TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081291/0812510.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.6 KB | 243 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 6

Nothing Is Ever Simply Black and White


Outspoken author SHELBY STEELE defends Clarence Thomas and argues
that too many African Americans see themselves as victims

SYLVESTER MONROE/MONTEREY and Shelby Steele


    Q. Why are so many African Americans concerned about Clarence
Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court?

    A. On the deepest level, he touches the very soul of the
debate in black America, which is a debate between using the
principle of self-sufficiency as a means to power as opposed to
using our history of victimization. We have taken our power from
our history of victimization, which gave us an enormous moral
authority and brought social reforms, to the neglect of
self-reliance and individual initiative. And now, any time you
talk about self-reliance in relation to black problems, you are
automatically considered a conservative.


    Q. You don't consider yourself a conservative?

    A. No. I think of myself more as a classical liberal. I focus
on freedom, on the sacredness of the individual, the power to
be found in the individual.


    Q. But other black thinkers from Booker T. Washington to
Malcolm X to Jesse Jackson have preached self-reliance, and
nobody called them conservatives.

    A. Clarence Thomas is considered a conservative today because
of the context, and the context is that for the past 25 years
civil rights organizations have focused one-dimensionally on our
oppression and demanded redress based on that. Well, here comes
a man in 1991 who stands for self-help, and so he is anathema.
The principle of self-reliance seems to devalue victimization
as a source of power. I don't think it necessarily does, but it
seems to. And so Thomas seems to be against the interests of
black people merely by standing for self-reliance. He's not
remotely anti-black. He's just asking that we develop another
source of power.


    Q. You have said that you are against preferential treatment,
not affirmative action per se. But the widespread perception is
that you are anti-affirmative action, and so is Clarence Thomas.

    A. What I've tried to say, and I think Clarence Thomas stands
for pretty much the same thing, is that by opposing racial
preferences we stand for black strength rather than weakness.
The thing that disturbs me about affirmative action, about
preferences, is that they can and will be taken away. They will
diminish over time. And in the interim they encourage us to
believe that redress is our power. I don't take any simpleminded
black-and-white view and say racial preferences have never done
a bit of good for anybody. All I've tried to do is point out the
down side and that we've probably come to the point where they
are doing more harm than good.


    Q. Are you letting white people off the hook?

    A. I don't mean in any way to let white people off the hook.
I think as American citizens, they have a profound
responsibility to black Americans. I favor every form of
affirmative action except preferences. I favor the government
improving the education system in the inner cities. I favor
programs that go down to the teenage mother and try to break
that cycle of poverty by teaching her parenting skills.

    The most important thing that people who have been
victimized can understand, whether it is fair or unfair, and it
certainly is not fair, is that change will have to come from
themselves. Thomas and I are not hardhearted people who are
simply saying, "Get up off your butt, pull yourself up by your
bootstraps." We need government intervention to help us. But
we've also got to help ourselves. Opportunity follows struggle.
It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.


    Q. You once said that liberals are no friends of blacks. What
did you mean?

    A. Watch out that your closest friend may be your greatest
enemy, is my feeling about liberals, because they encourage us
to identify with our victimization. It is one thing to be
victimized; it is another to make an identity out of it. I am
not willing to be a boy because I am inferior, and I am not
going to be a boy because I am a victim. I reject both avenues
to being a boy. The one thing a white liberal can never do with
a black is be honest and tell him what he tells his own
children.


    Q. Which is what?

    A. Which is that you have to work hard and your life in many
ways will reflect the amount of effort you put into it. They
teach that every day to their own children, but then they come
out in public and talk about blacks as just victims who need
redress. This is racial exploitation by white liberals, who
transform this into their own source of power. We're being had
by them, and we really need to know that.

    Liberals are screaming for racial preferences. But as soon
as they give you the preference, they hold it against you.
"Hey, you were helped by affirmative action," they say about
Clarence Thomas. "You wouldn't be where you are if it was not
for affirmative action." That's one reason I have a problem with
preferences. How can he win? He can't.


