Shelby Steele & The Consequences of Courage
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Over 25 years ago, on September 29th, 1998, we watched a brainy girl with curly hair drop everything to follow a guy she only kind of knew all the way to college. And so began Felicity. My name is Juliette Littman, and I'm a Felicity superfan.

Join me, Amanda Foreman, who you may know better as Megan, the roommate, and Greg Grunberg, who you may also know as Sean Blunberg, as the three of us revisit our favorite moments from the show and talk to the people who helped shape it. Listen to Dear Felicity on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, boys and girls. I'm back. This is Ben Dominich, publisher of The Federalist.

Ben Domenech, Fox News.

It seems to me that there are a number of different dynamics in this country worthy of discussion and that require a lot longer of a conversation than what you can get in just a brief cable news hit.

That's the kind of space that we want to have here on this podcast, where we can have those conversations at length, delve into the different issues involved, get to know the different people that we're talking to, and reflect a bit on the different aspects of this country in this particular high-strung, very tense, very tribalist moment.

We're going to talk about populism. We're going to talk about the future and the past of the American right and left. We're going to talk about race in America. That's the subject of our first episode today.

We're going to talk about aspects of our culture, both the high culture and the low culture, what it means for us as Americans as we see them develop. And we'll do that both with the creative side of things, the business side of things, and the people who comment and analyze this for you on Fox News with regularity. If you're listening to this, I don't need to tell you that America has been getting a pretty bad rap as of late.

There are a lot of people running it down from without and from within. And those are people who I think are fundamentally wrong. I believe in America. I believe in its past and in its future, in its promise and in what it offers uniquely in the history of the world. The essence of American optimism is founded in a belief that the world we pass on can exceed the one we inherited.

We are not prisoners of an all-encompassing destiny, and neither are our children. This is not a uniquely American inclination, mind you, but a human one. But not all cultures acknowledge or honor it. It was here, in America, where such an experience was uniquely understood from our inception, in our creed.

We create as we were created and know all who are created have worth. And so they have an equal claim to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. We're going to be talking to a lot of interesting people in the coming weeks and months. I hope that you will go along with us on this conversation. And I appreciate the folks at Fox News for having the ability and the interest in hosting these conversations. Today, we'll be talking to Shelby Steele.

He's an author and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He's the son of a southern-born black truck driver who left school in third grade to work the fields. He would marry a white woman in 1944, which is not exactly the kind of things that a lot of people are known for. It led all of her siblings to abandon her. He talked recently to the Wall Street Journal in an interview that I encourage you to look up.

Mr. Steele laments that liberal America is, quote, still not ready to talk realistically and frankly about race. What is obvious to him, he says, and obvious to millions of Americans, is the fact that America has made more moral progress in the last 60 years regarding race than any nation, country, or civilization in history, unquote. He describes this progress as, quote, miraculous and cites his own life as proof.

He was born into a deeply segregated America where every aspect of life was racially calibrated. In 1946, when his mother showed up at a Chicago hospital in full labor, nurses ushered her into the maternity ward. When her husband arrived after parking the car, the nurses realized the baby wasn't going to be white. They pushed her into the elevator, which descended to the basement where the colored maternity ward was. This was where Mr. Steele and his identical twin brother, Claude, were born.

Mr. Steele encountered plenty of discrimination in his youth. He couldn't be a paper boy because they wouldn't let black kids ride a bike through white neighborhoods at 6 a.m. He couldn't be a caddy on a golf course. He couldn't wash dishes at the local Greek restaurant because people would see his black hands on the plates. He couldn't work at JCPenney because he couldn't be seen laying clothes out on display. He couldn't go to the schools he wanted because all the schools were segregated.

And yet he too believes in America. Coming up, we'll hear from our guest today, Shelby Steele.

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Shelby Steele is one of the most interesting intellectuals in America today. He's also someone who's spoken over the course of his career to a number of the issues that currently find themselves at the center of Americans' discussion about race in this country, about the history of the nation, and about the kind of nation that we want to have moving forward.

