The daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes

Image: Shelby Steele

The greatest black problem in America today is freedom. All underdeveloped, formerly oppressed groups first experience new freedom as a shock and a humiliation because freedom shows them their underdevelopment and their inability to compete as equals. Freedom seems to confirm all the ugly stereotypes about the group—especially the charge of inferiority—and yet the group no longer has the excuse of oppression. Without oppression—and it must be acknowledged that blacks are no longer oppressed in America—the group itself becomes automatically responsible for its inferiority and non-competitiveness. So freedom not only comes as a humiliation but also as an overwhelming burden of responsibility. Thus, inevitably, there is a retreat from freedom. No group that has been oppressed to the point of inferiority is going to face the realities of new freedom without flinching. Almost always, oppressed groups enter freedom by denying that they are in fact free, this is a way of avoiding the daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes.

Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (pp. 67-8)