nd conflict that keeps people from wanting to discuss race. But without an effort based on an understanding of the extent and limits of caring no progress will ever be made.
Steele admits that in the late 1960s he also liked to pose this type of question to confront a group of whites "with the knowledge of both their racism and their denial of it" (333). Steele reports that in his literature classes when white students discuss the motivations of characters in works by black writers a black student will inevitably "begin to set in relief the various racial problems that are the background of these characters' lives" (334). Even if he tries to defuse a situation before it gets started, Steele finds that racial division suddenly comes to dominate the class. The black students who react in this way are, he feels, "operating out of a black identity that obliges them to badger white people about race almost on principle" (334). Whites remain shamed by the problem of racism and the students, and Steele as a young man and the man who spoke up at the party, are trying to put whites on the defensive. They are trying to put them in touch with the collective white guilt over the subject of race. Wha
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