From: HF.GTD@forsythe.stanford.edu (Gabrielle Daniels)
Subject: Remembering Steele
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 20:43:36 GMT

Responding to the previous posts regarding Shelby Steele:

I went to San Jose State for my undergrad work and I was there
during the time that SJSU was compelled to bring in more blacks and
other minority faculty in the Seventies--when Steele was hired.  I
remember the English Department faculty as being pretty much lily
white except for a brother (and I use the term loosely) who was more
Anglophile than my rather fun older white Shakespeare instructor.
He took to sporting tweeds and smoking a pipe.  Not that Im against
this, cause I go for Masterpiece Theater, too, but this was
supremely maxxed out behavior.  You hadda be there.  When Gwendolyn
Brooks came for a residency one semester, even she got tired of his
pomposity and had to tell him--but nicely-- to shut up.

Anything somebody of color decided to create in the Department was
either co-opted and failing control, eventually destroyed.  I
remember hearing of some minority grad students who put together an
English study hall for those people of color needing help from other
people of color, basically on their own time and using a Department
room, but without the imprimatur of the Department office.  When
certain faculty folk caught wind of this, especially when the study
hall became worthwhile, they wrangled it away from the grad students
and made it accessible to everybody.  Sometimes, you must
understand, its important for people of color to get encouragement
and help from each other.  This is not being separatist for its own
sake, this is trying to save someones life.  Some people dont
understand this and say that its discrimination in reverse.
Bulltacos.

I think Shelby Steele is basically a Richard Wright-type, black skin
and white mind, and way out of touch after trying to escape
from blackness.  Another example of a former radical going from one
extreme to another.  His mother is white, too, and his white
wife, by the way, is a shrink (and what a job she must have done on
him).  A recent interview had him hedging around the fact that he
had gotten his faculty post through Affirmative Action and
practically basking in the praise of George Will, who called him
(and Im paraphrasing) the natural successor to Frederick Douglass.
Say WHAT?  I think Steele had better wait to hear from the brothers
and sisters about whether hes really son of Frederick Douglass.
Like Ishmael Reed said at this local book festival, when the
liberals are back in vogue again, this guy is going to be nowhere
and no place.

I got to meet him only once, in 1980, when I won a literary prize of
which he was a final judge.  I had written a series of poems about
my relationship with a white man.  To my dying day, I will believe
that he saw himself in those poems.

My friend Omonike and I saw him at Joses, a popular restaurant run
by a black Cuban-American and ex-refugee in Palo Alto a couple
of months ago.  (When youre down near The Farm, try it.  Yum!)  We
gave him The Stare.  We knew who he was, and he knew that we
knew who he was.  We figured he was trying out for a cushy spot at
Stanfords Hoover Institution and decided to go ethnic for
dinner.