Race Relations
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In "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?," Shelby Steele raises questions that can be answered, in part, by referring to Nel Noddings' "An Ethics of Care." Steele opens with a story about a dinner party with a number of professional people at which one guest, an African American man, mentions how it disturbs him to send his daughter to a school where there are very few black children. He is afraid, he says, that his success has put his daughter in a position where she may "lose touch with her blackness" (333). The remark makes the white hosts and guests uncomfortable. No one responds to the remarks and the party breaks up quickly. The question Steele raises is why racism and race relations are subjects that make people so uncomfortable that they are unable to talk about them -- at least in racially mixed groups. The problem, as Steele sees it, lies largely in the confusion of questions of morality and power in regard to race relations. It is the refusal to recognize the power struggle that lies behind racial division as the source of America's problems. This refusal leads to the failure to acknowledge the moral dimensions of the question and, fearing that it will be pointed out to them that they are moral cowards, people wish to avoid the question altogether. To go beyond the problem and make the moral effort needed to solve the problem of racism would require the courage to adopt a new ethic -- one based on caring rather than on power.
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onstrating how he was, once again, a victim of the white society that would rob his daughter of her heritage and, as a victim, he was innocent. The white hosts and guests saw themselves as being provoked by "an ungracious troublemaker" whose "bad behavior underscor[ed] their goodness" (335). Both sides won the struggle to some extent because both could see themselves as innocent victims. But Steele's point is, of course, that both sides lost. The discomfort that a discussion of race causes is the discomfort of people who do not wish to recognize the fact that they are engaged in this kind of struggle for power.
This much would seem fairly obvious but then Steele makes his strongest point when he says that "the claim of innocence amounts to an insistence on ignorance, a refusal to know" (336). Whites willfully refuse to know blacks (thus avoiding the demonstration of the fact that they are not inferior) and blacks willfully avoid "seeing their own responsibility for bettering themselves" (336). One of Steele's principal subjects is the problem of black belief in black entitlement to affirmative action and other support programs that are based on correction of racial inequality by means of promoting someone's welfare on the
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Approximate Word count = 1814
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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