Steele, Shelby 1946–

PERSONAL: Born January 1, 1946, in Chicago, IL; son of Shelby Sr. (a truck driver and activist) and Ruth (a social worker and activist) Steele; married; wife's name Rita; children: two. Ethnicity: "African American." Education: Coe College, Cedar Rapids, IA, B.A., 1968; Southern Illinois University, M.A., 1971; University of Utah, Ph.D., 1974.

ADDRESSES: Office—Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6010.

CAREER: Taught high school in East St. Louis, IL; San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, professor of English, beginning c. 1974; Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, research fellow, 1994–. Narrator of Frontline episode for PBS entitled Seven Days in Bensonhurst; frequent guest on television programs, including Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, Night-line, and This Morning. Member of national board, Center for the New American Community at the Manhattan Institute, and American Academy for Liberal Education.

MEMBER: National Association of Scholars, University Accreditation Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, 1990, for The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America; Emmy Award, Writer's Guild Award for television documentary writing, and San Francisco Film Festival Award for television documentary writing, all 1991, all for Seven Days in Bensonhurst; National Humanities Medal, 2004; Bradley Prize, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, 2006; San Jose State University President's Award.

WRITINGS:

The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (essays), St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1990.

"Seven Days in Bensonhurst," Frontline (television news series), PBS, 1990.

A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1998.

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor of essays and articles to periodicals, including Harper's, Commentary, Fortune, Mother Jones, National Review, Newsweek, American Scholar, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Contributing editor, Harper's Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS: Shelby Steele first came to public attention in the late 1980s for his controversial articles on race relations, published in periodicals such as Harper's and American Scholar. He collected and expanded some of these essays for his 1990 book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, which garnered him the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. Steele has also explained his views on race on numerous television talk shows, and created and narrated a documentary for the Public Broadcasting System's Frontline series on the killing of a young black man in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York and the media exploitation that followed. Because of his unusual approach to the problems of blacks in the United States—he places emphasis on individual achievement and rejects social remedies such as affirmative action—he has been both praised and criticized by black and white critics alike. "As a black analyst of America's racial scene," declared Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune Books, "Shelby Steele seems somewhat anomalous. He is neither preacher nor politician nor sociologist. He is a middle-aged professor of English who has an appropriately fine gift for powerful prose and an uncommonly sharp bulljive detector tuned in to the empty rhetoric that often passes for sound racial discourse these days."

Steele was born in 1946 in Chicago to interracial, activist parents. They were founding members of the civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. Steele grew up in Phoenix, a suburb of Chicago, in an atmosphere that promoted both social activism and individual education. He told E.J. Dionne, Jr., in the Washington Post: "I grew up in that ethos of CORE—high principled Gandhian activism." Like many other black children of the time, he attended a segregated school. As a student at Coe College in Iowa, Steele became active in the civil rights movement. He admired both Martin Luther King, Jr., and the more confrontational black leader Malcolm X, and he served as head of the black student organization there. Upon graduating, he took a job teaching Afro-American literature in a ghetto school in East St. Louis, Illinois. Though he admitted to Dionne that "it's the best teaching experience I've had, in the worst ghetto I've ever been in," he decided to go on with his academic career. With a master's degree obtained from night school at Southern Illinois University while teaching in East St. Louis, he went on to get a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah.

After many years of teaching at San Jose State University and writing on black authors such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Steele's essays on the subject of race began to appear in well-known periodicals. According to Peter Applebome in the New York Times, Steele "began writing on race after he was annoyed by a 1986 radio broadcast on the holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in which a black leader was espousing what Mr. Steele considered the clichés of the civil rights movement." These collected and expanded essays form the core of his 1990 book, The Content of Our Character. The title is taken from a speech by King in which he said he dreamed of a day when his children would be judged not by their skin color, but by their character. In the book, Steele contends that most important civil rights battles have already been won, and that there is less racism and more opportunities for black achievement now than there were in the 1960s. He urges his fellow blacks to let go of what he sees as their psychology of victimization—because he thinks that black people believe (and are continually told by present-day civil rights leaders) that they are automatically oppressed, they are afraid to try to better themselves. Steele argues that blacks, unlike other U.S. ethnic groups, come from a "culture of oppression," and that "oppression conditions people away from all the values and attitudes one needs in freedom—individual initiative, self-interested hard work, individual responsibility, delayed gratification, and so on. In oppression these things don't pay off and are therefore negatively reinforced. It is not that these values have never had a presence in black life, only that they were muted and destabilized by the negative conditioning of oppression."

