OpinionJournal - 'Witness' by Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele is always good for an insightful, responsible observation on the state of race relations in the USA. Today, on the occasion of the passing of Rosa Parks, he bears "witness" to what he considers the worst failing of blacks everywhere: the failure to lift themselves out of poverty when they got the opportunity. As evidence he offers the spectacles of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It's not just the colossal failures of leadership, like row upon row of school buses not moved out until they were flooded out. It's the looks on people's faces--a look of despair, surrender--and wanting somebody else to help them.

He writes:

[I]n the immediate aftermath of Katrina,... so many black people were plunged into misery that it seemed the hurricane itself had held a racial animus. I felt a consuming empathy but also another, more atavistic impulse. I did not like my people being seen this way. Beyond the human mess one expects to see after a storm like this, another kind of human wretchedness was on display. In the people traversing waist-deep water and languishing on rooftops were the markers of a deep and static poverty. The despair over the storm that was so evident in people's faces seemed to come out of an older despair, one that had always been there. Here--40 years after the great civil rights victories and 50 years after Rosa Parks's great refusal--was a poverty that oppression could no longer entirely explain. Here was poverty with an element of surrender in it that seemed to confirm the worst charges against blacks: that we are inferior, that nothing really helps us, that the modern world is beyond our reach.

Needless to say, Shelby, I don't accept that, and I never have. I see a bunch of overgrown, wayward, untrained, undisciplined youth who never learned to act like adults. But I do not see inherent inferiority. If I did...well, you wouldn't want to know.

Fortunately, Steele identifies the great error of public policy that made the New Orleans spectacle all too likely: that whites, beginning with President Lyndon Baines Johnson, agreed to try to lift blacks out of poverty and did not require blacks to do any of the lifting themselves. Today, as Steele readily acknowledges, racism is no longer the fact of life it once was. (Witness President Bush's unprecedented level of appointments of blacks and other minorities to ranking, even sensitive, positions in his administration--where most of them have performed excellently.) He now gives his fellow blacks this message: if they don't want anyone to look down on them, then they need to stop looking down on themselves. Because no one can lift another man out of poverty--he must lift himself out.