A Dream Deferred, the Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. - book review

Public Interest, Spring, 1999 by Alvin Kernan

Racism is the original sin of American society, and no matter how a millenarian society centered on equality attempts to ameliorate it or, better still, eradicate it, it remains, a baffling and ugly fact. Slavery, the Missouri Compromise, John Brown, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Great Society - still racism is there, and nothing makes it go away.

Since the heroic death of Martin Luther King and the freedom movement of the 1960s, America has been engaged in another great effort to right the wrongs of its past treatment of blacks. "Affirmative action" may be taken as the covering term for a vast social effort that ranges from aid to dependent children and welfare, to racial preferences in college admissions, job hiring, and the granting of contracts, to social scientists who would "prove" that intelligence tests, in which blacks do not score as well as whites, are racially biased.

For the most part, the public voices we hear on this issue are white and liberal. They largely tell us that America has turned its back on its shameful history of racism, and that progress is being made in all areas, not only as a result of government intervention and financing but by a change of heart everywhere. The former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, in their book, The Shape of the River, for example, demonstrate that affirmative action in higher education has created a black middle class that is not only prospering but contributing to the public weal. So attractive is the book's message that the New York Times commended it in an editorial. Statistics tell us that black income is rising. A black novelist, Toni Morrison, wins the Nobel Prize. Black athletes and entertainers are getting rich. Advertisements - an important component of American "reality" - now feature blacks as figures of authority and "role models."

It is a tough problem, but we are getting somewhere at last, say the traditional American voices of optimism and activism. But Shelby Steele, a black intellectual and research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is not buying it. In his recent book, A Dream Deferred, The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America,(*) he argues that "affirmative action" is a great sham. America, so goes his interpretation, has slavery and racism on its puritan conscience, and, unable to endure the guilt for past sins, it constructed "affirmative action" to restore its feeling of virtue. The policy relieves the American conscience of its guilt and restores its "moral vanity" but really changes nothing. It is only another instance of "our general willingness to have the glib, 'innovative' idea stand in for principle and difficult struggle."

Steele is not merely commenting on the smug hypocrisy that always hangs about good causes. He considers affirmative action to be "the second betrayal of black freedom in America," slavery being the first. The present attempt to help blacks continues to assert their inferiority, functioning to the same end, though far more generously and subtly, of course, as Jim Crow and even slavery itself. In accepting the responsibility, Steele argues, for what it has done to blacks in the past, affirmative action turns those blacks into "victims," an inferior race that is not responsible for either its own past sufferings or its present problems. It is white society that is responsible, white society that makes things go, not the black individual. Do poorly in entrance exams to college - it is the fault of deficient early education. Do badly in early education - it is the fatherless family, or the drug-taking mother, or the cruel ethos of the street gangs that is responsible. Do poorly anywhere, and it is the heritage of oppression that is to blame.

In this way, liberal America cultivates in black people themselves a feeling of inferiority and insufficiency in contrast to the "white masters" who make things happen on their own. And, as blacks come to think of themselves as victims of white society, they lose, according to Steele, the cutting edge of their suffering. They blame others rather than themselves, thus failing to take the self-preserving actions that suffering should generate in the sufferers. "This is intolerable, we must do something to get out of this situation," is what Steele wants blacks to say. But instead they ask for reparations, and America acts in bad faith, vitiating its own most fundamental principles, such as equality, to provide them in the form of affirmative action. Witness the O. J. Simpson case!

Still, there is no great harm in being misguided do-gooders, a trifle naive perhaps, but still warmhearted and caring. Yes? "No," says Steele, who finds behind affirmative action a concealed desire not only to establish white superiority but also to assert the moral authority of the reformers. Surely, not everyone will see affirmative action as a covert bid for political dominance, but it will be hard for even our most zealous reformers to deny altogether that they harbor a desire "to repeat history, to have whites take agency over black life and use it for their own ends." And those ends are, according to Steele, mostly forms of power.