with inherent racism and then demand that they prove themselves innocent by supporting black-friendly policies like affirmative action and diversity.
Steele maintains that Senator Obama is too constrained by these elaborate politics to find his own true political voice. Obama has the temperament, intelligence, and background -- an interracial family, a sterling education -- to guide America beyond the exhausted racial politics that now prevail. And yet he is a Promethean figure, a bound man.
Says Steele, Americans are constrained by a racial correctness so totalitarian that we are afraid even to privately ask ourselves what we think about racial matters. Like Obama, most of us find it easier to program ourselves for correctness rather than risk knowing and expressing what we truly feel. Obama emerges as a kind of Everyman in whom we can see our own struggle to accept and honor what we honestly feel about race. In A Bound Man, Steele makes clear the precise constellation of forces that bind Senator Obama, and proposes a way for him to break these bonds and find his own voice. The courage to trust in one's own careful judgment is the new racial progress, the "way out" from the forces that now bind us all.
White Guilt:
How Blacks and
Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0060578629
Format: Hardcover, 192pp
Pub. Date: May 2, 2006
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
In 1955 the murderers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted of their crime, undoubtedly because they were white. Forty years later, O. J. Simpson, whom many thought would be charged with murder by virtue of the DNA evidence against him, went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. Clearly, a sea change had taken place in American culture, but how had it happened? In this important new work, distinguished race relations scholar Shelby Steele argues that the age of white supremacy has given way to an age of white guilt -- and neither has been good for African Americans.
As the civil rights victories of the 1960s dealt a blow to racial discrimination, American institutions started acknowledging their injustices, and white Americans -- who held the power in those institutions -- began to lose their moral authority. Since then, our governments and universities, eager to reclaim legitimacy and avoid charges of racism, have made a show of taking responsibility for the problems of black Americans. In doing so, Steele asserts, they have only further exploited blacks, viewing them always as victims, never as equals. This phenomenon, which he calls white guilt, is a way for whites to keep up appearances, to feel righteous, and to acquire an easy moral authority -- all without addressing the real underlying problems of African Americans. Steele argues that calls for diversity and programs of affirmative action serve only to stigmatize minorities, portraying them not as capable individuals but as people defined by their membership in a group for which exceptions must be made.
Through his articulate analysis and engrossing recollections of the last half-century of American race relations, Steele calls for a new culture of personal responsibility, a commitment to principles that can fill the moral void created by white guilt. White leaders must stop using minorities as a means to establish their moral authority -- and black leaders must stop indulging them. As White Guilt eloquently concludes, the alternative is a dangerous ethical relativism that extends beyond race relations into all parts of American life.
Dream Deferred: The Second
Betrayal of Black Freedom in America
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0060931043
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Pub. Date: October 1999
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Edition Description: 1ST
From the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our Character comes a new essay collection that tells the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today. In A Dream Deferred Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States'the first one being segregation'emerged from the civil rights era when the country was overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame.
According to Steele,1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming goal the expiation of America guilt rather than the careful development of true equality between the races. This "culture of preference" betrayed America's best principles in order to give whites and America institutions an iconography of racial virtue they could use against the stigma of racial shame. In four densely argued essays, Steele takes on the familiar questions of affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group preferences, victimization'and what he deems to be the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression. A Dream Deferred is an honest, courageous look at the perplexing dilemma of race and democracy in the United States'and what we might do to resolve it.
The Content of Our Character:
A New Vision of Race In America
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 006097415X
Format: Paperback, 175pp
Pub. Date: September 1991
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
In this controversial essay collection, award-winning writer Shelby Steele illuminates the origins of the current conflict in race relations'the increase in anger, mistrust, and even violence between black and whites. With candor and persuasive argument, he shows us how both black and white Americans have become trapped into seeing color before character, and how social policies designed to lessen racial inequities have instead increased them.
The Content of Our Character is neither "liberal" nor "conservative," but an honest, courageous look at America's most enduring and wrenching social dilemma.
Related Links
Shelby Steele references on AALBC.com
Bio bio excerpted from Hoover Institute and HarperCollins
Photo: C-Span2 BookTV In Depth Interview Live Broadcast, April 2nd 2006
