Yesterday, my father, Shelby Steele, and I had a great, wide-ranging discussion on ideology in education and other key subjects with Monica Harris of FAIR and Ildi Tillmann who is a FAIR Arts Fellow. People called it an inspirational conversation but I’ll let you judge for yourself.
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Perhaps the best line was from my father who said bluntly, “We have to stop teaching identity in schools. We have to teach performance and excellence.” Click the picture below or here for the conversation.
Also, I wanted to share with you an X post of mine that I thought you might find interesting, given all the WWII revisionism and antisemitism going on:
Leon Bass was a nineteen-year-old African-American sergeant serving in a segregated army unit when he encountered the "walking dead" of Buchenwald. Like many others, he tried to repress his memories of the horrors that he saw there and "never talked about it all."
But in the 1960s, while involved in the Civil Rights movement and teaching, he met a Holocaust survivor and felt moved to declare to his students that “I was there, I saw.”
Leon Bass: "Nobody ever talked about the things we did in the Battle of the Bulge. No one talked about the 761st Tank Battalion, which was black, who fought all the way through Europe with General Patton.
"When I went into the armed forces...I found out that institutional racism was part of our country’s system. You see, when I went down to the induction center...they sent me one way and they sent all my white friends another way.
"I found out that the people that I had sworn to protect and defend were looking at me as though I was not good enough to enjoy what all Americans are supposed to enjoy.
"When you have two separate armies, you’re sending a message saying that you’re not good enough; you are inferior. But we made them aware that that was not so, because we demonstrated that we was equal to, and sometimes even surpassed, some of the other soldiers...
"...We had to keep in mind...that goal was to fight to get rid of the racism that created the hostilities in Europe, and to remember that we had to focus on the hostilities and the racism back here at home. So we had a double duty, so it took a good soldier to do that.
"The day that I walked through the concentration camp gates of Buchenwald, and I saw what I saw, I can never say that I’m callous about human life.
"It made me know that human life is sacred, because when I walked through those gates in the spring of April of 1945, I was totally unprepared for what I saw. And I saw what I can refer to now as the walking dead.
"It made me know that human life is sacred, because when I walked through those gates in the spring of April of 1945, I was totally unprepared for what I saw. And I saw what I can refer to now as the walking dead.
"I saw human beings there that had been beaten and starved and tortured and so mistreated that they were nothing but human skeletons. They were skin and bone and they had those skeletal faces with the deep-set eyes, and their heads had been clean-shaved.
"And they were standing there holding on to one another, and they were so thin. They had sores on their bodies that were brought on by malnutrition. And that man held out his hands, and his fingers had webbed together with the scabs that come from malnutrition.
"And I ? I just said to myself, 'My God, what is this? This is some kind of insanity! Who are the people? What did they do that was so wrong?'
"And that’s when I found out that they were Jews and gypsies, some were Jehovah Witnesses, they were trade unionists, they were Communists, they were homosexuals.
"There were so many different groups placed in that camp by the Nazis. And what did the Nazis use as a yardstick as to who would be chosen to go there? They said those people who were not good enough, those people who were inferior, they could be segregated.
"So, you see what I mean? Segregation, racism, can lead to the ultimate, to what I saw at Buchenwald."
It was a wonderful discussion, indeed! And such an honor for FAIR to host you, Eli, together with your father and Ildi! Thank you for spending your time and sharing your invaluable insights with all of us and the thousands of viewers on X!
It was a wonderful discussion, indeed! And such an honor for FAIR to host you, Eli, together with your father and Ildi! Thank you for spending your time and sharing your invaluable insights with all of us and the thousands of viewers on X!
I was unable to access the conversation on X. Neither the link nor the photograph worked.