book recommendation

Right now I'm reading White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele, on loan from Sammer. I would recommend this thought-provoking read to anyone who has ever grappled with the oft blurred lines between issues of biblical justice and political/social justice.

It's a pretty easy, quick read, though the topic is anything but. Steele is one of the clearest thinkers on issues of race that I have ever encountered, and I haven't been able to put the book down. I won't attempt to recap or summarize any of his ideas, because I would only botch them, but I will leave you with an excerpt...

"When there is no white guilt vying for responsibility over minority struggles, there is no incentive to distort these problems into instances of injustice. We blacks, then, remain entirely responsible for them whether or not we get help from others.

In music, literature, sports, and entertainment our deficiencies are, thus, simply deficiencies that we overcome the way all people overcome deficiencies: through skill development, innovation, and relentless practice.

People wrongly dismiss black achievement in these areas for reasons that can be ascribed only to racism - that are compelling excellence follows from a mere genetic advantage. The fact is that we are good at sports and music because we subject ourselves to unforgiving standards of excellence and then work ferociously to meet those standards. Ruthlessly, we allow absolutely no excuses. The same poverty and deprivation that afflict us as we walk to school in the morning afflict us later in the same day on the playground or in the tenement basement where we practice obssessively on a cheap electric keyboard. The different is that white guilt makes no appearance on that playground or in that basement.

There is no carnivorous white need standing between us and the pursuit of excellence. No pity. Thus, excellence is allowed to entice us with its own intrinsic joys and rewards; and we come in thrall to it."

Also this...

"...if this boy's problem is reading and writing rather than basketball, white guilt will certainly prevent even a modified version of this natural human process from occurring. Career-hungry academics will appear in his little world, and they will argue that his weaknesses reflect the circuitous workings of racism...he will be an object of abstract compassion for everyone. And permeating his classroom, like a stalled weather pattern, will be a foggy academic relativism in which scholastic excellence is associated with elitism, and rote skill development with repression.

Yet just beyond the window of his classroom, on the pockmarked basketball court with the netless and bent hoop, another weather pattern prevails. On that court almost nothing is forgiven, and he will be "blamed" and held entirely responsible for all his deficiencies. And all through the torpor of a day structured to spare his feelings around reading, writing, and arithmetic, he will long to be on the other side of that window, where everything is asked of him."

For clarification - when Steele writes of "white guilt," he is referring to a great moral vaccuum, or loss of moral authority, that racism left in white America. This book is a thorough unpacking of his assertion that both white America's attempts to refill that vaccuum and black America's embrace and exploitation of said attempts have together destroyed the hope of the Civil Rights Era.

Go pick it up!