A New Vision of Race in America
As a black (Left) libertarian, I have sympathies with many of the arguments put forth by black conservative thinkers. As an aspiring critical race theorist I feel that there is really no one way to do race theorizing. As I was reading Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, I think the CTR and more progressive side of me won out. I was expecting to encounter arguments I had never heard before, perhaps a different way of looking at things.
While Steele’s arguments are well thought out, and while I do commend him for criticizing conservatives for playing the “color-blind” game, I had a difficult time separating his opinions from the talking points I see by pseudo-conservatives like Sean Hannity– that blacks always play the victims. Steele would argue, over and over in the text, Blacks play the victim, it’s just a power play, but yes there is still racism, and vice versa. I am well aware of the victim mentalities that appear in minority communities. Theologically, yes I said theologically, especially since Steele refers to Jean Paul Satre and Immanuel Kant, Steele does not know how to articulate a comprehensive approach to victims. There are real victims, there are real scapegoats. Steele mentions the large number of African Americans in prison, but that’s just a blip. No mention of racist drug laws or police brutality.
Honestly Steele starts off great, bringing up Reverend Dr. King’s vision, problematizing Ronald Reagan’s “color-blindness” but I think that his approach is lacking because it is ahistorical and lacks contextuality. He leaps forward to the universal, without providing any religious or philosophical background. In other words, he affirms the racist society he protests against. An example: he says that because MLK Jr appealed to morality rather than his racial particularity (page 19), but my question is, exactly where does MLK get his morality from? Is it a specific place? For Steele, silently, the nation-state forms our morals through assimilation (148).
It is this problem of Steele’s approach that proves to be a problem, that it fails to address blackness as something that can only be studied alongside whiteness. The burden of fighting racism, like with progress liberal narratives that claim to be “anti-racist,” fall on the backs of the oppressed.
I am all for a strong black traditional family as well as individual rights, but to fail to discuss what separates families (such as the Prison-Industrial complex) I think leads to a dishonest conversation at least, and at worst, it lets race-mongerers like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh off the hook.