I recently had a conversation with a very intelligent friend of mine, Emily Eakins, currently the research director over at the Cato Institute, about the fact that she and a group of her friends

had gotten together to discuss Shelby Steele's 2006 book, White Guilt, which has an enormous, I think, lesson to teach us in this current time. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and he is joining us here today. Thank you so much, Shelby, for taking the time to join us. Thank you for having me. I had back and forth with my friend Emily about

what kind of questions she wanted me to ask you. And so I hope that you'll forgive a little bit of book club intrusion onto our conversation today. But one of the questions that really was front of mind, I think for them,

was about how to wrestle with an America that has gone beyond recognizing the evils of racism to the point where race now seems to be used in a weaponized way against our fellow Americans. Absolutely.

You know, as I've written about in that book as well, there was a moment in the 60s when America openly confessed to its long, terrible history of racism. DePice prayed for that very honorable act was to lose moral authority. And so the loss of moral authority has been a problem for America ever since, white Americans especially. And it's...

And in any given situation, any conflict that comes up as a black, I can say, well, you're quoting principle to me now, but you didn't quote principle. You didn't act out that way when I was growing up in segregation. And so I have a moral authority that that white Americans don't have. And it's it's it's it constitutes a.

And this is white guilt is an enormous, I think, obviously very underrated power in American life. It determines any number of things, our attitudes toward race and so forth. Whites have been in the position since the 60s of having to defend

to demonstrate in some way their innocence of that old racist path. I'm not me. My universe, it's sort of branding. It's come down to that. My institution is we have diversity. We have inclusion. We have all these wonderful things today because we're innocent of that. And therefore, we deserve the moral authority to be seen as a legitimate American institution.

So the very legitimacy of our institutions are tied to this accusation against America. One can even, I think, go a little broader. I think it also, the same dynamic is at work in European countries as well, as they face the problem of their former colonies coming into, immigrating to their societies. Mm-hmm.

One of the elements of this that's taken on a new importance in our current discussion is the rise of woke members of society. At least it's kind of a poorly defined term. But one of the things that seems to come with it is caring a lot about an appearance of righteousness and

as opposed to caring about what actually helps individuals. How is that playing out in this current dynamic in America? Well, again, it is a predetermined preoccupation with innocence, innocence of the past. And as a minority, as a Black, one of the things, and many, many of my friends say the same thing, is it's

One of the things that is so offensive is the assumption that, well, let me make it a little simpler. Social reform relating to race has been more devoted to proving the innocence of white Americans and white American institutions than it has to the development of blacks and other minorities. Mm-hmm.

So we have war on poverty and affirmative action and diversity programs and school busing and public housing and all these things. And none of them, of course, ever work because their purpose is really not to work. It is to work for white Americans, to give white America the moral authority to be legitimate and to move on as a society. President Johnson realized that, mentions it out loud, uses the word guilt.

Well, if you're guilty, then you've got to pay off. And so we get all these trillions of dollars worth of social programs. And again, it pays off for whites to become preoccupied with their moral innocence around race.

It inflates them morally and otherwise. It makes them better people than they would otherwise be. If you're white and you don't declare your hatred of racism, then my God, you're a disgusting person. You're not legitimate. You're not acceptable. So any hint of that now...

Again, is this pressure on whites to be preoccupied? And it's someone who sort of watched this sort of go down through the last several decades. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad to see people so preoccupied, thinking that they're preoccupied with Blacks, that they feel the right way about Blacks.

but entirely driven by their own need to reclaim moral authority and legitimacy. One of the things that you draw out in that book is this example from Maureen Dowd's 2003 op-ed about Clarence Thomas and affirmative action, where she invokes the concept of him being ungrateful.

People like her, essentially. The opening paragraph of it is, what a cunning man Clarence Thomas is, he knew that he could not make a powerful legal argument against racial preferences given the fact that he got into Yale Law School and got picked for the Supreme Court thanks to his race. You see this dynamic where you have

white liberals essentially building themselves up and putting themselves out there as, you should be grateful to me. I am superior because I have the morally righteous end of the argument. That's what American liberalism is today. It's the self-inflation of whites, the self-aggrandizement by way...

So you're absolutely right. I mean, once again, Maureen Dowd is saying exactly the same thing, word for word, that the slave owner said. I own you. I paid for you. Shut up, for goodness sakes. Be grateful. I'm going to give you three meals a day. And because, again, I'm superior and you're inferior. And I'm exploiting you because I'm superior to you.