    Q. How much impact does racism have on the lives of black
Americans?

    A. I think being lower class has a much greater impact. You
and I both know, as a middle-class black you can send your kid
to any school you want. But if you and I were on the South Side
of Chicago and not doing very well economically, then clearly
you would not be able to send your kid to whatever school you
wanted. At this point, class, poverty and isolation are far more
difficult variables for blacks than racism. That does not mean
racism is gone; I think you'll meet it wherever you go. But it
does not have the power to contain your life that it used to
have.


    Q. According to you, there is a great deal of opportunity
that blacks are simply not taking advantage of. Many blacks
disagree with you.

    A. It depends on how you define opportunity. I don't see
opportunity in a one-dimensional sense as something that is
simply there either waiting or not waiting for somebody to come
and grab it. I think of opportunity as something that one
creates, that you generate opportunities for yourself.

    A Jewish woman told my brother something I think is
absolutely vital for black people to understand. It was a simple
phrase: "Don't wait for people to love you." We are too
preoccupied with whether white people love us or not, whether
they are racist or not, what they think about the color of our
skin or the texture of our hair. Who cares? We have to go
forward and make our own opportunities.


    Q. You've told me that you admired your father and that he
saved your life, taking you to the YMCA when other black parents
said it was too far to go or too expensive. Clarence Thomas
talks much the same way about his grandfather. How do you
duplicate that experience for less fortunate blacks?

    A. This is one of the heartbreaking things about the politics
of victimization. We have always had the tradition of
self-reliance in the black community, but this tradition gets
squashed because it conflicts with victimization. We think we
are here because of affirmative action, but we are not. We are
here because of those people who let us get into a position to
be able to take advantage of what society was trying to do for
us. But this victimology causes us to denounce as a race our
greatest source of strength, which is people like that, who
ought to be held up as role models.

    Clarence Thomas ought to be held up as a role model. But
no, we say, he made it by himself too much. He's not a victim.
We don't want him.


    Q. But one major criticism of Thomas is that he thinks he did
make it all by himself.

    A. This is the shortsightedness of victimology. You're
goddam right he made it by himself. Now you are going to take
that away from him and say he made it because of affirmative
action. He didn't have affirmative action back there in Pin
Point, Ga. His grandfather made him go to school and study hard,
and then he gets into the position where, yes, maybe he could
benefit. But if all that early work had not been done, we
wouldn't know Clarence Thomas today.


    Q. What are you telling young blacks?

    A. The most important thing for young black people to do is
what you and I did -- become educated. If you are educated,
then at least you have some kind of chance. Learn to think, to
read, to be in touch with the larger world. One of the saddest
things I see is black students who say to me, "I only read black
writers." And what they really mean is they are reading people
like Don L. Lee and Louis Farrakhan. I say, Have you ever read
any Jean-Paul Sartre? Have you ever read any Ralph Ellison or
Albert Murray or James Baldwin? Nope. But they read Don L. Lee's
tract on what a black man should be, as though this is different
from what any man should be. And so there's this sort of
intellectual segregation that I think is absolutely a death
knell for our future.


    Q. Many blacks accuse you of allowing yourself to be used by
white neoconservatives, who are no longer willing to deal with
the problems of race and poverty.

    A. Some of them do use me, and I think some of them do not
have the best interests of black Americans at heart. But if
everybody is hip enough to ask me this question, then my use to
the neoconservatives is neutralized.

    In many ways, the fear that I'm being used by
neoconservatives reflects a paranoia that has always been part
of black life, and it is part of the life of any oppressed
group, a paranoia about what you say in front of the Man because
he'll use it against you. One of the things I stand for more
deeply than anything else is that I do not see the white man as
all that powerful, all that smart. Blacks really need to begin
to understand that these people do not control our fate as much
we think they do.


    Q. What has this debate and being labeled a black
conservative done to Shelby Steele?

    A. It has put a lot of stress on me. It's not fun to be
labeled when you know that it's very shortsighted. On the other
hand, overall I am very, very happy because I think the terms
of the debate have been really opened up. I don't think things
will ever be the same again. And I think Clarence Thomas'
nomination drives that nail home. There will now forever more
be diversity of opinion in the black community. People will
think about these things a great deal more than they did when
we were a sort of one-party system. I feel very good about that.