You know that old saying about how to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail? It's kind of like that with Shelby Steele, only he simply believes that every problem the United States has faced since the 1960s can be explained by white guilt:
One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.
This is in a column about the Gaza flotilla incident. In case you're wondering, our problems in Iraq also stemmed from white people being afraid of being racist. If only we weren't so concerned with being politically correct, we might have our military invade a third country -- because let's face it, two is holding back for fear of being "imperialistic."
Really, the man exists in a kind of self-imposed Sisyphean hell where he's compelled to make the same argument over and over again.
-- A. Serwer
