White Guilt

I have a column up at TCS about the new book, White Guilt, by Shelby Steele. Here is an excerpt:

While listening to the radio recently, I heard the writer Christopher Hitchens' riveting description of Shelby Steele's new book White Guilt : How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. I promptly ordered it and have not been disappointed.

White Guilt is a powerful essay that (as George Will says in the cover blurb) "braids family memories with an acute understanding of national policies." Will says Steele "demonstrates what went wrong when whites for their reasons and blacks for theirs, embraced the idea that white guilt explains blacks' problems and can be the basis of polices for ameliorating them."

But what happens when our national policies are derived from white guilt and black anger rather than the universal principles that free societies aspire to -- freedom for the individual, rights for all individuals, equality under the law, equality of opportunity, and an inherent right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

Read the whole thing.