Review by Booklist Review
This must have been a hard book to write, speaking as it does such unpopular truths. It may well be a hard book to read, especially for those deeply invested in a vision of black oppression and white guilt. Steele strikes out at the racism that disguises itself as liberalism or even radicalism but permits blacks to be only blacks and not fully human. He questions why black students call for segregated departments while decrying apartheid, damns those who'd blame all inner-city crime on poor policing, and attacks those who reject successful blacks as abandoning their heritage. He gives names to behaviors: "race-holding," for blaming every discomfort on racism; "grandiosity," for compensatory excellence in permitted areas like entertainment and sports; "subjective correlatives," for the recasting of problems (drugs, teenage pregnancy) as symbols of black oppression; "integration shock," for the self-doubt that comes with access to groups and experiences previously forbidden. Because this brave book stands so far outside the patterns of current discourse--for instance, he isn't certain affirmative action works--the easy reaction will be to accuse Steele of Uncle Tomism. But is that fair? Expect controversy, but read this book and talk about it. --Pat Monaghan
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Steele, seeking to improve strained race relations, demonstrates how social policies intensify rather than lessen racial differences, how blacks and whites tend to see color before character, and how blacks are often oppressed more by doubt in their abilities than by racism. This won a National Book Critics Circle award. (Sept.)no PW (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This volume is a collection of nine of Steele's essays, some of which have been recently published in Harper's , which he frames with an introduction and an epilog. He presents his own perspective on the current state of race relations in the United States, noting problems but purveying a generally optimistic message. He offers introspection, a dash of autobiography, and a hint of social psychology. The danger with such a mixture is, of course, that social diagnoses and prescriptions drawn from necessarily idiosyncratic experiences, while thought-provoking, can be often only serendipitously correct and sometimes just plain wrong. Still, the value of this work is that it should spark similar introspection on the part of literate lay readers.-- Joseph Stewart Jr., Univ. of Texas at Dallas, Richardson (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Previously published (in Harper's, Commentary, The American Scholar, etc.), these collected essays by the eloquent, idealistic, controversial black San Jose State English professor seem certain to make a signficant offering to America's unending race debate. Shelby's closely reasoned ethico-politico vision combines Booker T. Washington's ""bootstrap"" emphasis on black individual achievement with Martin Luther King's anti-militancy. Several key assumptions undergird these disparate essays, which cover subjects ranging from black middle-classdom to affirmative action to race and college politics: that racial debate in America is tainted and restricted by the ""politics and its party line"" of each race, which impose a ""totalitarianism"" over original thought (like Steele's own, perhaps); that government must consider blacks and whites not race groups but as ""competing power groups"" in order to revise social administration successfully; that white and black America both seek racial ""innocence"" in race relations, but that white guilt and black feelings of inferiority mar this attempt. Steele also argues that blacks have a ""hidden investment in victimization and poverty,"" a legacy of black-power movements of the Sixties, when martyrdom, not achievement, became the theme of black politics; that a ""politics of difference"" that bestows affirmative action and entitlement of blacks devalues achievement and responsibility and falsely rewards historical suffering; and that black ""awe"" of white achievement creates psychological ground for black failure. Steele may be seen here by some to be praising conventionally ""conservative"" values (if not policy) as a key to black success; for this he may emerge as something equivalent to the Allan Bloom of race relations. In any case, his book's stylish argument is guaranteed to move (and anger) many. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
