White Guilt, Obama, and Shelby Steele

"What is white guilt? It is not a personal sense of remorse over past wrongs. White guilt is literally a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality, and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America's historical racism. It is the stigmatization of whites and, more importantly, American institutions with the sin of racism. Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative--that they are not racist--to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity. If they fail to prove the negative, they will be seen as racists. Political correctness, diversity policies, and multiculturalism are forms of deference that give whites and institutions a way to prove the negative and win reprieve from the racist stigma."

Excerpt from:
The age of white guilt: and the disappearance of the black individual

Essay
By Shelby Steele
Harper's Magazine, November 30, 1999
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President Barack Obama sound good to you?
Sounds good for Africa, Asia or some Arab country - but not for the United States of America. I'm not some silly woman all googley-eyed over Barack Hussein Obama (sounds like Osama, doesn't it?) or some self-hating or misguided white person who feels I must vote for the black man to prove to the racist PC masters I'm not racist.
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Shelby Steele on Obama
"He needs a self. There's no self there. I think it comes from a lifetime of being bound up and playing one side, and another side, and never feeling that he had the right to be his own man," Mr. Steele said in a hotel bar this week. "This is the tragedy, certainly, of the black intellectual class in America. They don't think they have the right to be individuals, so they're all just predictable, victim-focused, old line. It's a generation that's failed to really take us further. Obama is a part of that. There's nobody there."