White Guilt = Black Power

The world and his significant other are rightly raving about Jane Galt's essay on 'gay marriage', which brought to mind a fine essay on the same subject from Hoover fellow Shelby Steele. It's here. The piece was written in response to Andrew Sullivan's friendly fisking (that's a 'k') of Shelby Steele.

I'd forgotten what a good writer Shelby Steele is. If there was a decent links page for him he'd be on the sidebar. Here's his take on white liberal guilt.

"institutions today lose their mainstream legitimacy unless white guilt defines their approach to racial matters"

"White guilt is best understood as a vacuum of moral authority. Whites live with this vacuum despite the fact that they may not feel a trace of personal guilt over past oppression of blacks. Whites simply come to a place with blacks where they feel no authority to speak or judge and where they sense a great risk of being seen as racist. It is a simple thing, this lack of authority, but it has changed everything.

One terrible feature is that it means whites lack the authority to say what they see when looking at blacks and black problems. Political correctness is what whites have the authority to say about blacks, no matter what they see. It is a language of severely limited authority, of euphemisms that steer whites around associations with racism."

While we're at it, a rare sighting on the Web of Richard Littlejohn, interviewing Michael Howard in the Spectator.