Synopses & Reviews
The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress. Amid the bickering and inertia, the promise of the 1960swhen we came together as a nation to fight for equality and universal justiceremains unfulfilled.
As Shelby Steele reveals in Shame, the roots of this impasse can be traced back to that decade of protest, when in the act of uncovering and dismantling our national hypocrisiesracism, sexism, militarismliberals internalized the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern American from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs, such as Affirmative Action. Steele reveals that not only have these programs failed, but they have in almost every case actively harmed Americas minorities and poor. Ultimately, Steele argues, post-60s liberalism has utterly failed to achieve its stated aim: true equality. Liberals, intending to atone for our past sins, have ironically perpetuated the exploitation of this countrys least fortunate citizens.
It therefore falls to the Right to defend the American dream. Only by reviving our founding principles of individual freedom and merit-based competition can the fraught legacy of American history be redeemed, and only through freedom can we ever hope to reach equality.
Approaching political polarization from a wholly new perspective, Steele offers a rigorous critique of the failures of liberalism and a cogent argument for the relevance and power of conservatism.
Review
New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
Wall Street Journal
Shelby Steele is one of the very few writers able to tell home truths about the plight of black Americans.... In Shame, an essay on the political polarization of our country and on the want of progress among black Americans, he has produced his most complex and challenging work.... The irony here is that Shelby Steele might just be a Tom of a different kinda black Tom Paine, whose 21st-century common sense could go a long way to bringing his people out of their by now historical doldrums.”
New York Times Book Review
A spirited polemic…Steele delivers this message in an ardent, readable style
Steele
speaks with passion, eloquence and unremitting honesty.”
Publishers Weekly, starred review
This timely critique warrants attention from anyone troubled by the persistence of racial discord in American life, from Selma to Ferguson.”
Kirkus
A conservative analysis of political polarization and race relations in America, more thoughtful and less vitriolic than most volleys from either side.”
Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage
In a society as polarized as contemporary America, mired in self-destructive culture wars, one of the great pleasures of reading Shelby Steele is that we find ourselves in the presence of a truly courageous, even inspiring, mind and spirit refreshingly free of ideology, self-deception, and fear. With Shame, Steele continues his deeply thoughtful and responsible search for the underlying truths, seldom spoken, about our social lives, proving yet again through often trenchant analysis why he is one of the few black public intellectuals that America absolutely needs.”
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Shelby Steeles courageous challenge to Americans to get a moral grip on the countrys past and present is an important contribution to a future of liberty and justice for all, in the colorblind society of aspiration, solidarity, and achievement of which the classic civil rights movement dreamed.”
Synopsis
The greatest barrier to racial equality today is not overt racism, Shelby Steele argues in [
Title TK], but white liberals. Under the guise of benevolence, liberals today maintain their position of power over blacks by continuing to cast them as victims in need of saving. This ideology underlies liberal social policies from affirmative action to welfare, which actually exacerbate racial inequality rather than mitigating it. Drawing on empirical data as well as his own personal experience, Steele demonstrates that these policies have not only failed, but have made it impossible to address the problems that plague the modern black community, and have ensured that black Americans will never be truly equal to their white countrymen, in their own minds or in practice.
Forthright and persuasive, [Title TK] offers an unflinching look at the failures of liberalism and a compelling case that a return to conservative principles is the only way forward for African Americansand for the nation.
About the Author
Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Winner of the Bradley Prize and a National Humanities Medal and the author of the National Book Critics Circle award-winning
The Content of Our Character, Steele lives in the Central Coast of California.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: The Great Divide
Chapter Two: A Collision
Chapter Three: Hypocrisy
Chapter Four: The Moral Asymmetry of Hypocrisy
Chapter Five: The Compounding of Hypocrisy
Chapter Six: Characterological Evil
Chapter Seven: The Battle of Algiers”
Chapter Eight: No Past, No Future
Chapter Nine: Americas Characterological Evil”: A Pillar of Identity
Chapter Ten: The Denouement
Chapter Eleven: After Evil, "The Good"
Chapter Twelve: The New Liberalism
Chapter Thirteen: Dissociation
Chapter Fourteen: Relativism and Anti-Americanism
Chapter Fifteen: The Culture
Chapter Sixteen: Conservatism: The New Counterculture
Chapter Seventeen: A Politics of Idealism
Chapter Eighteen: Liberalism is Beautiful, but Conservatism is Freedom