What is the author's style in The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America by Shelby Steele?

Shelby Steele is a self-described black conservative. Steele was born in the mid-forties and participated in the Civil Rights Movement and in CORE. During that time, Steele adopted a strong belief in racial equality and fought for the freedoms that were won during those years. As the black community turned towards black power, Steele followed them. Over time however, Steele began to feel alienated from the black community. This was apparently, not because his wife was white and his children were mixed, but because he wanted to rise up to the middle class and live as an academic. Steele followed a bourgeois conception of virtue and many of the blacks he knew condemned him for it.

As a result, Steele began to reevaluate his relationship to the black community and his understanding of the barriers black face in developing socially and economically. Steele began to see flaws in the black power movement and started to place more emphasis on individual responsibility and individualism. He also recognized the importance of bourgeois virtue and resisting dependency on the state for assistance. All four of these qualities: responsibility, individualism, bourgeois virtue and resistance to state power are hallmarks of the '80s style conservatism that Steele embraced.

Due to his conservatism, Steele not only argues that his values can benefit the black community but that government programs aimed at aiding blacks such as welfare, affirmative action, and the like have done more harm than good and should be resisted.