Shelby Steele @ Cody's on Telegraph May 16, 2006

http://www.codysbooks.com/calendar/may06Calendar.jsp:

Tuesday, May 16 - Shelby Steele
7:30 PM at Cody's Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley

Shelby Steele has helped define the parameters of the current dialogue on racism in America in his essays in the national press and in books such as A Dream Deferred and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Content of Our Character. Now, in WHITE GUILT: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, this thoughtful and provocative social critic ups the ante with a concise, potentially incendiary exploration of the ways in which the last half-century of race relations has not only failed to abolish racial injustice and achieve equality, but has spawned a moral void created by white guilt. Government and academic institutions put affirmative action and other programs in place, ostensibly to help blacks, but the upshot has been a different form of exploitation, which views blacks as victims rather than equals. "White guilt" has been a way for whites to keep up appearances, to feel righteous, and to acquire an easy moral authority, without addressing the real underlying problems of African Americans. And black leaders have indulged this new form of racism. In WHITE GUILT, Steele calls for alternatives to this moral relativism, which he feels extends beyond race relations into all parts of American life. Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. A contributing editor at Harper's, Steele received the National Humanities Medal in 2004. 7:30 PM at Cody's Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley