When Shelby Steele heard about the racially motivated murder of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn last August, his first reaction was fear -- the same fear he used to feel as a young black boy growing up in Chicago in the 1950s. There was, he recalled, "a sense that an ugly element of our history had somehow crawled forward into the present and made our belief in racial progress feel like an illusion." But Hawkins' death also evoked in Steele an overwhelming sense of what he calls "racial fatigue," that inescapable burden of color that all black Americans still bear.
During the past two years, Steele has argued in a provocative series of essays that a generation after the Watts riot and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is time for blacks to drop the crutch of racial victimization and rely on their own efforts to gain access to the American mainstream. The opportunities are there, he says. Blacks have only to stop hiding behind racism and take advantage of them. Last May he focused a PBS television special about Bensonhurst on that recurring theme. And next month a collection of his essays will be published in his first book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (St. Martin's Press), raising him to center stage in America's tortuous debate over race relations.
Why is this reclusive 44-year-old San Jose State University history professor receiving so much attention? His boosters say it is because Steele's deft prose has invigorated a stale debate. "There is a freshness to his writing," says producer Thomas Lennon, who persuaded Steele to do the PBS special Seven Days in Bensonhurst after reading one of his essays in Harper's. "By making himself his own laboratory, he cuts at familiar issues in a very unfamiliar way." Says author Stanley Crouch, like Steele a critic of affirmative action: "One of the most important things he is doing is questioning Pavlovian racial responses. What's important is not that other people agree with what he says. It's that serious discussion is brought to the discourse dominated by slogans and cliches."
Nonsense, say Steele's critics. They consider him only the latest of a small but widely publicized band of black intellectuals who have been lifted from relative obscurity by a white establishment bent on promoting any African American who publicly attacks mainstream black thinking on affirmative action and other civil rights causes. Like other black conservatives, including Crouch, Stanford economist Thomas Sowell and Harvard political scientist Glenn Loury, Steele takes a heavy verbal beating from black thinkers who argue that the mavericks are undeserving of the attention they receive. Says Martin Kilson, Harvard's first black tenured professor: "Steele's stuff is simpleminded, one-dimensional psychological reductionism. It's slick sophistry." Declares Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the N.A.A.C.P.: "These people have nothing to offer except a conservative viewpoint in a black skin."