waldo
09-26-2007, 12:33 PM
Shelby Steele has a great column in the WSJ today.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010650#cooliris
The first part recounts his experience as a kid growing up in the south. The second part is more interesting.
For the most part, this is how white America came to handle its new accountability in the civil rights era. The country got busy self-consciously redeeming itself. Redemption would be our big, ingenious achievement. If freedom and opportunity and wealth had always been the special mandates of American life, suddenly redemption was added to the list. And, as the civil rights movement worked its way through many more Little Rocks, as a movement for women's equality burst forth, and as the Vietnam War came to be held against America, the idea of American evil expanded and, thus, redemption became more and more entrenched as a national mandate.
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.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010650#cooliris
The first part recounts his experience as a kid growing up in the south. The second part is more interesting.
For the most part, this is how white America came to handle its new accountability in the civil rights era. The country got busy self-consciously redeeming itself. Redemption would be our big, ingenious achievement. If freedom and opportunity and wealth had always been the special mandates of American life, suddenly redemption was added to the list. And, as the civil rights movement worked its way through many more Little Rocks, as a movement for women's equality burst forth, and as the Vietnam War came to be held against America, the idea of American evil expanded and, thus, redemption became more and more entrenched as a national mandate.
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.