In 1955 the killers of Emmett Till, a black Mississippi youth, were acquitted because they were white. Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. The age of white supremacy has given way to an age of white guilt—and neither has been good for African Americans. Through articulate analysis and engrossing recollections, acclaimed race relations sch… More >>
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era
Shameless whites who serve the elite establishment of this empire, like Laura Ingraham, really love this book. It denies the existence of institutional racism, things such as the racist drug laws (see “The Perpetual Prisoner Machine” by Joel Dyer), the CIA funnelling crack into African-American communities (see “Dark Alliance” by Gary Webb), the neglected public schools (see “Savage Inequalities” by Jonathan Kozol), and much more.
Then there’s the constant derision of government “hand-outs.” A very clever deception, as the people who most often deride “hand-outs” usually have their snouts quite deep in the government trough. People like state functionaries in the DEA, CIA, FBI, INS, and other agencies that traditionally have harrassed black and brown people to a disproportionate degree. Then there are the hand-outs that are procured by an army of corporate lobbyists that secure public dollars for businessmen with a sense of entitlement (see “Take the Rich off Welfare”). “Hand-outs” are only a bad thing when it’s the general public who want a share of their public dollars to serve their communities. But “hand-outs” are just good business when the public subsidies go toward corporatists, weapons contractors, extractive industries who hoard the wealth of our public lands, Wal-Mart billionaires who put their exploited workers on government assistance and so forth.
This book, like Thomas Sowell’s and Jessie Lee Peterson’s, is exactly the sort of delusion that irresponsible and cowardly whites lap up. I love Steele’s propaganda about a “minimalist” war. As anybody familiar with the real world knows, dumping depleted uranium and cluster bombs, endless Apache and Warthog attacks, the demolition of Falluja and Samarra, and so forth has killed tens of thousands of people. Apparently, this mass destruction of human life isn’t enough to satisfy Steele’s bloodlust. He and other worshippers of our culture of death should take heart and keep in mind that our bombing of Iraq’s water and sewage infrastructure, and the sanctions we then imposed, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as well. Maybe Steele and others will only be satisfied with a nuke dropped on Baghdad, or another third of US blacks being stuck into cages. Who knows? Maybe at some point the white folk and race traitors who make a living off of all this oppression will experience pangs of guilt; but I’m sure they’ve got a bottle of Zoloft nearby to take normal human sentiments away.
“If there is a country in this world that has committed unimaginable crimes against humanity, it is the United States of America.” -Nelson Mandela
Rating: 5 / 5
“Public school resegregation is a “national horror hidden in plain view,” writes former educator turned public education activist Kozol (Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace). Kozol visited 60 schools in 11 states over a five-year period and finds, despite the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, many schools serving black and Hispanic children are spiraling backward to the pre-Brown era. These schools lack the basics: clean classrooms, hallways and restrooms; up-to-date books in good condition; and appropriate laboratory supplies. Teachers and administrators eschew creative coursework for rote learning to meet testing and accountability mandates, thereby “embracing a pedagogy of direct command and absolute control” usually found in “penal institutions and drug rehabilitation programs.” As always, Kozol presents sharp and poignant portraits of the indignities vulnerable individuals endure. “You have all the things and we do not have all the things,” one eight-year-old Bronx boy wrote the author. In another revealing exchange, a cynical high school student tells his classmate, a young woman with college ambitions who was forced into hair braiding and sewing classes, “You’re ghetto-so you sew.” Kozol discovers widespread acceptance for the notion that “schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of academic and career goals” than schools serving middle-and upper-class children. Kozol tempers this gloom with hopeful interactions between energetic teachers and receptive children in schools where all is not lost. But these “treasured places” don’t hide the fact, Kozol argues, that school segregation is still the rule for poor minorities, or that Kozol, and the like-minded politicians, educators and advocates he seeks out, believe a new civil rights movement will be necessary to eradicate it.”
From the Publisher’s Weekly review of
THE SHAME OF THE NATION
Jonathan Kozol
“In 1968, African Americans earned 55 cents for every dollar of white income. At the current pace, it would take 581 years for African Americans to achieve income parity.
* States including Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia tax food and basic needs at a higher rate than income from investments.
* Welfare for very low income people totaled $193 billion in 2004. Aid to “dependent corporations” exceeded $800 billion.
This updated edition of the widely touted Economic Apartheid in America looks at the causes and manifestations of wealth disparities in the United States, including tax policy in light of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and recent corporate scandals.
Published with two leading organizations dedicated to addressing economic inequality, the book looks at recent changes in income and wealth distribution and examines the economic policies and shifts in power that have fueled the growing divide.
