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by Radio Raheem
G21 Staff Writer

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RADIOACTIVE: SHELBY STEELE PLAYS THE RACE CARD, AGAIN - RAHEEM is back and once again, at a reader request, he takes on the Hoover Institute's Shelby Steele.

Oakland, CA, USA - If you look at a Google search or believe what the people writing in to the VOX POPULI page here at The World's Magazine, it seems that there are only two Black men in America willing to play the Race Card from a thoughtful and challenging perspective, Shelby Steele and myself. While Michael Eric Dyson is certainly and deservedly much more celebrated, Bill Cosby has raised more waves (mostly elitist) and all the academics follow the turbulent career of Cornell West, at the end of the day, it seems for most of your average folks, its Shelby Steele and me standing toe-to-toe and trading punches over the last few years.

I'm willing to admit that Steele has sent a few haymakers my way, all I have to do is look on Google under his name and there I am. Steele thinks it's below himself to admit that I even exist.

That's all right. I've only stepped to him a couple of times. He deserved it both times. As far as I can see, he hasn't sent me an adequate response. That's all right, too.

I'm just a working class guy in a chocolate city (I know that phrase has major freight carried with it after Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans' Ray Nagin, but we used that phrase here in Oaktown for decades without anyone raising a peep.) Shelby Steele has a sinecure at Stanford University, so - Hell! - he MUST be smarter than me. Anybody with a doctorate of Philosophy must know of what he speaks, right?

So it wasn't much of a surprise to me that a Loyal Reader of The World's Magazine from Africa sent an e-mail to our Esteemed Editor, asking him to pass it on to me, seeking my opinion of Shelby Steele's take on the New Orleans disaster that was published at the Wall Street Journal about the same time that my own take was published here at G21.

Perhaps you don't want to use your time to read the entire article, so I shall help, you, Gentle Reader. Mr. Steele, is a much better rhetorician than me, from long practice sucking at the trough at Stanford, letting his Teaching Assistants grade the papers of his students there and spending his highly-valued time writing editorials like this one and more books to pay for his grandchildren's education, thanks to the Hoover Institute, a neo-conservative think-thank. So let me focus you on the crux of his argument in this editorial, which appears in the third paragraph. (You will notice that this is where the editors at the Wall Street Journal, in their wisdom, make a significant break in the narrative.)

Mr. Steele says in this paragraph:

ä What mattered was the invocation of the great white shame. And here, in white racism, was a shame of truly epic proportions--the shame of white supremacy that for centuries so squeezed the world with violence and oppression that white privilege was made a natural law. Once white racism--long witnessed by blacks and acknowledged since the '60s by whites--was in play, the subject was changed from black weakness to white evil. Now accountability for the poverty that shamed blacks could be once again assigned to whites. If this was tiresome for many whites, it was a restoration of dignity for many blacks.

The telling phrase, the phrase which establishes Mr. Steel's argument in this passage is this one: "Once white racism--long witnessed by blacks and acknowledged since the '60s by whites--was in play, the subject was changed from black weakness to white evil. Now accountability for the poverty that shamed blacks could be once again assigned to whites."

Like many of the ancient Greek and Roman polemicists that our Esteemed Editor often shows honor, Mr. Steele is a master - a master! - of blaming the victims for their being victims, as I've noted in my previous critiques of his screeds.

Mr. Steele would have us believe that Whites are justifiably exhausted by being faced with the fact that Blacks have been economically disenfranchised, particularly in places like the Deep South of the United States, particularly in places like the crypto-plantation that is New Orleans. It is Black weakness (read inferiority and misguidedness, in his worldview) that is the real culprit.

The victims are indeed at fault, Steele argues for the umpteenth time.

Give me a damned break!

You, Gentle Reader, may not have read our Publisher's book, Katrina and The Lost City of New Orleans, as I have. I suggest, seriously, that you buy this book since Rod is a former resident of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. If you had read this book, you'd know that the New Orleans school system has been rated in among the lowest, usually the Louisiana system vied with Mississippi's for the lowest; they just change places, for decades now. If you had read that book, you'd also know that people openly talk down there about how that's the best way to keep a pool of people to change hotel bed sheets and clean toilets for the tourists who flock down for Mardi Gras and JazzFest. I'm going to use that phrase again, "plantation system."

One of the biggest industries in New Orleans, we learn in Rod's book: prison. It's right up there with tourism and the festivals and the port, has been since the 1970s. Why? Too many Black folk that you need to break down, emotionally and psychologically and economically. Rod includes a quote from a Justice conference - held in New Orleans of all places - in 2004. The quote is from an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and says, I'm paraphrasing, if Louisiana and Mississippi were countries, they would have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world. Get a clue.

And, before you carp, Gentle Reader, I'm not the only person who thinks this way. From what I've read in Rod's book and on many of the Blogs about New Orleans, this is common knowledge in those parts.

Why does it seem like nobody is in a hurry to get the Black folks back? Well now they got thousands of Latinos to rip off, once they bussed them in and put twelve or thirteen to a single hotel room. Let Houston deal with the niggaz.

Do a Google search on the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Better yet, go to a Blog called Common Ground Collective and take a look at some of the commentary there. Or check out this video.

How do any, any of these pieces of reporting and evidence jibe with Mr. Steele's argument that it's Black people's fault that they died on rooftops in New Orleans because they are inherently weak and inferior to all other people in the United States? How do any, any of these heartfelt statements from people who have not been given even the minimum opportunity for a better life, jobs, health care, decent schools, match the rhetorical and comforting picture (for some people) Mr. Steele paints for his (equally well-heeled) audience at the Wall Street Journal?

ANSWER: They don't. Mr. Steele is (again) reporting from the Ivory Tower. Mr. Steele is NOT reporting from on the street, on the ground. Mr. Steele wouldn't know the situation on the streets of New Orleans before Katrina if it bit him on the ass.

But that's not a very elegant or rhetorical way of stating the facts, is it? Like I said at the outset, I'll never be the rhetorician Mr. Steele is. I don't have the practice. I have to work for a living and support a family by the sweat of my brow. You know, what most of us "weak" Black people do. Unlike Mr. Steele.

"Take it to the hole, Shaquille!"

It's blood simple, when you really think about it. Mr. Steele serves his function of rationalizing the callous, heartless, disguised racism of too many people in the body politic of the United States. He does it with such facile and dismissive reasoning that he makes the Big Bucks. But he must even know, in his heart of hearts, that he is on the wrong side of history and helping to perpetuate another Big Lie. All men and women are NOT, not, not treated equally under the law or anything else in America. Everybody on our streets, the people on the ground, knows this truth. Only liars and their sycophants speak words about a "color blind" nation.

The rest of us live under an unjust system that is built around treating corporations and Fat Cats much, much better than your average working person, Black, White, Brown, Red or Yellow. That doesn't, in my view, negate the fact that Black People continue to suck hind teat though we've been here longer than the damned Pilgrims. (We got here in 1619, the Pilgrims came late.) Four hundred years!

I, on the other hand, and as Mr. Steele's Official Nemesis, have this to say: Just look at the facts of the situations we have argued. Which one of us sounds more like what you see, with your own eyes, every day of your life?

Peace out.