October 25, 2021
IT'S NOT CRT WHEN WE SAY IT:
American Humanist: Shelby Steele's work stresses the importance of blacks accepting the burdens of freedom--and rejecting narrow racial claims. (Samuel Kronen, Autumn 2021, City Journal)
For more than three decades, best-selling author and Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele has illuminated the psychology of race in America. But his rare ability to unmask the individual under the skin has also made him guilty of an unpardonable sin of our time: remembering that racial groups are composed of individual human beings. "The mistake everybody makes when they look at race," he once explained, "is to look at race."The key insight running through Steele's five books, many essays, and various film projects is that race in America is never what it appears. "I have long believed that race is a mask through which other human needs manifest themselves," he asserted in his Emmy Award-winning 1990 documentary, Seven Days in Bensonhurst. "I think we often make race an issue as a way of not knowing other things about ourselves."
As folks say, it's a social construct.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 25, 2021 6:43 PM