by Radio Raheem

G21 Staff Writer

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a cathedral of words

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OAKLAND, CA, USA - Many thanks to Stanford University Hoover Institute Fellow Shelby Steele. It is because of him that I now know the civil rights movement is over. According to Mr. Steele, we won. Nobody bothered to send me that e-mail.

I know now because our Esteemed Editor took it upon himself to hip me to the recent effort by Mr. Steele in the pages of Harper's. I'm glad to have read it because, being a brother who has to work for a living, I am not always able to keep up with the happenings among the Ivory Tower circle that the old folks used to call "the talented tenth".

In the article, Mr. Steele explains that there are no Black individuals anymore. His reasoning is that Black people stopped being individuals when the civil rights movement supposedly ended and the "Age of White Guilt" began. According to Steele, we live in the Age of White Guilt right now. This Age is characterized, he argues, by White people proving the negative -- that they are not racist. It is also characterized, he says, by all Black people being forced into the position of giving up their individuality -- and the chance for individual achievement -- in order to assuage White guilt by taking on the characteristics of the "protest identity."

This is all very heady stuff, so I wouldn't be surprised if you have as hard a time following it as I did at first. I had to read Mr. Steele's argument twice before I got to the heart of what he was trying to say, Homes. I'll respond to what Mr. Steele was really trying to say at the end of this article.

If I'm getting him correctly, Mr. Steele believes that it is damned near impossible for a Black person to act as an individual anymore, so oppressed are we by the expectations of our group identity as protesting victims. He says we are forced into taking on this stance in order to receive the benefits now offered willy-nilly by all White institutions in order to prove that they are not racist and thereby part of what's socially acceptable today. I know there are some White folks -- including some of the writers for this magazine -- who are sayin' "Hooray!" to this analysis, because that is the way they see the world themselves.

Where I'm sitting, in a working class neighborhood in the flats of East Oakland, THIS JUST AIN'T SO.

Firstly, Mr. Steele fails to acknowledge that there is still a civil rights movement going on for some of us and with good reason: it ruins his perfect little Ivory Tower construction of the world.

I guess he didn't have time to telephone Kwesi Mfume or anybody at the NAACP and let them know the struggle had been won. They would have given him an earful. Those Black people still struggling to get their right to vote acknowledged in Flordia? They are living in a Dream World, as far as Mr. Steele seems to be concerned.

Because, by his own admission, Mr. Steele is a member of that privileged class of Black folk who grew up in the 'sixties and who did indeed collect all the benefits they could from Whites THEN falling all over themselves to create a Great Society, he believes his situation is the same for all of the rest of us. Mr. Steele falls into that trap of believing everybody is exactly like him that ensnares so many intellectuals. He ignores the situation of my own generation or those behind us in the process.

Not everybody in the Black community -- in fact very few of us -- live in the rarefied world of cloistered political correctness and over-accomodating institutions that Mr. Steele and Cornel West, who he holds up for special criticism, inhabit. We live on the mean streets of a country that still doesn't make any bones about our being second class citizens.

What is so wrong about Mr. Steele's belief that we are in this new Age of his is that it ignores the facts of the last twenty years at least.

In Mr. Steele's world there is no Charles Byrd or Amadou Diallo. But neither is there a Walter Mosley or a Barry Bonds. None of these Black people can survive or even exist inside Mr. Steele's construct.

How could they? They were born after we won the civil rights struggle and thus are incapable of conceiving of themselves as individuals, thus we should not conceive of them as individuals, either. The last Black individual predates their existence.

His assertion that Blacks are now trapped by what he calls "the Baldwin model" of the protestor is laughable at best. It's hard to protest while slinging dope on the corner, a very individualistic choice Mr. Steele ignores, or working on a highway gang.

Even more humorous, to me at least, is that his argument that a Black person in this new Age of White Guilt (WG) cannot be a true individual, because of both group identity and WG pressures, could be taken as an insult to poor Ward Connerly, with whom he opens his essay. Ward Connerly is clearly an individual, as far as I'm concerned, who has no problem ignoring the pressures of group identity. He has made a career of repudiating our group identity, in word and deed.

What gets under my skin the most about Mr. Steele's argument here is that he avoids like the plague saying outright what he really means.

By using his anecdote about Mr. Connerly's problems at a Harvard forum, and then his extended tales about both James Baldwin and Cornel West, Mr. Steele is grinding an axe.

What Shelby Steele does not say, what he avoids saying, is that he believes Black people are now a group of people receiving special privileges.

In both the Baldwin analysis and his take on Cornel West's move from Harvard to Princeton, Mr. Steele is avoiding saying explicitly that these are examples of Black people getting something they did not deserve.

His construct is an attempt to couch this long-standing neo-conservative myth in soothing and acceptable terms. He says that Black people must reclaim their individualism by avoiding the benefits they receive unfairly because of WG and reclaim the stature that a meritocracy will afford them.

My question for Shelby Steele:

What damned meritocracy, Shelby? What country are you living in?

Last time I looked, there weren't a lot of Black CEOs of multinational corporations or wives of billionaire Blacks enjoying mimosas with the Ladies Who Lunch.

The last time I looked, Shelby, a brother's qualifications for a job were only one factor in his actually getting that job for the same pay as a member of the White Boys' Club.

The last time I looked, our government had reported that our schools were effectively segregated once more and few -- if any -- brothers were even getting into institutions of higher learning to hold the kind of privileged fellowship position you now enjoy. And the last time I looked, the civil rights struggle was still an on-going project.

The reason the civil rights project is on-going and incomplete, I would argue to Mr. Steele, is because people like him insist on continuing to spread this false myth of Black privilege. It's insidious. It won't go away. The neo-cons like Shelby continue to spread this myth the same way their predescessors did the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Ronald Reagan did the urban legend about "welfare queens" riding around in Cadillacs. THEY REPEAT THIS LIE SO OFTEN THAT EVEN SEEMINGLY REASONABLE PEOPLE BEGIN TO BELIEVE IT.

But because it is a Big Lie, it has to be challenged each time it is uttered. It cannot be allowed to stand.

We shall not have overcome, Shelby, until your myth of Black privilege is a thing of the past and the issue of race is acknowleged, as W.E.B. DuBois asserted, as the central problem of our century. That day will arrive when we are all truly looked at as simply members of a human family, with all of its privileges and all of its responsibilities; when brothers aren't simply asked to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but acknowledgement is made that they don't have any damned boots; and when even revisionists like you recognize that being Black is not being part of a special group.

Peace out.

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