Shelby Steele recently wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he criticized the NFL players for their protests. In this piece Steele concludes that the protests have been “fruitless.” The reality is that the opposite has been true. The protests have sparked a national conversation on issues such as police aggression and racism in the United States, which is precisely what the original purpose of the protest was about. Colin Kaepernick explained that the purpose of his protest was to bring awareness to the injustices that are going on in the country. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Kaepernick’s actions, the fact is that no one has been able to ignore it. Even the president has felt the need to comment on the protests. The protests are not fruitless simply because Steele says that they are.
In this piece Steele feels the need to point out that the protests have “elicited considerable resentment.” This is not news to anyone. Every form of protest or resistance on the part of African Americans has elicited resentment. Nat Turner was executed for his rebellion against slavery and there was a bounty placed on Harriet Tubman because she dared to assist others in escaping from the plantations. Martin Luther King was beaten and jailed for his non-violent protests. Others like Medgar Evers and Fred Hampton were murdered in cold blood for demanding equal rights. Steele speaks of “a new fearlessness in white America” as if there isn’t already a long history of white American repressing African Americans for demanding equality.
Steele also argues that the problem that confronts African Americans today is not the problem of racism or oppression, but “the shock of freedom.” In making this case Steele echoes the thinking of racists such as Samuel Cartwright who argued that enslaved Africans who desired freedom suffered from an illness known as “drapetomania.” Freedom was viewed as a burden that was too great for African people to handle. This was also one of the justifications for the colonization of Africa. Africans were viewed as being incapable of managing ourselves as a free people, so we needed the guiding hand of the Europeans to civilize us. According to Steele “past oppression left us unprepared for freedom.” When Steele makes this assertion he is not speaking from the perspective of the masses of African Americans who are still struggling for freedom. He is speaking from the perspective of a racist like Cliven Bundy who openly wondered whether or not African Americans were better off as slaves.
The problem with conservatives like Steele is that they are quick to blame African Americans for our own problems, but they don’t seem to understand what the problems are in the first place. They argue that racism and racial oppression are things of the past, and that the thing that his holding African Americans down now is a victim mentality. Steele even goes so far as to argue that Black Lives Matter is “aspiring to black victimization, longing for it as for a consummation.” But for all of his condemnations of African Americans as a people who are incapable of handling freedom and longing for victimization, Steele offers no solutions to the problems that confront African Americans.
What do we do in the future to prevent future Trayvon Martins, Michael Browns, or Freddie Grays from being killed? Steele does not say because he believes that the “near-hysteria” around their deaths was “a hunger for the excuse of racial victimization” as if African Americans somehow orchestrated the deaths of those three men as an excuse to keep our racial victimization alive. Steele does not appear to have any sympathy for the daily struggles that African Americans undergo. For example, he describes thousands of people being shot in Chicago in 2016 as something that “embarrasses us because this level of largely black-on-black crime cannot be blamed simply on white racism.” It may embarrass Steele, but it certainly does not embarrass me because I understand the roots of where such violence comes from which is why I’ve written an entire chapter in my book Essays Towards Restoring the African Mind on the very topic of black-on-black violence. The suffering of my people does not embarrass me. It only emboldens me to work harder to do what I can to fix the situation, but those like Steele would much rather blame the victim rather than work with the victim to solve the problem, and I use the word victim here very deliberately because in Steele’s view African Americans are helpless victims who are desperately trying to cling to our victimization.
What Steele seems to be doing is projecting his own feelings of helplessness and victimization onto African Americans. We do not see ourselves as being helpless victims, which is why the players in the NFL decided to protest. This is why the activists in the Black Lives Matter movement have been protesting. This is why many of us across the country, and African people across the world, have been engaged in the work that we have been because we recognize that as a people we are face many challenges and that it will take hard work and dedication on our part to overcome those challenges. It is my hope that Steele and others like him will one day shed their victim mentality and join us in working to overcome the challenges that face our people.
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