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Archive of posts published in the tag: Shelby Steele

Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist

The sign on the Statue of Liberty does not ask for your Nobel Prize winners, your valedictorians and your Mensa members.  The state of Georgia was a penal colony. So was Australia.  In Israel the Ethiopians, airlifted in Operation Solomon, became stellar Israelis.  What made the United States, Australia and Israel the successful nations they became was not an immigration meritocracy, but the development of a system where those from the worst conditions in the world could rise so far above it that they created the greatest nations on earth.

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Racism and Freedom

Shelby Steele at the WSJ-
“When you don’t know how to go forward, you never just sit there; you go backward into what you know, into what is familiar and comfortable and, most of all, exonerating. You rebuild in your own mind the oppression that is fading from the world. “

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The Racial Hammer

From The Wall Street Journal, Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism by Shelby Steele Such people—and the American left generally—have a hunger for racism that is almost craven. The writer Walker Percy once wrote of the “sweetness at the

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Racial Fatigue

From The Wall Street Journal, Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism by Shelby Steele So today there is sweetness at the news of racism because it sets off the hunt for innocence and power. Racism and bigotry generally are the

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Mock Liberalism

From Shelby Steele in the WSJ, The Exhaustion of American Liberalism White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities. Moreover, all the actual

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The Theft of Moral Authority

From Shelby Steele in the WSJ, The Exhaustion of American Liberalism This was the circumstance in which innocence of America’s bigotries and dissociation from the American past became a currency of hardcore political power. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by

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The Corruption of Liberalism

From Shelby Steele in the WSJ, The Exhaustion of American Liberalism Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism

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A Victim of Their Own Success

Shelby Steele writes in the Wall Street Journal The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment. Excerpts: This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of

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