Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Remembering Little Rock

Shelby Steele recalls Little Rock 50 years ago and the death of white supremacy.

"Innocence face to face with evil."

I've said it before and I'll say it again, nobody writes better about race in America than Mr. Steele

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day. After Little Rock whites stood permanently accused. They would have to prove a negative--that they were not racist--in order to claim decency. And this need to forever beg one's innocence is the very essence of white guilt.

Hardly something to celebrate, this. Or this…

By the mid-1960s this mandate had already given us a new illiberal liberalism--a busybody, interventionist liberalism that was more bent on erecting an American redemption than ensuring freedom. The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation. And today's "diversity" will fail because it, too, is only a denial--a kitsch that gives us an image of an America shorn of Little Rocks.

September 25, 2007 at 6:38 PM 

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