And here you are, ungrateful to me. And so Maureen Dowd would have a lot of fellow feeling with the slave owners of the past. They were probably more honest about it.

One of the things that you describe in the book is the difference between the new man, the white liberals taking the superior view, and the unreconstructed white American view.

who you describe as whites who have failed to dissociate from the country's racist past. Such whites may or may not actually be racist, but their failure to dissociate in this age of white guilt means they carry no moral authority and add nothing to the legitimacy of the institutions they are part of. To me, that sounds like the position of

a lot of older conservative white members of America, Republican voters, you know, who, you know, they don't want to dissociate necessarily from the past because they experience the value part of it and don't view themselves as bearing the guilt for for racist sins of the past because they were not active participants in them.

how can people like that navigate this current moment when, you know, essentially if you don't have the racial views of this moment, if you have essentially the same views that you've had for the last 40, 50 years, that means that you are categorized in this new dynamic as being someone who's racist. That's right. And the American left likes to keep it that way because the, the, the,

need for whites to establish their innocence is their single greatest source of power. It is why they

Why I believe that Mr. Biden won the presidency was was the exploitation of of continually to cast himself as the redeemer of and the friend of blacks. And if you if you don't vote for me, you're not really black because I am the the lord and master of that. And I claim I claim innocence and power because of that.

So it is until whites, the problem whites have that came out of the 1960s is that they didn't just lose their moral authority and so forth or have it come into question. They lost their confidence, their moral confidence.

And when you look at white America today and they ask questions, how can we get out of this situation? How can we solve it? The whites have to find a way. White America has to find a way to restore its moral confidence other than this sort of shallow rebranding of itself as diverse and so forth. That's not that's that's just more of the same. It's never going to work. But.

And how do you regain confidence? How do you become confident enough to say, look, I'm not a racist, and I don't care what you say, whether that agrees with you or doesn't. I'm not one, and I'm not going to act as though I'm one. I'm going to fight for what I believe. I'm going to argue for my case. The only way to do that is to find some courage. Mm-hmm.

And I think the difficulty white America has at the moment is that it just hasn't quite, it doesn't have the confidence, doesn't quite have the confidence. It can complain around the side, around the periphery of things and say that they're being treated unfairly and so forth. But there's not, there is a lack of confidence there.

necessary to simply accept oneself as a citizen. And the big word for me is citizenship. That seems to me where we have a chance to find some common ground and to find some confidence.

And I think that's going to happen. I think white America will meet this challenge and will stand up for itself. There'll be many blacks who stand along with it, many minorities who do, who will say it's time we move beyond this moral authority game and deal with the actual issues we face as a free democracy.

But we haven't been there yet. And that, it seems to me, why black America would vote to the extent that they did for someone who is so nakedly exploiting their history of victimization for his own

his benefit. That's not a good sign. The element of this that I think puts so many people in a position of feeling scared is that for a lot of white Americans, they care very much about avoiding being viewed as racist. They want to avoid racist speech. They want to avoid saying anything or making a joke that could allow them to be depicted as racist.

Even, I think, self-censor in ways that perhaps they didn't in the past about which movies they enjoy or which things might make other people feel uncomfortable. And to me, it seems that the reason that they're acting that way is not because they actually believe that they are racist or that they have some kind of racist thoughts, but that they're scared.

They're scared that people will use the concept of racism to, you know, essentially inflict guilt on them, either on some, you know, invented basis or by taking something the wrong way. And because of that, it's kind of an indication of a situation where they care less

the person that they're worried about doesn't actually care about justice. They care more about power and using race as a way, uh, to, to gain a foothold or, or to gain, uh,

an advantage over someone else around them, either in the workplace or in the community. For Americans who are in that position, it's a lot to ask them to be courageous and to stand up when they're just a normal citizen who wants to live their life and doesn't want to be at the center of some controversy about race.

