In his two thoughtful books, The Content of Our Character and A Dream Deferred, academic Shelby Steele has explained great disappointment of the post civil rights era. How was it possible that after the landmark Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, the politics of race would turn sour? Steele explains that the politics of the United States must be understood in terms of white guilt.
It was not enough to just sign the Civil Rights Acts and go home. Left over from the euphoria was the shame of white oppression, the stain of centuries. That accumulation of white guilt had to be expiated.
And so we were led by guilty white liberals into the wilderness of racial preferences, affirmative action, and “diversity.”
As is so often the case, it turned out that the moral crusade of white expiation was not just good politics, but good business, and liberals found that they could build careers, not to mention power and the love of beautiful women, out of race politics. Indeed they have transformed the culture of the university completely in their great work of expiation.
Today in the United States the only thing that matters in an educational institution is race, class, gender, oppression, and victimization. In an era when barriers of race, class, and gender have been lowered to an extent never seen before in human history, the diversity activists declare that oppression and marginalization are the only reality.
In an article in OpinionJournal.com, Shelby Steele now takes his theory of white guilt global.
In the aftermath of global white colonialism and white imperialism, he explains, the powerful United States must expiate for the sins of the white race.
Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence.
...
So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism.
That is why the weak and disorganized insurgency in Iraq can enjoy a certain success: the United States cannot bring the full force of its power to bear. It must fight two wars, one against the insurgency and one to prove itself free from the stain of white imperialism.
It is the same white guilt that makes the elite white Europeans flummoxed over the radicalized Moslems in their midst.
You can see where all this is going. It is going to get worse. It is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. It has to get worse before the white West finally flips and says: Enough already.
From a grand strategic point of view, it will probably help if India and China get singed by the Islamic conflagration so that when the tipping point comes they will tip onside.
Things will need to get worse before they get better because of the cultural power of the left in the West, the people who believe in white guilt instead of believing in God. It will not take argument and the give and take of debate to discredit the left and its discourse of power and oppression. It will take a disaster.
Although the West, the democratic capitalist West, is experienced world-wide as a white phenomenon, it is not. It is a middle-class phenomenon, the new world-historical culture that transcends race, tribe, religion, and political power. It champions the idea of free peoples serving each other in voluntary cooperation and trust under the rule of law. It champions the separation of powers in government, and the greater separation of powers in society between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.
It is still new, still confusing, still little understood. It is the first world culture that already in its structure and its ordering permits the flowering of a true cooperative world community.
And it will prevail.
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