[IN] MANY WAYS IT'S ABOUT POWER. In order to pursue power as they do, you have to have victims. Wow, the excitement that creates on the Left. It validates their claims that America is a wretched country, and they must get their recourse. It feeds this old model . . . that America is guilty of racism, guilty of this sin, and has been for 400 years, and minorities are victims who are entitled.
So when people start to talk about systemic racism, built into the system, what they’re really doing is . . .
. . . expanding the territory of entitlement. We want more. We want society to give us more. Society is responsible for us, because racism is so systemic. Well, that’s a corruption, and I know it’s a corruption, because the truth of the matter is blacks have never been less oppressed than they are today.
Opportunity is around every corner. In all of this, no one ever stops to say, well, you’re unhappy with where minorities are at in American life, and blacks continue to be at the bottom of most socioeconomic measures. You’re unhappy about that. Well, why don’t you take some responsibility for that? Why don’t you take more responsibility? I would be happy to look at all the usual bad guys, the police and so forth, if we had the nerve, the courage to look at black people.
To look at black Americans, minority Americans, and say, you’re not carrying your own weight. You’re gonna go have a fit and a tantrum and demonstrate, [but] are you teaching your child to read? Are you making sure that the school down the street actually educates your child? Are you becoming educated and following a dream in life and making things happen for yourself? Or are you saying, I’m a victim, and I’m owed, and the entitlement is inadequate? I need more, and after all, you whites, you know racism has been here for four centuries with slavery and so forth, so it’s time for you to give to me.
Well, that’s an exhausted, fruitless, empty strategy . . . . We’ve been on that path since the 60s. We’re farther behind than we’ve ever been, and we keep blaming it on racism, blaming it on the police. I’m exhausted with that. I grew up . . . when there was real segregation. Blacks during the ’50s took a lot of responsibility for their lives, because the government didn’t. My father bought three ramshackle houses, rebuilt them, rented them out, kept clawing his way up the ladder. A man with a third-grade education from the South. What civil rights bill is going to replace that? That value system?
And he was not exceptional. Across the community we lived in, those were the values. That is the problem. We have allowed ourselves to be enabled in avoiding our real problems by a guilty white society. It keeps using us and exploiting us as victims. If you really care about how minorities do, why don’t you ask them to do it? Why don’t you ask them to drop the pretense?
There’s always going to be some racism, in every society. My own sense is that it is endemic to the human condition. We will always have to watch out for it. As I like to always say, stupidity is also endemic to the human condition, and we have to watch out for that too. That is no excuse for us to be where we are right now in American life. We have let this sort of guilty society, and our grievance industry, put us in this impossible situation where we are a permanent underclass. . . .
(Shelby Steele, Partial Transcript, Life, Liberty, and Levin, June 7, 2020, from Jeff Reynolds, "Insurrection: Civil Rights Leader Shelby Steele to Mark Levin: 'Blacks Have Never Been Less Oppressed'," PJ Media, June 8, 2020)
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