That's too bad. That's an answer. Too bad. You're going to have to do it anyway. You have to do it anyway. At some point, I think you're exactly, you described it exactly as it is. People are saying, well, what in the world did I ever do to be in this position where I have to prove that I'm not a racist? I don't, I was never racist. You know, what, what's that about? Well, the, you know, the, the,

Until whites do begin to recover some confidence through courage, they will have to find courage. If they don't, the other side will run over. The grievance industry in America grows by the minute because of white guilt. I'm in the university and you see people

um hired and and you you're creating a almost a middle class upper middle class of of uh minorities in american institutions who are there to do nothing but be sort of window dressing for white innocence and uh these these people will continue to run the show as long as white america

persists and does not find the courage to say to itself, I am not racist. I believe all citizens are the same. And that's the best. I owe you things as a citizen. You owe me. Race has nothing to do with it. It has to be taken out of modern life as much as possible. But people just find that it is profoundly dangerous

White America is on the verge of lacking the courage to assert its best self, its best principles, the principles that ensure freedom and individual rights and Constitution, Declaration of Assurances, and so forth. We don't have the confidence at this moment to say to somebody, you can't get a preference into a university because of your race.

It was evil when whites did it, and it's evil when blacks do it. It's evil, regardless of somebody's race. When I see a university have that kind of courage, boy, I'll do everything I can certainly to support it. I think many, many others. We need a resistance at this point, and it need not be race-based. It need not be white only and all that sort of thing. It is a resistance movement.

to this game where we've allowed Black victimization, Black suffering to become the greatest social power we have so that everybody tries to align themselves in ways that flatter them, that they gain a sort of sense of power.

I suppose, of inevitability, of the right to thrive. We need people to break away from that, to find their own voice, to go with those principles that we're afraid to support right now. Right now, the way you show your innocence of racism is that you defer to minorities, which means you lower standards everywhere. So every institution now is rushing to lower its standards.

UCLA throwing out the SAT exam, so forth. Well, lowering standards makes blacks weaker, makes whites more and more, makes them weaker as well, and doesn't deliver any innocence.

We see all these companies across the country bringing in people like Robin DiAngelo, people like Ibram X. Kendi to espouse things based on the tenets of critical race theory in the workplace. That seemed to me something that was pretty crazy when they were just doing it in the realm of the academy or at the Aspen Festival or something like that.

Now that it's invading the lives of a lot of Americans for whom this is the first time that they're really dealing with these concepts and they're being forced into these groups, reading these books that people in HR departments are signing to them.

what are some of the ways or the methods that you think they ought to push back? Is it saying, well, I'm happy to participate in this, but I want to bring in this book too? Is it to say, if we're going to participate in this, we need to recognize the basis on which this is being done? We saw the backlash to, for instance, former President Trump's order dismissing critical race theory as something that

should be allowed within the federal government, where a lot of the folks in the media covering it were kind of falsely depicting it as just saying, well, this is just racial sensitivity training. It's not really that, is it? And what should we do if you are confronted by it within your workplace? Well, no, it's not just that. It is a huge power move. It wants to take over. It wants to dominate. It wants to be the arbiter of truth.

as any authoritarian sort of impulse. It is an authoritarian, totalitarian impulse, and it wants simply to dominate. My fear is there won't be, again, an easy way to do this. These people have been encouraged from the highest rungs of society, presidential level on down,

Critical race theory is bogus. It's a blatant, empty, to me as a minority, demeaning, dehumanizing. I mean, you can go on forever. But

It is a currency with which whites can buy innocence in the marketplace. It's a currency through which blacks and other minorities can exercise power in the political arena. So it's not there idly. It has a real function. So critical race theory is just trying to take that

from a sort of narrow place to an absolutely broad. Everything they do is broadening. We don't have racism anymore. We have systemic racism, much broader, much more ingrained, subtly infused into our lives. And so Blacks literally now at this point by walking down the street are being racially violated.