Praised by Sojurners as ‘a clear blueprint on how to combat growing inequality,” Economic Apartheid in America provides “much-needed groundwork for more democratic discussion and participation in economic life’ (Tikkun). With ‘a wealth of eye-opening data’ (The Beacon) focusing on the decline of organized labor and civic institutions, the battle over global trade, and the growing inequality of income and wages, it argues that most Americans are shut out of the discussion of the rules governing their economic lives.
Accessible and engaging and illustrated throughout with charts, graphs, and political cartoons, the book lays out a comprehensive plan for action. Charts, graphs, and black-and-white illustrations throughout.”
Book description
ECONOMIC APARTHEID IN AMERICA:
A Primer on Economic
Inequality & Insecurity,
Chuck Collins (Foreword), Felice Yeskel,
United for a Fair Economy, Class Action
“There are always recalcitrants who raise questions about official pronouncements. Some even go as far as Adam Smith, who had little use for England’s posture of noble intent. Smith held that ‘the principal architects’ of global policy, ‘our merchants and manufacturers,’ have sought to ensure that their own interests have ‘been most peculiarly attended to,’ however ‘grievous’ the impact on others, particularly the victims of their ’savage injustice’ in India and elsewhere, but even the domestic population. Smith therefore falls into the category of ‘conspiracy theorists,’ people who attend to the historical and documentary record, and to domestic structures of power and the interests served by state planners. They do not reflexively admire professions of benign intent, such as the dedication to promote democracy, justice and freedom. [Therefore] Their pernicious influence must be stemmed–in more violent states, by force; in more free societies by other means.”
Noam Chomsky
FAILED STATES
From chapter four,
“Democracy Promotion Abroad”
“In this…illuminating anthology, editor Borjesson succinctly explains the journalist’s predicament: ‘The buzzsaw is what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country’s large institutions, be they corporate or government, want kept under wraps.’ Indeed, if members of the general public read this book, or even portions of it, they will be appalled… Executives regularly squelch legitimate stories that will lower their ratings, upset their advertisers or miff their investors. Unfortunately, this dirt is unlikely to reach unknowing news audiences…Here, Murrow Award-winning reporter Borjesson edits essays by journalists from the Associated Press to CBS News to the New York Times. Each tells of their difficulties with news higher-ups as they tried to publish or air controversial stories relating to everything from toxic dump sites and civilian casualties to police brutality and dangerous hospitals. Most of the sentiments here are especially relevant given the current reports of the war in Afghanistan and questions of their validity, making this timely and essential reading for students and scholars of journalism…”
Publisher’s Weekly
Excerpts of review of
INTO THE BUZZSAW
by Kristina Borjesson
All the guilt in the world could not have created America’s policies of exclusion, and no amount of analysing it is going to change it if we choose to ignore it.
Rating: 2 / 5
“The Republicans have a problem. The economic program of American Conservatives, if enacted in its entirety, would devastate the middle class while helping the American overclass. Income would be redistributed upward, while taxes would be redistributed downward…. How can conservatives expect to win votes for an economic program so inimical to the middle class? The answer is they cannot–and they know it. Therefore, most conservative ideologues… have done their best to change the subject from the economy to what they like to call, ‘the culture’…”
Michael Lind
UP FROM CONSERVATISM (1996)
From Chapter Five, “Whistling Dixie”
“Record levels of unemployment and disappearing jobs in inner-city neighborhoods are the root cause of poverty and social distress among African Americans, contends Wilson, an eminent University of Chicago sociology professor… Wilson…sees a direct link between growing joblessness and what he calls ghetto-related behavior and attitudes–fatherless children born out of wedlock, drugs, crime, gang violence, hopelessness–but unlike those who blame a “culture of poverty,” he emphasizes that structural changes can effect a turnaround. His plan to reverse declining employment and social inequality includes proposals for city-suburban collaboration, private-sector partnerships with public schools, national health insurance, and time limits on welfare for able-bodied recipients combined with guaranteed jobs in a public-works program modeled on the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration.”
From the Publisher’s Weekly review of
WHEN WORK DISAPPEARS
William Julius Wilson
Shelby Steele is a highly regarded English professor whose wife is a licensed psychologist. The combination of the two perspectives–both definitively focused on language and artistic narrative above science and economics–creates a marketable perspective on society that, ironically, hides the true origins of the structural indignities of our society. The resultant obfuscation of the rebirth of an old Plantation monster in the advent of the neoliberal economic policies implemented by neoconservatives since the Reagan Administration (and, naturally, their effect on the American poor and middle class regardless of race) is, like an illegal drug, simultaneously euphoria-producing (”ignorance is bliss”) and emotionally addictive. Pretending “The Race Question” is still at cause of the issues of America allows, via latent racism, the psychological narcotic to be marketed with impunity.
