Required Reading
Today it’s Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a small bit:
This new 21st-century racial problem might be called the problem of emergence–the shock that formerly oppressed people experience when they first emerge into new freedom, and the struggle with responsibility that always follows. In freedom their underdevelopment looks precisely like the inferiority their oppressor had always accused them of, because now it no longer has the excuse of oppression. Under this threat of humiliation, the newly free will have to decide who should be responsible for their development. And the society that oppressed them will also have to decide. All discussions of race in America today are discussions of responsibility.
So the first phase of emergence is rarely a wholehearted embrace of freedom but rather a resurrection of the enemy just defeated. For blacks the old enemy of racism mutes the humiliation of new freedom by absorbing blame for inferiority. “I can’t because of racism.” Perhaps the most pernicious feature of real oppression is that it is always, in itself, an argument that others should be responsible. So when it ends, a new and kinder dependency will look like justice. This is why the dream of freedom for many oppressed peoples is a socialistic “promised land,” not really a dream of freedom at all. When you are oppressed, you tend to believe in the power that oppresses you. You only want it to make your life prosperous rather than wretched.
Read it all. Read it now. Feel free to discuss in the Drinks section below.
I don’t often talk about race on this site because racism is too stupid to bother debating, and, well, I’m a privileged white boy who doesn’t know a whole lot about oppression. But Steele wrote something of great importance and service, and it needs to be read.
I remember happening upon a book by Erich Fromm called “Escape from Freedom” and being so perplexed by the title, I had to read the book. I was in 8th grade, and freedom was an unqualified good in my mind and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever want to escape from it. It was a thing all sane individuals ran towards not from. His book was a revelation to me and I began to see many human problems through the prism Fromm first introduced to me. The problems of being human and making choices and making a life are obviously daunting, but when an individual’s culture doesn’t provide him the necessary tools to overcome such challenges, they can completely overwhelm him, and his only concern is finding an identity to latch onto that will obviate the need for him to think and choose and be responsible for himself. It is a most common human phenomenon and blacks in the US are a good example of it. Slavery robbed them of most of the social and emotional tools that would have helped equip them to build lives that would have been fully human and free in the best sense. A great many whites in this nation try to avoid responsibility for their lives although their justifications for their flight from responsibility are diferent because they don’t share the legacy of slavery with blacks. There is no doubt that a major crime was commited against slaves and their decendants in that they were robbed of their cultures and forced to live sub-human lives and then as second class citizens. But there is no escaping the fundamental human reality that we are all responsible for ourselves as individuals and any actions we take that ignores that reality, debases us, and prevents us from actualizing our highest human potential.
Wow. Very powerful stuff. That’s probably the most succinct article on modern racial issues and the basic difference in attitudes toward race that can roughly be assigned to the left and the right.
Sadly, it’ll probably be read by more privaledged white folk than need be and far to few African Americans. God forbid, my local paper (the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) ever pick it up.
I think we are likely to see a lot of this phenomenon in the wake of the war just won, also. Already we hear (as in Teheri’s article in NRO today) that the Iraqi people expect us to come in and run things for them. Having been freed from something that was the equivalent of slavery, and learning to keep their heads down, lest they get shot off, they are now bereft of leadership, direction, and purpose. The result is the power vacuum that we now need to address post haste.