I review Shelby Steele’s White Guilt.
In the United States, whites abused blacks for many decades. Legally, this abuse ended with the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But those acts did not erase the sordid history. Steele’s thesis is that sensitivity to this history produces white guilt and fuels black anger. The result is that blacks have become the abusers, and whites—liberal whites, especially—have become the abused.
The fundamental issue facing blacks is that what they can extract from whites via moral shakedowns exceeds what they can create on their own through independent agency.
Part of this is a numbers game (since blacks are only 13.4% of the population, $1 taken from everyone else is $6.5 for blacks, and obviously much higher ratios for the black activist class).
But the biggest part is simple Bell Curve stuff. They live under a kind of Genetic Jim Crow, even if they made their best efforts they will always be at the bottom of the pyramid.
Asians, who don’t have Bell Curve issues, don’t waste their time on moral shakedowns. They just use their high IQ to get good jobs.
The authors observation that conservatives sound like MLK in 1963 should be accompanied by the fact that Social Justice Warriors sound like MLK in 1968.
Like MLK, I think that there was an expiration date on how long people who can’t acknowledge their inability to achieve equal outcomes under equal opportunity would accept that state of affairs without abandoning equal opportunity.
The author is correct that blacks only lash out because it works. If whites acknowledge that the black/white gap is genetic in nature, then they can decide not to respond to the shakedowns since they are unjustified and unreasonable. That’s the only way out of this.
White progressive elites affect a pose of collective guilt they don’t feel as individuals in order to pose as morally superior not only to those whites who don’t, but also to blacks who are seen as inferior due to imputed lack of agency. Their smug attitude is tearing apart the social fabric. They are garbage people.
To the extent a minority of non-blacks leverage black grievance to extract concessions from the majority it is more morally dubious because unlike blacks these agents generally have the genetic agency to improve their own lives. However, they are more dangerous for the same reason (their superior natural ability makes effectively harnessing black grievance more possible than the mob would have on its own).
Naturally, the aggrieved majority of ordinary people who just want to grill will seek out anyone who can credibly organize their own interests and fight back. However, this is difficult to do in a coherent way when you are required to ignore the elephant in the room explaining all the gaps.
Having grown up in the Third World, I saw that the biggest problem of poorly developed countries is that the greatest returns to smarter or more capable individuals was to use the system to extract rents instead of produce valuable products or knowledge.
As the West descends into bureaucratic hell and near Maoist socially dysfunctional indoctrination, the returns will grow for rent-seeking through cancellation while slowing down for all productive forces. After awhile it will become impossible to separate productive firms from the parasitic. The best will do both or die. So it won’t be possible to kill parasitic rent-seeking without killing the top industries, as China and the USSR saw as well as most of the Third World, like Latin America or Africa.
This rent extraction “insider subsidy” will the main reason America grinds down, from internal reasons.
Individualism and meritocracy are needed to fight it.
The elite insiders need to be more clearly identified and more open policies to reduce their ability to extract rents.
BLM & pseudo-racism based on outcomes will create a backlash to stop that path, but there will be other PC paths used. It’s a never ending fight — unless one is willing to lose.
asdf, your post is reminiscent of the debate between Booker T. and Du Bois, with Du Bois advocating for political action over vocational aptitude. But Du Bois also advocated for the “talented tenth” to aspire and train to help their fellow Blacks. He didn’t anticipate the talented tenth being co-opted and helping to burn the place down.
Shelby and his son Eli made a documentary “What Killed Michael Brown”, which, like the Clarence Thomas documentary, Amazon kicked off their streaming service last October in the usual Kafka-esque way. The Wall Street Journal wrote it up and several other prominent friends of the Steeles made a big fuss and eventually Amazon backed down for that one case, again in the usual Kafka-esque fashion.
Good news for the Steeles, but bad news for everybody else, as the consensus seems to be that as a consequence of getting mildly burned by this and other politically-loaded incidents (like the Justice Thomas film) and wanting to avoid such incidents in the future, Amazon just decided to kill Prime Direct Video altogether earlier this year. Interesting lesson there: if a business isn’t compelled to take everybody, then to avoid the PR pain resulting from picking and choosing, they might just decide to take nobody at all.
