A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America.(Review)
Author/s: Peter Berkowitz
Issue: Feb, 1999
A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America by Shelby Steele HarperCollins, 185 pp. $24.00
In the Content of Our Character, the 1990 book that first brought him to national attention, Shelby Steele described himself as a "fortyish, middle-class, black American male" who had concluded, on the basis of his own experience and that of others like him, that there is now "an enormous range of opportunity open to blacks in this society." As dramatic a departure as this was from the conventional wisdom of the civil-rights establishment, Steele went still farther, arguing that to take advantage of these opportunities, blacks needed to embrace more fully certain basic American ideals:
There will be no end to despair and no lasting solution to any of our problems until we rely on individual effort within the American mainstream--rather than collective action against the mainstream--as our means of advancement. We need a collective identity that encourages diversity within the race, that does not make black unity a form of repression, that does not imply that the least among us are the most black, and that makes the highest challenge of "blackness" personal development.
For giving powerful contemporary voice to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream that one day individual blacks would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, Steele was rewarded with a certain amount of fame but an even greater amount of notoriety. In particular, black and white intellectuals of the Left greeted his defection from orthodoxy with loud and often personal vituperation.
In his new book, Steele shows the scars of this unpleasantness. He is older, angrier, and understandably less patient with those who refuse to weigh his case on its merits. In "The Loneliness of the `Black Conservative,'" an essay that comprises nearly half the book, he complains with justice that he has been defined, and vilified, not in terms of the views usually associated with conservatives--loyalty to tradition or embrace of the free market--but for the simple fact that he refuses to treat the oppression of American blacks as the sole explanation for their fate. When a black female journalist declares to Steele, "I don't think we can tell the story of our victimization enough," he replies with palpable ire. People can also suffer, he quotes himself responding, from "ignorance, fear, a poor assessment of reality, and from a politics that commits them to the idea of themselves as victims."
Such indignation courses through A Dream Deferred, but it hardly makes Steele's thought "entirely reactive," as the sociologist Alan Wolfe charged in his review of the book in the New Republic. Indeed, Steele's new essays make clear that, in common with many other so-called conservatives, he remains very much a liberal, albeit one in the old-fashioned or classical sense. For him, individual freedom and personal responsibility are non-negotiable, and represent two sides of the same coin. These principles, he maintains, are the necessary foundation not only for American self-government but also for the dream of racial integration, to which he remains rock-solid in his devotion.
