Black power = white guilt. So says Shelby Steele in a new book. He says white guilt isn't guilt of conscience, but a stigma people always feel they must disprove, much as blacks once felt they needed to disprove their inferiority.
The civil rights movement went wrong when it began to use white guilt as black power. Our power as blacks is the fact we could make the president of the United States give us the Great Society, welfare, affirmative action. We were slaves; now we can make the government give us these things. We went for that fool's gold. Since that time, black power or black leadership is totally devoted to the manipulation of white guilt as the way forward for blacks. They should have been saying manipulating white guilt is a waste of time. The only time we'll ever become competitive with other races, other people, is through our own development: educational development, economic development, cultural development.Here's an interview with him.
