tes. Racial power allows whites to excuse their use of racial power on the basis of the perceived inferiority and unworthiness of blacks.
Moral power, on the other hand, is truly rooted in goodness, as opposed to the pretensions and illusions of racial power. Steele harks back to the early days of the civil rights movement, a period which he sees as the height of moral power in terms of the role it played in racial relations and in the movement for justice in the United States. Steele writes that after a brief time in which pro-civil rights workers embodied the spiritual principles of non-violent protest, the movement turned to divisive policies and practices which were once again based not on moral power but on racial power. Black leaders turned away from white liberals and toward "black power"---the belief in racial power, that blacks were not equal to whites but actually superior:
Increasingly, the [civil rights] movement began to seek racial as well as moral power, and thus it fell into a moral contradiction that plagues it
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