Some reviewers, such as Adolph Reed, Jr., in the Nation, have lambasted Steele's ideas, complaining that he echoes black and white neoconservatives, blames victims for their own bad situations, and uses too many examples from his own personal life rather than accumulating case studies in a more scientific manner. But others, even those who disagree with Steele on several points, laud his courage in breaking with what most black civil rights leaders project. Steele "cannot be dismissed out of hand as there appears to be much substance to what he is saying," noted R.L. McNeely in Human Relations. Steele "seems earnestly engaged in a search for truth, regardless of where that search may lead. Because of this, and because his remarks should serve as a call to arms on the part of those not active in their own interests, we must embrace Steele, regardless of whether we agree with him," McNeely concluded. "For all the flaws in Steele's thesis," declared Juan Williams in the New Republic, "he has addressed the real problems, and offered a new approach in thinking about them." Black author Charles Johnson, critiquing the collection of essays in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, went even further in his championing of Steele: "The Content of Our Character is, clearly, a book that will infuriate anyone who disagrees with Steele's premise that 'the American black, supported by a massive body of laws and the not inconsiderable goodwill of his fellow citizens, is basically as free as he or she wants to be.' But I am convinced that we cannot afford to ignore his conclusions, that we must, in other words, take with us into the 1990s his statement (one that echoes back in black thought to the end of the Civil War): 'What we must know … is that nothing on this Earth can be promised but a chance. The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.'" Steele himself responded for Applebome to the charges of making his book too personal: "I know I don't have all the answers, but I try to write what I know. Some people say I shine a harsh light on difficult problems. But I never shine a light on anything I haven't experienced or write about fears I don't see in myself first. I'm my own first target. I spill my own blood first." He also objects when critics see him as being too similar to black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. "We're all very different," he told Dionne. "Our politics are different. But we're against that [present civil rights] orthodoxy. So we're cast out of the church and lumped together."

In the same year that The Content of Our Character was published, Steele hosted a PBS documentary for the Frontline series that he wrote himself. "Seven Days in Bensonhurst" is about a black man who was attacked and killed by four white teenagers when he entered their Bensonhurst neighborhood to look at a used car that was for sale. The documentary, however, goes beyond the murder itself to examine the behavior of civil rights leaders and both black and white politicians in its context. People reviewer David Hiltbrand noted that Steele's program is "both cogent and timely."

In A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, Steele writes further on the topics he examined in The Content of Our Character, except that in this volume he is "older, angrier, and understandably less patient with those who refuse to weigh his case on its merits," observed Peter Berkowitz in Commentary. Much of Steele's attention in this volume is dedicated to the "sensibility according to which racial preferences are the indispensable means to achieving equality for blacks," Berkowitz noted, and to dismantling the notions surrounding this contentious concept. This type of "redemptive liberalism" stands in contrast to more "classical liberalism," which was informed by concepts such as self-reliance, seizing of opportunity, taking of responsibility, and being rewarded and advanced according to merit, Steele asserts. For Steele, Berkowitz commented, "individual freedom and personal responsibility are non-negotiable, and represent two sides of the same coin. These principles, he maintains, are the necessary foundation not only for American self-government but also for the dream of racial integration, to which he remains rock-solid in his devotion." He is sharply critical of those he calls part of the "grievance elite," a group of black scholars, politicians, activists, and writers whose attitudes he sees as continuing to foster an environment of black helpless and victimization, and whose manipulations of the associated emotional and social elements help them retain their own power within government, the media, and the African American community. He is equally critical of white liberals, however, and those who seek to quell a sense of racial shame by offering ineffective solutions and weak social reforms that do not address long-term issues or, in the main, help African Americans solve their most pressing problems. "With searing eloquence and an inspiring display of the freedom of mind that he wishes to encourage in others, Shelby Steele reminds us of the demanding principles by which Americans of every race can yet live together with pride and mutual respect," Berkowitz stated.

