‘A Dream Deferred’ RevisitedShelby Steele’s masterful second book invites black America to reject redemptive liberalism and the helplessness it demands for a humanistic politics of advancement.Samuel Kronen
22 Aug 2023
“The second book you publish,” Shelby Steele’s editor once told him, “is the hardest one you will ever write.” In Steele’s case, it turned out to be his best. After the publication of The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America in 1990, Steele found himself in the intellectual spotlight on the most contentious issue in the country. That experience changed his life. “Ultimately, what I found after The Content of Our Character is that people wanted more, wanted me to go further,” he told me earlier this year. “So that became the struggle. I had to go deeper to get to material and get my own thinking onto a different phase.”
The success and attention Steele received, however, came at a steep price. He was ejected from academia after a 20-year tenure at San José State University as an English professor, and he became a pariah to the post-1990s civil-rights establishment. He lost a number of friends and found that his university lectures were now routinely shouted down by students. “My career in universities sort of ended at that point, involuntarily,” he recalls. “The campus I taught on for many years sort of canceled me. I brag today [that] I was one of the first canceled people.” These unwelcome developments resulted in his second book, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, in 1998—an extended reflection on his new role as a black conservative in America’s cultural landscape, and on the country’s racial iconography and moral psychology. “So, all these things I had to absorb and understand. It was a difficult, alienating period of my life that now, in retrospect, I’m grateful for.”
Steele was an unlikely black conservative. He was born in 1946 near the South Side of Chicago to an integrated family of civil-rights activists. His early upbringing saw the end of segregation, the successful passage of key civil-rights legislation, and the dawn of a new America. His parents, Shelby Sr. and Ruth Steele, were both pillars of their community and founding members of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. Consequently, young Shelby spent much of his childhood attending protests to integrate public institutions. Forced into an all-black neighborhood and subpar schooling, he was subjected to all the indignities and humiliations of living on the wrong side of the color line in a separate and unequal society.
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The Loneliness of the Black ConservativeThe lengthiest essay in A Dream Deferred is titled, “The Loneliness of the Black Conservative,” and it is here that Steele first considered how he came to accept that unfamiliar label: “I realized, finally, that I was a black conservative when I found myself standing on stages being publicly shamed,” he wrote. His previous book had argued that racism was no longer the major issue for black people in America, and that America’s obsession with uncovering white persecution of blacks resembled an extension of the country’s stormy racial history, not a break from it. This view was considered heresy in many quarters.
As Steele “traveled around from one little Puritan village (read: university) to another, a common scene would unfold. Whenever my talk was finished, though sometimes before, a virtual militia of black students would rush to the microphones and begin to scream.” He was invariably accused of betraying his race. “My confronters were not freedom fighters; they were Carrie Nation-like enforcers, racial bluenoses, who lived in terror of certain words. Repression was their game, not liberation, and they said as much.” This outrage, Steele believed, illuminated an ironic reversal in the nature of black protest from the 1960s to the ’90s: “a shift in focus from protest to suppression, from blowing the lid off to tightening it down.”
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/08/22/a-dream-deferred-revisited/