In other words, Steele’s work, while referencing respect and emotional health…is essentially a study in popular suburban mythology.
And myth sells even better than sex.
A similar archetypal example of the upper middle class will-to-psychology fright/flight response in the face of the revealing of unspeakable truths can be seen in the Washington Post response to the story of DARK ALLIANCE by investigative journalist Gary Webb. Gary Webb, via “following the money” of drug dealers in California up the food chain in the 90s, uncovered the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the proliferation of cheap drugs and guns in the Black communities across the country. This, as has been proven, was done for the benefit of fattening slush funds financing the Reagan-era “Contra” wars in Nicaragua; secret wars which broke every international law ever written for the benefit of destroying a democratically elected government that did not serve US interests in the region. The CIA role in the development and proliferation of illegal drugs is something re-proven by Gary Webb, and since THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA by Alfred McCoy a generation before him, has been a truism in the dissident historical literature. Yet despite the journalistic integrity, reams of paperwork & signed documents, interviews, photos and the like Webb produced, the so-called “liberal media” attacked him, *personally*, at all costs. It turns out the “liberal media” was–and always has been–a deadly oxymoron for the poor in America. The Washington Post, New York Times and other major newspapers in the country threatened to sue his newspaper in San Jose until his story was removed from both the paper and the website–despite it being, again, a totally true blockbuster piece that you’d expect to have won him a Pulitzer. This is when the “Black Rage” theory, designed to explain away this and other state secrets via codependent Negro paranoia, became ubiquitous.
What Gary Webb revealed by lifting the veil on government involvement in the international drug trade was the degree to which the media was complicit in it. A good deed for the population that could not go unpunished by the middle managers put in place to control it.
The reality: three industries (not emotions, industries) as part of the neoliberal economic revolution have changed the face of Black American culture dramatically and probably forever since the 1960s. And they are: 1) the abortion/birth control industry, and the degree of dramatic change it has facilitated in the gender/parent relations of American culture in general and the Black family in particular; 2) the aforementioned illegal drug trade and 3) the growth of the Prison Industrial Complex, creating a slave labor base for other (still declining) American industries while also keeping the undereducated white poor in America focused on criminal justice instead of social change. The only way you can have a substantive conversation about these dynamics in America is to begin by discussing the obvious evidence of their effect on the American poor’s overall health: expressed in its culture and interpersonal relations; its economic/behavioral choices; its (dys)functional morality. Preventing such self-analysis by hiding the facts, however, so undercuts the spiritual transformation & economic independence of the Black AND White poor that it becomes an invaluable function of upper middle class stability; EFFECTIVELY PREVENTING UNCONTROLLABLE SOCIAL CHANGE FROM BELOW. Removing “White Guilt” (aka the inner thermostat to the dominant culture’s misuse of the power given to their leaders), in regards to the degree the upper middle class is complicit in the perpetuation of these dynamics, is equally pernicious.
No culture has ever undergone the kind of mass transactional psychoanalysis WHITE GUILT implies we need, to nurture a dubiously functional status quo that is causing the actual problems. Freud has its limits. Steele has not done the state some service with this book. And he knows it.
Rating: 2 / 5
The term “white guilt” is another conservative invention created by white supremacists (and their cheerleaders, Steele & company) who attempt to negatively spin the objectives of the affirmative action movement. Steele and his ilk refuse to acknowledge the fact that for generations white america was able to very effectively use the government/laws to assure that they controlled all of the US lands and assets. It was only at the point that whites held everything when a few of them even began to ponder the extremely biased laws and practices that precluded other races (namely blacks)from even having a hope of ever enjoying a piece of the pie. Indeed, many white americans born today in the US still reap tremendous benefits from the institutional racism that occured in the past in the form of property, money, and other “hard” assets (where are all the books from conservatives discussing this issue??). Offering a few blacks the opportunity of affirmative action is a little like playing “White Monopoly”. In “White Monopoly”, one player (white) gets to own all of the property and the bank, and then competes agaist another player (black). They both get to collect $200 when they pass “Go”. Of course, in “White Monopoly” the white player is the one complaining – after all, why should the black player also be allowed to collect the $200?? TWO WRONGS DO NOT MAKE A RIGHT!! Save your money – skip this book!!!