THANKS for the link to Eli’s film. It’s great. and important.
Interesting summary of the book, although I wonder if the article got clipped; I didn’t see much reviewing the book and its ideas as opposed to a quick summary.
The surest way to tell a blue stater from a red stater is to mention an instance of alleged racism. Blue staters respond with outrage (often feigned). Red staters’ instinctive response is rolled eyes, “this again?”, and a wanking motion.
“The World of Patience Gromes” is an short book by a white VISTA activist of the collapse into urban renewal of a Black neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia where he worked. Among other things, it draws a vivid portrait of some of the “smaller men, bargainers, bluffers, and haranguers” that Steele mentions leaving their mark. They were not so much a conspirators as simple opportunists, made powerful by well-intentioned money coming in without any real interest in the neighborhood.
I doubt there is much guilt. Rather whites just can’t believe that Blacks hate them. Whites want to be likes and being hated produces a motivating angst. Most whites believe that if they throw enough other whites under the bus then Blacks will like them. Ha, ha. Most USA whites have not read any history of African nations.posts independence. They hate you and always will, so just get over it. For chrisssakes “Drop a Bomb on The white Man” was a big hit on the urban charts.
If we are honest, we really must admit to ourselves that it is just fine for Blacks to hate whites. If whites prefer to hate other whites to feel good about themselves, that is fine too. But the bottom line is that there is nothing more boring or intellectually inconsequential than race. If Blacks have found a way to make a buck off something so boring, good for them. And if a profound white indifference is “racist” that is fine too. There are many things worse than being called a racist.
Steve Sailed has the right idea when he calls for white honesty: https://www.takimag.com/article/reality-check-2/
Honesty breeds indifference which frees one from getting emotionally sucked into being a paying customer for race grievance generation and profiteering. But indifference also frees one to attend to truth. and beauty and the important things in life.
“If we are honest, we really must admit to ourselves that it is just fine for Blacks to hate whites.”
I wouldn’t say it’s “just fine for blacks to hate whites”. Rather, I’d acknowledge that there isn’t anything I can do to stop it, and that all I can really do is try and treat other people well and allow their reaction to that to be what it will be.
The serenity prayer approach is probably not bad. We define ourselves by our actions and treating others well regardless is certainly a fine approach.
The French do this. The government is banned from imposing race definitions and labeling people and otherwise practicing apartheid and they waste far less resources on promoting hateful divisions in society.
But the bottom line is that there is nothing more boring or intellectually inconsequential than race.
??? I’ll need more explanation, in that it is often seen as race=genetics=who inherits the future; personnel is policy; demography is destiny; plant and animal science people have made significant advances by considering such things. Seems like pretty consequential stuff.
A person’s race tells me absolutely nothing about them as a person. No amount of research will change that.
“Race” is a lousy estimator for genotype. Any information that it provides is swamped by social effects. Almost by definition race is a measure of social segmentation, because it is reduced to easily perceptible differences in appearance.
Separately, even supposing that genetics is destiny does not make destiny knowable. Things looked pretty promising for large lizards at one point in pre-history.
A person’s race tells me absolutely nothing about them as a person.
Statistical distributions argue otherwise.
Any information that [race] provides is swamped by social effects.
But many efforts at social change have been swamped by race.
even supposing that genetics is destiny does not make destiny knowable. Things looked pretty promising for large lizards at one point in pre-history.
LOL Indeed. But since our time is inherently limited, let’s organize our affairs along the lines of bona fide.
Good post by Arnold, but your Sailer link is much better because it actually discusses root causes and solutions, as asdf does a bit above. We fully accept black dominance at sports and certain entertainment, why can’t the left accept white and Asian dominance in tech and some other intellectual pursuits? We must be honest about our varying genetic endowments, rather than race-baiting or stereotyping (I completely agree with you that everyone must be treated as an individual on their own merits regardless of race, but we also can’t be surprised when there are no whites in the Olympic 100m final or blacks in key tech roles at the next big tech company). Perhaps that is too much to ask of our simplistic and childish culture these days.