Content area
Full Text
Broken Promise How the vision of the civil rights era was lost. White Guilt How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele HarperCollins, 192 pp., $24.95
Last May, Shelby Steele was presented the Bradley Prize for his outstanding achievements as a scholar and writer, and he greatly deserved it. As an English professor and, now, as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Steele has written innumerable articles and an indispensable trilogy of books about the psychology of modern American race relations: The Content of Our Character (1990), A Dream Defened (1998), and now White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.
White Guilt is presented as Steele's interior monologue-his internal "Chautauqua, a kind of narrative lecture through a subject or dilemma"-about race as he drives from Los Angeles to Monterey with, as an unlikely backdrop, the car radio's reports on the developing Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Not so unlikely, actually, as it is this angle on the scandal that prompts Steele's reverie: President Eisenhower, he dimly recalls, was rumored to have, from time to time, used the n-word on the golf course. If Clinton had done that, his presidency would have ended; if Eisenhower had been caught having sex with a White House intern, he would have been toast. So what accounts for the change in American mores between the 1950s and the 1990s, such that a hanging...