Shelby Steele: Underdevelopment, Not Discrimination
This article by Shelby Steele has so many nuggets of insight, I hardly know where to begin.
I’ve been blogging and writing articles about racial preferences since 2003. One of the reasons I’ve been called a self-hater and sent hate mail is because I’m not shy about publicly discussing the real reason disparities exist between blacks and whites.
Steele, author of such books as Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America and White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, shares my openness about this topic.
Our “preoccupation with preferences may be a fool’s errand,” writes Steele. “With black youths performing worse on the SAT in 2000 than in 1990, the obsession with affirmative action may only help us avoid the more troubling reality: the ongoing underdevelopment that keeps so many blacks non-competitive.”
He argues that underdevelopment, not discrimination, is the problem. Under the auspices of “white guilt” for past discrimination, America instituted a system to rectify this historic wrong. So-called affirmative action was developed to restore “legitimacy to American institutions” primarily, with uplifting formerly oppressed minorities as a secondary concern.
We now know that racial preferences have not closed the academic achievement gap or helped blacks achieve true equality, as Steele notes. Parity in skills and competence is required to close the gaps and decrease disparities. Hand-outs help American institutions feel legitimate, and Steele wonders how long it will take for these institutions to feel legitimate without condescending to a racial group.
The question demands an answer or at least a rigorous and public discussion. The Ricci v. DeStefano case puts the matter in stark relief. The notions of disparate impact, a judicial interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, and Equal Protection, a constitutional right, clearly are incompatible, as I mentioned in Ricci and the Title VII Catch. Steele writes:
“Disparate impact has two inherent corruptions: It allows discrimination to be established by mere presumption, and it makes victimization collective. By disparate impact, all blacks in the New Haven, Conn., fire department were presumed victims of discrimination without any evidence that the city actually discriminated against any of them. And the city threw out the test because it knew that a failure to promote blacks (while whites were being promoted) would automatically make the city guilty of and liable for discrimination. The Ricci case illustrates the irrationality of disparate impact. As New Haven threw out the firefighter’s test because of its disparate impact on blacks, it created a disparate impact on whites…Racial preferences only extend the misguided logic of disparate impact.”
I’ve argued many times that black Americans must be consistent in their support for equality. If racial discrimination against blacks is wrong, racial discrimination against whites is also wrong, regardless of historical baggage. We must embrace and demand that our government embraces individual rights over racial group preferences.
“We blacks know oppression well, but today it is our inexperience with freedom that holds us back almost as relentlessly as oppression once did,” Steele writes.
In a sense, embracing freedom requires us to remove the net and fearlessly face what it means to be free and morally responsible individuals.
“Success in modernity will demand profound cultural changes — changes in child-rearing, a restoration of marriage and family, a focus on academic rigor, a greater appreciation of entrepreneurialism and an embrace of individual development as the best road to group development.”