Rating: 1 / 5
“Most societies have some version of the Golden Age myth. (The term itself comes from the ancient Greek poet and moral philosopher Hesiod…) Once, it is said, there was a time when disorder and sin were nonexistent…children respected their elders; husbands and wives were faithful to each other…popular literature was highly intellectual, and tended to promote good character…
“…in recent years the intellectuals and publicists of the American Right, drawing on both Jefferson-Jackson populism and Marxism, have developed a unique synthesis of the Golden Age and devil myths. The Golden Age…ended in the 1960’s, when long-haired campus radicals [and militant blacks] took over the culture…”
Michael Lind
UP FROM CONSERVATISM
“The Culture War and the Myth of the New Class”
“We live in a relativistic culture where television ‘reality shows’ are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics…where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the ‘reality-based community,’ can assert that ‘we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’…members of the current Bush administration, as Franklin Foer has written in The New Republic, have promoted ‘the radically postmodern’ view that ’science,’ ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ ‘are guises for an ulterior, leftist agenda,’ arguing that experts (be they experts on the environment, Medicare or postwar Iraq) ‘are so incapable of dispassionate and disinterested analysis that their work doesn’t even merit a hearing’…”
Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
“Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways”
January 17, 2006
The Republicans have a problem…How can conservatives expect to win votes for an economic program so inimical to the middle class? The answer is they cannot–and they know it. Therefore most conservative ideologues have done their best to change the subject from the economy to what they like to call ‘the culture’…Both race-baiting and the [sexual] politics of family values are part of the same Republican culture war strategy of diverting the anger of the white working class from the owners and operators of the Republican party–the corporate and hereditary rich–and focusing wrath on unpopular minorities…”
“Supply-side economics, the myth of public school failure, and the illegitimacy-epidemic hoax are on the tip of the iceberg. Other examples of the dissemination of half-truths and falsehoods by the foundation subsidized conservative intelligentsia…are not difficult to find…”
Michael Lind
UP FROM CONSERVATISM
From Chapter Five, “Whistling Dixie”
“Mary Frances Betty, chairperson of the US Civil Rights Commission, said the real horror of the 2000 election was not the vote count that so transfixed our media, but what she calls ‘the no-count’–THE MEANS OF KEEPING CITIZENS FROM VOTING OR HAVING THEIR BALLOTS VOIDED. And Florida used more than the voter purge in their ‘no-count’ bag of tricks. In February 2001, I found a doozy…In a presidential race decided by 537 votes, Florida simply DID NOT COUNT 179,855 ballots. And whether your vote counted depended a lot on your color… The adjoining county, [predominantly black] Gadsden, also had machine-read paper ballots (as the ballots in predominantly white county Sancho, where the ballots with mistakes were mechanically shot back into the voter’s hands), BUT DID NOT ACTIVATE [the voting machine's] REJECT MECHANISM…As the Tallahassee official demonstrated to me, whether a ballot was counted or not had almost nothing to do with the voter’s education or sophistication–but an awful lot to do with the type of machine deployed AND HOW THE BUTTONS WERE SET.”
Greg Palast
THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY
From Chapter Two:
“Jim Crow in Cyberspace”
“Let me control the myths of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.”
Mark Twain
Steele’s rhetoric, eloquent though it usually is, is taking on more and more of the Apologist’s timbre with each book; this being his latest.
=Who exactly are the “black militants” he is referring to in this, the year 2006?
=Isn’t discussing Black Americans devoid of any significant class, ethnic or generational distinctions as he does a form of the very racism he is supposedly condemning?
=Does his book WHITE GUILT buy whites and blacks alike out of confronting the inconvenient revelations of Noam Chomsky (PROFIT OVER PEOPLE; ROGUE STATES; HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL; ROGUE STATES; FAILED STATES); William Julius Wilson (WHEN WORK DISAPPEARS); Jonathon Kozol (SAVAGE INEQUALITIES; SHAME OF THE NATION); or Greg Palast (THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY; ARMED MADHOUSE)?
=And wasn’t Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader “who appealed to the nation’s moral character” assassinated after speaking out against the Military Industrial Complex role in the horror of VIETNAM, not segregation (William F. Pepper: AN ACT OF STATE: THE EXECUTION OF MARTIN LUTHER KING)?
I highly respect Steele; his first book, THE CONTENT OF OUR CHARACTER, was wonderful. But he’s beginning to sound like he is trying to relieve HIS OWN guilt, regarding assimilating a bit more than even a (neo)conservative, intellectual, Black American intellectual should.
Rating: 2 / 5