In his 2006 volume, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Steele delves deeper into his ideas concerning the programs, policies, and social structures put into place, mostly by white liberals, to assist blacks in economic, educational, and other situations. In Steele's view, these programs, particularly Affirmative Action, fail to provide the means for African Americans to truly take responsibility for their lives and become self-sufficient outside of any consideration of race. Instead, these programs serve to do little more than assuage long-term white guilt over slave and civil rights abuses by creating policies that, on their surface, seem to be helping blacks, but which at their foundation only perpetuate the victim mentality and the notion that blacks must be helped by someone else—specifically, by whites. In a more insidious fashion, Steele observes, these programs help whites retain significant power over blacks, and ensures that those of all races who continue to espouse black victimization and similar disempowering rhetoric will retain a measure of power and ability to manipulate the racial divide to their own ends. "Whoever is able to establish moral authority vis-a-vis some 'outrage' grasps the power to lead and to do what they will," observed Alvin Kernan in Public Interest.

The functional core of white guilt, according to Steele, is "a form of self-congratulation, whereby whites devise 'compassionate' policies, the real purpose of which is to show that whites are kind and innocent of racism," Will noted. Steele is unimpressed by these policies and programs, and is intensely critical of some. For example, he calls Affirmative Action "the second betrayal of black freedom in America," after slavery, noted Kernan. "In accepting the responsibility, Steele argues, for what it has done to blacks in the past, affirmative action turns those blacks into 'victims,' an inferior race that is not responsible for either its own past sufferings or its present problems. It is white society that is responsible, white society that makes things go, not the black individual," Kernan remarked.

"The unbearable boredom occasioned by most of today's talk about race is alleviated by [this] slender, stunning new book," commented George F. Will in Newsweek. "Steele's analysis of affirmative action cuts deep and, I think, to the center. He cannot prove his case with statistics, does not even try, but he catches perfectly and explains persuasively the hypocrisy and self-serving qualities that seem always to hover around liberal social programs," Kernan stated. In concluding his review of the book, Will noted that White Guilt is a volume that will stand for years as a "clarifying lens through which to view the lonely struggle of clear sighted black intellectuals to rescue blacks from a degrading temptation" to "profit from the condescension toward blacks" that continues to propel misguided programs and white guilt today.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chronicle of Philanthropy, May 19, 2006, "Political Thought," p. 34.

Commentary, February, 1999, Peter Berkowitz, review of A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, p. 66.

Human Relations, April, 1996, R.L. McNeely, review of The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, p. 489.

Library Journal, April 15, 2006, Thomas J. Davis, review of White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, p. 93.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 30, 1990, Charles Johnson, "A Challenge for Black Americans," review of The Content of OurCharacter, p. 1.

Nation, March 4, 1991, Adolph Reed, Jr., review of The Content of Our Character, p. 274.

National Review, September 17, 1990, Brad Miner, review of The Content of Our Character, p. 52.

New Republic, December 10, 1990, Juan Williams, review of The Content of Our Character, p. 33.

Newsweek, June 5, 2006, George F. Will, "White Guilt, Deciphered," review of White Guilt, p. 68.

New York Times, May 30, 1990, Peter Applebome, "A Professor at the Heart of Anguish on Breaking the Shackles of Racism," p. A18.

New York Times Book Review, September 16, 1990, Patricia J. Williams, review of The Content of Our Character, p. 12.

People, May 14, 1990, David Hiltbrand, review of "Seven Days in Bensonhurst," p. 13.

Public Interest, spring, 1999, Alvin Kernan, review of A Dream Deferred, p. 118.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), September 16, 1990, Clarence Page, review of The Content of Our Character, p. 4.

Washington Post, October 10, 1990, E.J. Dionne, Jr., "Red-Hot Ideas on Black and White: Fueling the Debate on Race and Responsibility," profile of Shelby Steele, p. 1.