Dr. Shelby Steele, a conservative race theorist, delivered the fifth Richard E. Snyder President's Lecture yesterday afternoon in the Balch Arena Theater.
Steele's discussion, entitled "White Guilt: Why American Can't Solve the Race Problem or Win Wars," explained his thesis of "white guilt" and his views on the negative policy implications for African-Americans.
White guilt, as Steele defined it, is the "vacuum of moral authority" that resulted when global white supremacy ended in the period after World War II. In the context of U.S. politics, Steele cited legislation such as the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) as white America's acknowledgement of the racism it had practiced and its promise to give it up.
However, he argues this very admission of guilt caused white people to be "stigmatized as racists."
White people's attempts to dissociate themselves from this stigma have resulted in concepts and policies like diversity, welfare, and affirmative action, which according to Steele validate the nation's moral authority but do not necessarily effect real change.
The concept of diversity, he claimed, exists for only to allow white people to dissociate themselves from racism. By including black people, white institutions prove that they are not racist.
The message of diversity is "I don't know who the hell you are, but I need your race," Steele said.
Steele criticized the welfare system before the reforms of 1996, saying that it was an "incentive to inertia" because it did not cultivate hard work or encourage striving for excellence.
By cutting off aid to married individuals, Steele argued, welfare contributed to the "slow destruction of black families" and the high rate of children born out of wedlock in black communities.
Affirmative action, Steele argued, is a system that sets black people up for failure by putting on them on a higher level than they ought to be, stigmatizing them as inferior and unable to compete on their own. It also encourages black people to "trade on race, not talent or ability," he said.
Despite this tendency, Steele said, white guilt does not apply in certain areas: sports, music, and entertainment. In these areas, he said, black people settle for nothing less than excellence. Here, he argued, black people have taken the responsibility for success into their own hands and worked hard to achieve.
This is the kind of work ethic Steele portrayed as a step toward bridging the gap between white and black professional performance in the United States.
The problem, he said, is that "we mistakenly defined inequality in America as racism and injustice when it was in fact underdevelopment."
To overcome the underdevelopment that resulted from hundreds of years of oppression, Steele argued, black people must come to value excellence, merit, and education, and raise children who can compete in the world.
Steele argued that American could not win wars because we "fight with a kind of minimalism and restraint" for fear that our power will appear to be racist and imperialist when used against third world countries populated by people of color.
Audience response to Steele was diverse.
"His argument is very much based in common sense, but it's not a very nuanced argument," junior Michael Skocay said. "White guilt is the answer to some of our problems, but not all of them."
"It was a very provocative discussion that I wish hadn't been filled with so many unfair stereotypes about the black community," said Karen Gould, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education. "People that attended the lecture may have walked away feeling that they were the truth."
According to Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser, the purpose of the Snyder President's Lecture is to "bring a different point of view to campus" by inviting "provocative and interesting" figures to speak at Tufts.
Previous speakers include controversial Iranian author Salman Rushdie, technology expert Tim Berners-Lee, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, and Bush bioethics advisor Leon Kass.
