The invaluable Shelby Steele had a characteristically beautiful and profound piece in the Wall Street Journal recently. I should have blogged it earlier. As good as it is, however (and no one can do these essays better than Steele), I believe it would have been even better, made its central point even stronger, if he had added one more icing-on-the-cake argument.
With my unfortunately characteristic immodesty, I will make it below. But first, since I’m not sure whether access to Steele’s piece requires a subscription, let me give some excerpts:
I can no longer hear Jesse Jackson’s name without thinking of Norma Desmond, the great and ruined silent film star in “Sunset Boulevard” who, after killing her lover, descends a marble staircase as if for her next scene when in fact only the police await. Norma is a figure of chilling pathos because she insists on the past, laboring maniacally yet in vain to once more wield the sort of beauty that stops and starts the lives of others. But it was really the mystery that silent films imparted to beauty that had made her special. Now that the movies talk, she is not only older; she is a living anachronism.
When Jesse Jackson was arrested at Yale on Labor Day while marching in support of the university’s striking workers, there was that same man-out-of-time quality, the same eerie insistence on the past that made Norma so chilling….
But Mr. Jackson is not alone in decline. In this 40th-anniversary year of the March on Washington, the entire civil rights establishment looks like an out-of-touch gerontocracy. Each summer the NAACP and Urban League conventions draw less attention, despite attempts to garner publicity with ever more venomous anti-Bush proclamations….
Today America has simply absorbed the point the civil rights movement was born to make. Even back in 1963 when Martin Luther King marched on Washington, much of America was quite prepared to agree with him…. And there was no real counter-argument anywhere to the “I Have a Dream” speech. By the next year the greatest civil rights legislation in history was passed into law….
The March on Washington was a majestic American moment because it offered a vision of America that was at once critical, inspiring, and flattering. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is an American manifesto since, like the Declaration of Independence, it carries the flattery of high expectations: that America can achieve a colorblind society. This speech articulates the spirit of the civil rights legislation that followed it in the same way that the Declaration articulated the spirit of the Constitution.
So black protest taught America that it could not be a legitimate democracy unless race ceased to be a barrier to individual freedom. This was instructive protest of the highest sort because there was parity between its accusations against America and the wrongs which America could grudgingly acknowledge. It said America was a racist society and it clearly was. Thus King, out in front of a movement with a near-perfect equilibrium between what it charged and what was acknowledged, gave black protest an unquestioned integrity and authority….
The breakdown of this parity is what makes today’s black leadership so Norma Desmond-like…. King towered by standing atop a near perfect equilibrium; no black leader since has matched his stature because white America has made it impossible. By weakening race as a barrier to freedom, whites can no longer sincerely acknowledge wrongdoing commensurate with what black leaders accuse them of. Black protest has become bad theater — shrill, unconvincing.
I told you it was beautiful and profound; now go read the whole thing if you can (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I didn’t quote all of it).
If you’ve caught your breath you must be wondering what anyone, especially I, could add. Here’s what: Steele’s central, telling point is the new mismatch between the continuing, shrill accusations of the civil rights movement and what most Americans (I dislike terms like “white America”) are willing to acknowledge. That’s true, and fine as far as it goes. But that analysis should be taken one step further (or is it “farther”? I looked up the distinction in several usage sources and still don’t know).
Not only is there a disjunction between accusation and acknowledgment. There is an equally telling, perhaps even more profound, disjunction between what the Jesse Jacksons et. al. demand and what most Americans think should be granted. And underlying that disjunction is the even more fundamental divergence between the principle of fairness on which the Jackson demands are based and the principle that most Americans still hold. The Jackson principle is some version of proportional group representation, which now marches under the banner of “diversity.” Most Americans, by contrast, still honor the traditional core value that every person should be treated “without regard” to race, religion, or ethnicity.
Steele notes, profoundly, that “there was no real counter-argument anywhere to the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” That’s because it was based on and appealed to the most fundamental American values. Today there is not only extensive counter-argument to the accusations of racism; there is even more significant objection to the principle of fairness that underlies those accusations.
It will be replied, of course, that the “without regard” principle should be rejected because our society is not, nor has it ever been, colorblind. That would make sense only if one were also willing to jettison the principles of the Declaration of Independence because we are not, in fact, all equal.
