From: HF.GTD@forsythe.stanford.edu (Gabrielle Daniels)
Subject: Re: Remembering Steele
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Distribution: usa
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 22:49:07 GMT

In article <1992Sep12.165127.16223@pslu1.psl.wisc.edu>,
johnson@offroad.chem.wisc.edu (Arthur Johnson) writes to my article
about SJSU English Department and Shelby Steele:
>>
>     So what did the faculty use as an "argument" to justify their taking
>control of the study hall? Property rights? Some bizarre technicality?
.
Bizarre technicality...and I don't remember.  I tend to agree with
the other poster who spoke of possible reverse discrimination...
.
Then I say:
.
>> 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).
.
>     Um, let's be a little careful about dissing someone for their
>ancestry. Contrary to popular new-age speculations, a person can't pick
>his/her parents before conception. Obsession with "racial" purity is a
>waste of time, IMO. The fact that his wife is white I find mildly
>interesting, but hey, there's no accounting for taste. :-) Now his wife
>being a shrink definitely might explain a lot of things (especially his
>frequent use of psychology to "explain" the behavior of black folks). I
>know he talks a lot about how universities need to face the reality of a
>lot of black students never finishing college. I wonder if he's doing
>anything personally about this (besides writing books and giving
>lectures).
>     Steele may very well be a white mind in a black skin, but then the
>next question that comes to mind is: just what IS a white mind, anyway?
>(Louie, this could be the beginning of a whole new interesting thread.)
>
>  <vanish into a fogbank to the tune of the French national anthem>
.
.
Yes, and catch "Casablanca" on the Disney Channel and Showtime this
month....
.
Regarding Steele (again) in the responses to my previous post:

Look, I'm not ragging the brother (and I use the term loosely)
because of his mixed race or that his marriage is interracial.
What I'm concerned about is--as I said before--the job his wife
as well as other incidents and people in his life have done on
him and how he puts this across in print.  The result is
disingenuousness of thought.  At the very least, Steele is an
integrationist (in the old late-Fifties/early Sixties mode) and a
gradualist.  A brother just sent mail to me saying he got his degree
from Utah.  Can you imagine THAT scene--chock full of Mormons?
Steele insists he's still as black as ever, that he still encounters
racism.  He probably does, but does he know what the smarmy
paternalism of a George Will actually means?  The dude laps it up,
wallows in it.  This is what he calls making it, getting approval
from the same people who step on us?  Who is he fooling?
Unfortunately he tends, in my view, to blame the sad state of racial
affairs solely on us black folk and let me say, it takes TWO to
tango.

Shelby Steele is not the first person to preach black economic
self-determination, or to insist that black folk take
responsibility for themselves...as if this is something that
black mothers or fathers have forgotten to tell their children.
Even a black welfare mother  is thinking of a future in which the
kids are doing right and working.  Unfortunately, the folks that
promote Steele suffer what one of the characters in my novel-in-
progress has---an inability to look "to the front, side and back"-
--3-dimensional thinking: the past, the present and the future.
They think this "neo-conservatism" is something new, progressive,
and exciting, but they have agendas that do black folks as a
whole--except for a few---no good.

I tend to agree with Malcolm when he says, "by any means
necessary." He did not just mean by picking up the gun, either.  So
why can't we be both activist and build a economic base for black
people?  There should be no either/or about this.  Both are
superior ways.

Ever since Reagan got in, there's been the tendency for
conservative forces, exemplified in our communities by Steele and
now Camille Paglia, to rear their heads and try to drag
progressive thinking back into the stone ages, where the only
person who was on top was white and male. Supposedly we were
happier and better off when things were conservative and things
were a lot quieter.  Bull.  There were a lot of unhappy people in
the Fifties.  Folks were repressed.  A lot more repressed than
they are now.

What I'm looking for is some black brothers and sisters,
intellectuals who put theory into positive action, who can posit
definite empowerment alternatives to this system, instead of
trying to always accommodate the black community to white
standards of living, working, etc.  Every generation or so, we
lurch from one political and economic stance to the other.
Because what works for white folks (and sometimes it doesn't)
does not necessarily work for us.