TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081390/0813105.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 45

Up from Obscurity


With his maverick views on affirmative action, writer Shelby
Steele is being noticed -- and not always favorably

By SYLVESTER MONROE/SAN JOSE


    When Shelby Steele heard about the racially motivated murder
of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in the Bensonhurst section of
Brooklyn last August, his first reaction was fear -- the same
fear he used to feel as a young black boy growing up in Chicago
in the 1950s. There was, he recalled, "a sense that an ugly
element of our history had somehow crawled forward into the
present and made our belief in racial progress feel like an
illusion." But Hawkins' death also evoked in Steele an
overwhelming sense of what he calls "racial fatigue," that
inescapable burden of color that all black Americans still bear.

    During the past two years, Steele has argued in a
provocative series of essays that a generation after the Watts
riot and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is
time for blacks to drop the crutch of racial victimization and
rely on their own efforts to gain access to the American
mainstream. The opportunities are there, he says. Blacks have
only to stop hiding behind racism and take advantage of them.
Last May he focused a PBS television special about Bensonhurst
on that recurring theme. And next month a collection of his
essays will be published in his first book, The Content of Our
Character: A New Vision of Race in America (St. Martin's
Press), raising him to center stage in America's tortuous
debate over race relations.

    Why is this reclusive 44-year-old San Jose State University
history professor receiving so much attention? His boosters say
it is because Steele's deft prose has invigorated a stale
debate. "There is a freshness to his writing," says producer
Thomas Lennon, who persuaded Steele to do the PBS special Seven
Days in Bensonhurst after reading one of his essays in
Harper's. "By making himself his own laboratory, he cuts at
familiar issues in a very unfamiliar way." Says author Stanley
Crouch, like Steele a critic of affirmative action: "One of the
most important things he is doing is questioning Pavlovian
racial responses. What's important is not that other people
agree with what he says. It's that serious discussion is
brought to the discourse dominated by slogans and cliches."

    Nonsense, say Steele's critics. They consider him only the
latest of a small but widely publicized band of black
intellectuals who have been lifted from relative obscurity by
a white establishment bent on promoting any African American
who publicly attacks mainstream black thinking on affirmative
action and other civil rights causes. Like other black
conservatives, including Crouch, Stanford economist Thomas
Sowell and Harvard political scientist Glenn Loury, Steele
takes a heavy verbal beating from black thinkers who argue that
the mavericks are undeserving of the attention they receive.
Says Martin Kilson, Harvard's first black tenured professor:
"Steele's stuff is simpleminded, one-dimensional psychological
reductionism. It's slick sophistry." Declares Benjamin Hooks,
executive director of the N.A.A.C.P.: "These people have
nothing to offer except a conservative viewpoint in a black
skin."

    Such criticism makes Steele bristle. He describes himself
not as a neoconservative but as a "classical liberal focusing
on freedom and the power of the individual." He admires Crouch,
Loury and Sowell, he says, because they are not willing to
accept racism as the total explanation of black difficulty in
society. "A black writer or thinker who is somewhat at odds
with the civil rights establishment or with black nationalism
is automatically a black conservative and lumped together and
sort of cast out as a heretic," Steele says. "Some of us are
conservative. Some of us are not."

    Even Steele's admirers concede that his works could be used
to undermine support for affirmative action, including the
rights bill that the House approved last week despite the
threat of a presidential veto. "The origins of his essays are
not political," says producer Lennon. "But the net effect of
them is extremely political." Steele disagrees. "That criticism
implies a view of white people as omnipotent," he says. "It is
as though white people are in charge of our fate rather than
ourselves. White people will find whatever excuse they need to
avoid dealing with us. They don't need a few black conservatives
around the country." He also vehemently denies the accusation
that his writing lets whites "off the hook" while blaming black
victims for their plight. "I don't think I blame victims," he
says. "I challenge blacks. To me the goal of society is
absolute social equality. That's what the civil rights movement
was after, and we took a left turn into racial preferences that
has allowed everybody to get off the hook."

    The bottom line, says Steele in his forthcoming book, is
that "black Americans are today more oppressed by doubt than
by racism and that the second phase of our struggle for freedom
must be a confrontation with that doubt." But that view has
obvious shortcomings -- most notably that, as Yusuf Hawkins'
fate demonstrates, racism remains a virulent and all too
widespread phenomenon. Steele's personal experiences suggest
that the opportunities he claims blacks are neglecting are far
less available than he contends. After obtaining his doctorate
in history from the University of Utah in 1974, Steele had to
send out 60 applications before finally being hired by San Jose
State. Sixteen years later there are still only two black
tenured professors in the school's 110-member history
department.