Perspective

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...