Shelby Steele on Trump
"There is this slowly creeping reality that we blacks are in charge of our own fate."
Hi all,
Happy Thanksgiving! It has been quite the year for most and I hope you all enjoy some quality family and/or down time.
I wanted to share with you Jason Riley’s phone interview with Shelby Steele that appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. While many blacks continue to vote for Democrat candidates, there has been an undeniable political shift in the black underclass to break free of this bond for a simple reason: they never benefit.
That is why Pastor Corey Brooks and others have chosen instead to chart their own path. Brooks is halfway through building a $40M Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center on the South Side of Chicago — with virtually no help from the Democratic establishment that destroyed a once proud working class community with policies of dependency.
Elsewhere, Ian Rowe has had success with his Vertex Partnership Academies, giving hundreds of children access to the American Dream through a rigorous education.
These are just a few of the many new developments that are taking place across America so there is much hope for the future.
In any case, here is Shelby Steele on Donald Trump’s victory. I can’t publish the article in full here so here is a shortened version:
"When I phoned Mr. Steele this week for his reaction to Donald Trump’s victory, he told me it could be evidence that the country had 'evolved' politically since the Obama presidency. Ms. Harris couldn’t rely on blind racial loyalty from minority voters or guilt from white voters to the extent that Mr. Obama had in 2008.
"'White guilt is a kind of unexamined force in American political life,' Mr. Steele said. 'Whites do a lot of things—entertain a lot of things—not because they believe them but because it buys them innocence, political innocence from all the evils of Western civilization.' If fewer whites were shamed into voting for Ms. Harris based on her ethnicity, bravo. Similarly, he said that if the link between skin color and political preference is severing—if more blacks are starting to vote based on something other than racial identity—'I think it’s progress because it’s breaking up this idea that race is in itself meaningful, that it has some truth to deliver in political contests.'
"Mr. Steele said that most people were simply looking for a basic level of competence, and the Democratic candidate came up short. 'The inarticulateness, the lack of any sort of familiarity with the issues. I mean, wow! She was kind of an insult to minority voters. You can’t do any better than this?'
"And he found it 'thrilling' to see so many blacks support Mr. Trump, who won a quarter of all black men and a third of black men ages 18 to 44, according to exit polls. 'To me, that’s a vote for individualism over group identity. We thought identity was the be-all and end-all, and if we mastered that, everything would be wonderful. It wasn’t. We were worse off. I think this election was a real note of progress for black America politically..."
"'I think it’s definitely something that will continue when Trump leaves the scene,' Mr. Steele told me. 'There is this slowly creeping reality that we blacks are in charge of our own fate. And those kinds of ideas—you see more of an openness to that way of thinking. You can go to the deepest pockets of black America, where you would presume that anger defines everything. And you see many blacks now thinking what you and I have been thinking for a long time. That hey, this doesn’t work. I believe in the collective perceptivity of black America, that they are going to absorb this.'"
If you have access to the WSJ, here is the link to the full article.
Happy Eating,
Eli
Living most of my life in Detroit, I've watched a gradual maturing process in the black electorate over decades. When black candidates first got elected, they would do anything to keep the first black occupant in that office, for fear that "the whites" would take over again. It didn't matter what the candidate did. My black state representative was even reelected while in prison. Plus, any black running against the black incumbent was portrayed as representing "the whites" who wanted to take back power. However, eventually a black congresswoman was elected who turned out to be so terrible that she was replaced with a more competent black candidate. Once that happened, many blacks were still voting based on race, but they were freely replacing bad black incumbents with other black candidates. In more recent years, that electorate has graduated to just electing whoever they think can fix the mess, so they sometimes elect whites and Asians to office. All they want is for someone to give them the same good life, education and professional opportunities that others have.
You also can't underestimate the impression it's made on Detroiters to see other blacks move to white majority suburbs where their children receive a good education that prepares them for much better opportunities. The black high school kid in the Detroit system might never have heard of Paris, while a similar kid who was enrolled in the suburbs might graduate proficient in French, not to mention calculus.
Eli, thanks again for sharing your father's wisdom again with us via this interview.