Shelby Steele writing in the Wall Street Journal
In the mid 60s, when the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were staples on the evening news, we black Americans stepped into a vastly greater freedom than anything we had ever known.
Great God Almighty, we are free at last portrayed freedom as heaven. But freedom also had to have been scary. Oppression had conditioned us to suppress our humanity, to settle ourselves into a permanent subjugation. Not the best preparation for a full life in freedom.
I believe it was this collision with freedo , its intimidating burden of responsibility, its terror of the unknown, its risk of humiliation that pressured black Americans, especially the young, into a terrible mistake.
In segregation we had longed for a freedom grounded in democratic principles. In the 60s we won that point. But then suddenly, with the ink still wet on the Civil Rights Act, a new voice of protest exploded onto the scene, a voice of race and color and atavistic longing: black power.
To accommodate, we shifted the overriding focus of racial protest in America from rights and laws to identity. Today racial preferences are used everywhere in American life. Identity is celebrated almost as profusely as freedom once was.
It all follows a simple formula
Add a history of victimization to the identity of any group, and you will have created entitlement. Today
black identity is a victim focused identity designed to entitle blacks in American life. By the terms of this identity, we blacks might be called citizen victims or citizens with privileges.
The obvious problem with this is that it baits us into a life of chasing down privileges like affirmative action.
In broader America, this only makes us sufferers for want of privileges. Reparation can never be more than a dream of privilege.
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University Hoover Institution and author of
Shame: How America s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country.
