The Content of Our Character
   Shelby Steele
  1991 Harperperennial Library NY USA
   ISBN: 006097415X


A New Vision of Race in America. An honest, personal & courageous look at America's most enduring & wrenching social dilemma. Why, after 25 years of legal change & waning prejudice, are blacks worse off today?

This was a shocking little book of essays, back at the end of the 1980s. So much so, that I gave a copy to both my children for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day the year it was published. We had many a heated, animated discussion over the next year.  
"I had begun to feel that public discussions of the race issue had become virtually choreographed...[r]acism had to be offered as the greatest barrier to black progress, and blacks themselves had still to be seen primarily as racial victims. Whites...had to show both concern and a measure of befuddlement at how other whites could still be racist. There also had to be in whites a clear deference to the greater racial authority of blacks, whose color translated into a certain racial expertise..."

At the time, reading Shelby Steele's take on the state of racism in our urban nation, was almost naughty. Certainly it engendered reactions of indignation or relief from its readers. I remember blithely asking people if they'd read The Content of Our Character yet & receiving either a befuddled query as to what was that or a kind of glance out of the corner of the eye as if what I'd suggested was seditious.

I found it a fascinating, riveting read. With my years in the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago, sometimes being the only white woman in a community of mixed races & all those years of raising mixed heritage children, I felt I knew something about race. As I read The Content of Our Character & wrote about it in my journal, I was relieved to find someone else who had seen & thought along the same lines.

"Whatever I do or think as a black can never be more than a variant of what all people do and think. Some of my life experiences may be different from those of other races, but there is nothing different or special in the psychological processes that drive my mind. So in this book I have tried to search out the human universals that explain the racial specifics." Now that is incendiary stuff!

In the Feminization of my education, many of Shelby Steele's thoughts reverberated in my life. I could paraphrase just about anything he wrote into the plight & state of the female in a male society. For example: in response to Page 4, lines 23-25: Female anger always, in a way, flatters male power. In America, to know that one is not female is to feel an extra grace, a little boost of impunity.

Each generation has to struggle up through its layers of unconscious rhetoric, knee-jerk reactions to integrated situations & racial[gender]-holding: how can a black family want to live in an upscale suburb, like white folks? Why would a woman want to become a CEO, like a man?

As much memoirs as socio-political observations, Shelby Steele has written an absorbing, articulate & eminently readable book filled with well-etched stories, palpable mind-altering ideas & generously profound resolutions.

I liked reading The Content of Our Character - you should see all the hi-liting, scribbled comments & extrapolations in my copy! Very well done!

Shelby Steele's work has appeared in Harper's, New York Times Magazine, Commentary, the Washington Post, and American Scholar among many other publications. He won a National Magazine Award & one of his essays on race was chosen for The Best American Essays 1989.
(05/30/9)

Rebecca