White Guilt, by Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele's book awoke strong feelings in me. Forgive this rant, it is a heartfelt one, very close to my heart and involves people I love and care about deeply. I read Shelby Steele's book, White Guilt in one night. Mr Steele reiterates what I feel is wrong with Blacks and the white liberals trying to help Blacks out of their very dire straights. I do believe that liberals mean well by Blacks. I think that they really think that they know how to help Blacks and that they often think that you have to ask Blacks how best to help them. I disagree with this idea as the Blacks I know do not have any idea or do not have the will to do the right thing. I believe that only Black religious leaders know how best to go about lifting their people up from the poverty, addiction, fatherlessness, Welfare dependency and criminality that so plague much of Black America.

The problem is that the liberals have been helping Blacks out of the hell that is much of their existance for the last 40 years and they have only driven them deeper into it. I grew up In Oakland and have seen the downward spiral firsthand. I can tell you exactly how it happened and chronical the devastation for you, year by year. I can tell you what will work and what won't. I can tell you that any white that thinks that racism is the major problem for Black America is dead wrong. I can also tell you that white liberals are in denial that their policies are hopeless. They will keep banging their heads against the wall and nothing will change.

I have always felt that since I grew up in the ghetto and have Black friends whom I love and worry about, I am in a position to tell other people who are really unaware of what pernicious problems the average inner city Black person is dealing with. As an insider/outsider I can be more objective than the Blacks themselves. I can tell you what really is going on in the lives of Black people. I repeat, there are no stereotypes that are not stereotypically true. Many, many Blacks are dealing with levels of addiction and criminality that the average white can not imagine. The average Black person I know has multiple relatives and friends with serious criminal backgrounds. You would not know it to look at these people. I know Blacks that tell me of horrifc crimes that their relatives have admitted perpetrating, assaults, rapes, murders. I know of Blacks that beat their children to a pulp. Blacks who give much of their money to boyfriends that have many women and are just using women for sex and money. Men that do not in any way support their multiple children. Incest and sex with very young girls is common. I know women that have relationships with Black men that are so abusive that they should never be let out of jail. Animal abuse abounds, child rape abounds. These things are so entrenched that they are normal for many Black families. My friends will think nothing of knocking children out and letting them lie in place for hours. Again, this is average for Blacks in the inner city.

Blacks are in hell and the white liberals are telling them it's because white people are racist. It is not racism at all, it is a lack of human capital and immoral cultural values that is causing Blacks to spiral into darkness. Blacks are never held reponsible for their actions. Never, ever. For white liberals there is always an excuse for why the Black man is engaged in horrific self destructive behavior in his own home and neighborhood. Huge numbers of Black children have never known anything but abuse at the hands of Black men and yet the blame for the brutal behavior of these Black men is laid on the white man. I hear stories regularly of groups of Blacks that attack and brutally beat police officers having police picnics in Oakland parks. I see violent attacks and have personally seen shootings and my sister was a witness to an assassination of a drug dealer. I am also privy to things they don't tell you on the news. Liberals decry police brutality while they ignore the constant brutality perpetrated by Blacks against Blacks and Blacks against other races.

White liberals' methods for helping Blacks have been lethal. They have given Blacks mortal wounds from which they may never recover. They have undermined the work that educated and cultured Blacks did on behalf of their people in the early half of the last century. They have undermined the education systems and instituted low standards for Black achievment and been content when the Blacks have not even met the lowered standards because the Liberals are so invested in pitying people and making sure that no one ever has to have a bad feeling about themselves that the Blacks make it through school as ignorant as they would have been without 12 years of schooling.

Shelby Steele says "that Bush's "bigotry of low expectations" statement was the first and most far reaching enunciation of American social policy since Lyndon Johnson's Howard University speech. It offered a new direction for social reform and, especially, a new theory: dissociation from the racist past through principle and individual responsibility rather than at the expense of these things. Bush is the first president to openly cmpete with the left in the area of ideas around poverty, education, and race. Shelby Steele says that Liberals failed the country out of a self congratulating moral elitism, that they refused to enforce demanding principles or to ask for more responsibility from those they claimed to feel compassion for, and that they flattered themselves with a progressivism of mere moral relativism even as the culture declined all around them."

No one likes to know that they are wrong and the left has been so wrong, and in such a horrifically damaging way, that they are totally invested in hanging on to their ideology. The left has always engaged in losing battles, they are the party of losers and they would make everyone in their own image, which is weak and unhealthy. They have infected Blacks with their disease and they will continue to do so as long as they control the educational, mental health and social service agencies in the US. As long as they are governors and mayors and city council members and school superintendants. Until the stranglehold the liberals have on the government systems is broken, Blacks can expect more misery and poverty.