Synopses & Reviews
From the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our Character comes a new essay collection that tells the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today. In A Dream Deferred Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States--the first one being segregation--emerged from the civil rights era when the country was overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame. According to Steele,1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming goal the expiation of America guilt rather than the careful development of true equality between the races. This "culture of preference" betrayed America's best principles in order to give whites and America institutions an iconography of racial virtue they could use against the stigma of racial shame. In four densely argued essays, Steele takes on the familiar questions of affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group preferences, victimization--and what he deems to be the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression. A Dream Deferred is an honest, courageous look at the perplexing dilemma of race and democracy in the United States--and what we might do to resolve it.
Synopsis
Bestselling author Shelby Steele offers a timely and controversial essay collection on the untold story behind today's polarized racial politics.
Synopsis
Steele has given eloquent voice to painful truths that are almost always left unspoken in the nation's circumscribed public discourse on race. --New York Times
From the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our Character and White Guilt comes an essay collection that tells the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today.
In A Dream Deferred Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States--the first one being segregation--emerged from the civil rights era when the country was overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame. According to Steele, 1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming goal the expiation of American guilt rather than the careful development of true equality between the races.
In four densely argued essays, Steele takes on the familiar questions of affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group preferences, victimization--and what he deems to be the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression. A Dream Deferred is an honest, courageous look at the perplexing dilemma of race and democracy in the United States--and what we might do to resolve it.
About the Author
Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of The Content of Our Character, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and A Dream Deferred. He is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, and his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Newsweek, and the Washington Post, among many other publications. For his work on the PBS television documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst, he was recognized with both an Emmy Award and a Writers Guild Award. In 2004 President George W. Bush, citing Steele's "learned examinations of race relations and cultural issues," honored him with the National Humanities Medal. He lives in California.