Latest book: 'A Dream Deferred' by Shelby Steele

I recently read A Dream Deferred by Shelby Steele, a book which argues that post-60's liberalism has focused on social policy as a means of redemption from shame. His basic thesis is that once white Americans fully came to grips with the enormity of America's racial crimes, they sought redemption and hence lowered standards for African-Americans.  He critiques welfare and affirmative action, both of which have changed between 1998 (the publication date of his book) and 2020. Welfare is no longer the open-ended subsistence bestowed in the 1990's (Clinton and Gingrich passed welfare reform), and while diversity programs run as strong as ever, explicit quotas and set-asides are mostly gone. Implicit, hidden quotas, fudged evaluations, etc., all of these things still exist, more than ever. But good luck getting somebody to lay it out in a document that could be subpoenaed.

Steele says that this is all about white people seeking redemption from shame. He says that this is why educators lurch from one fad to another, because they desperately need to be seen doing something. It is less important that African Americans improve than that white people be seen trying. As a black conservative, he despises this, both for what it does to black people (it forces them into dependent roles so that white liberals can feel better) and for what it doesn't do (it doesn't actually raise performance).  I think he over-simplifies somewhat, but that's inevitable in a book that's 180 pages.  Either you should state your thesis in a more succinct essay, or write a tome of nuance and documentation.  He's an excellent writer, and packs in as much nuance as 180 pages will allow (his prose is magnificent, and I doubt I could ever write an essay as good as his), but it's still light on documentation.  (Then again, he came up as a literary scholar, not a social scientist.)

Lest you think he's too harsh on his own people, he has no shortage of praise for his culture. He praises areas of African-American endeavor, and argues that they have been most successful in areas (art, literature, music, entertainment, sports) where competition cannot be easily manipulated by do-gooders. Of course, reality is more complex than that, but he brings an important consideration to the table.

He keeps revisiting the point about unbearable shame, and I think that does explain the restlessness I see among educators. We have been told that we are THE solution to the unbearable shame, and when it doesn't puff us up with pride it fills us with desperation to fix something that we cannot fix on our own, neither for the benefit of the intended recipients (an underclass) nor the desperately guilty upper class. We can only do our part, but we need to be seen doing as much as possible, lest we be called to account by either the underclass (who will tell us we did too little) or the upper class (who will tell us that we failed to discharge the guilt that they transferred to us).

One thing I wonder about is why Germany doesn't display the same restlessness, despite having a terrible crime on their record.  I suspect it's 4 things:
1) I'm too far removed to see it clearly.
2) The descendants of their victims mostly live elsewhere, so they don't need to discharge their debt via domestic social policy.
3) Their crime, as terrible as it was, was one episode in a much longer history, so it doesn't stain every single thing in the way that racism stains our entire history. (Indeed, their neighbors have plenty of pogroms on their own ledgers.)
4) After WWII they immediately confronted a new problem (division between two outside powers, and the oppression of half of their people by one of those powers) so they had a different set of considerations.

Anyway, I'm off to read some books that I'm currently not motivated to blog.  Maybe that will change.