racism is just dripping out of the air. Well, what they're saying is that's my power. Can you match it? You don't have enough innocence to stand up to it. And so far we don't. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think is a problem about this is that the ability to just correct basic facts is

is very, very difficult within this. There was a survey conducted by the Skeptic magazine recently that was looking at what people believed about

police killings of unarmed black men in 2019. And it found that more than 50% of progressives think that police have killed more than a thousand unarmed black men just in that one year alone. As you know, the number was, it's normally between 25 and 30 and it was 27 that year. When you're dealing with a situation where someone truly believes that

that something like that is happening. And then they have that view reinforced, not just by political leaders, but also by, you know, the members of the NBA all wearing, you know, jerseys and, and, and names and things like that, which creates an impression that,

that this really is some kind of war by cops on unarmed black men. How can you possibly push against that when the entire media, you know, sports celebrity narrative pushes in that direction? Well, you're right. You described the problem very well. It is a serious problem because there is no easy way to do that. When you have NBA superstars and so forth, and they're all...

making hundreds of millions of dollars, yet dressing in the garb of victimization and getting away with it, getting away with it. And from the, you know, president on down, people just don't have, we're not, we're not, it seems to me, we're just simply not close to

It's been frustrating for me because you think, well, now they're going to finally see it. Finally, they're going to see that their own insecurity is the problem, that you are literally what white, what liberal white America is doing today is enabling. That's the, you know, the, the word from having to do with addiction. And so they are enabling people.

these attitudes in blacks to fight for, you know, kneeling at football games and as though this is some sort of brave thing. Black Lives Matter, burning up cities and so forth, as though this is some sort of noble thing

a life-affirming act. And it's whites who buy that. I drive through neighborhoods, you see the Black Lives Matter signs on people's yards and so forth, and basically saying, yes, I'm a wretched racist, and I need to advertise that so that I can flagellate myself. Mm-hmm.

and find some peace, some innocence. If people only knew what it was like to be black and suffer that. That's sad. And it's

What will end it is, I suppose, the question. And again, it sounds glib to keep saying it, but I do believe at some point white Americans are going to say enough. Enough is enough. We've gotten now well over 60 years. The one thing that white guilt always draws out of whites is deference.

That is, and that deference is black power. It is the power of the American left defer to the victim, the victimization that this, these people suffered and lower the standards for them, make exceptions for them and, and give them the feeling that they have power. And that,

You know, that is at some point, it seems to me whites have got to begin to realize that that's what they're doing, that they're enabling. And of course, then my beef with blacks is that we sit there and think that really is our power.

We don't look at the development, education, risk-taking, entrepreneurial, all of the sort of classic ways, genuine powers. But we don't look at that. We look at the fact that we live amongst guilty whites and that when we speak, they shut up. And that's the muscle.

Well, it's been profitable muscle for Ibram X. Kendi, I have to say. Jack Dorsey gave him a ton of money to continue peddling. Yeah, and you look at it, and it's mind-boggling how, you know, how well. It's just, I've never quite seen it this starkly absurd. Yes.

There was an interesting interview the other day published in New York Magazine with David Shore, who actually got in trouble for sharing some academic research on effective protest movements last year when

when he was pointing out that violence actually doesn't help things. But he's an interesting Democrat analyst who looks at a lot of different aspects of this. And he was talking about what happened in 2020. He said that Democrats gained roughly 7% among white college graduates, but their support among African-Americans declined by about 2%. Their support among Hispanic Americans dropped by 8% to 9%. And his explanation for this was,

That what they found was when they looked at Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing and public safety.

Those were ones who were far more likely to switch to voting for Donald Trump over Joe Biden. And the way that he described this is, I think you can tell this micro story. We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of non-white votes disagreed with us on. And then as a result, these conservative, he says, especially Hispanic voters who had been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.

To what degree will there be a political side of waking up to this reality? If these types of trends continue and we just saw this police reform bill pushed through very radical, basically considered a nonstarter in the Senate by the Democrat House.

Will there be some reconsideration of this or are they so invested now in that defund the police, you know, law and order is, is necessarily just an act of white supremacy narrative that that's going to be the dominant element of our political discussion for a while. Well, that's a very good question. I'm not sure I have the answer, but, but it is, it is a, it's,

It's the same larger question. You know, one is just appalled to look at that form of politics emerge because, again, it is so starkly absurd. And yet I have not at this moment seen much resistance, much opposition.

Much bravery. Certainly there has not been a rhetorical. I mean, what Joe Biden has basically done, what Joe Biden basically did in terms of the campaign was to say, oh, I'm not in favor of defunding the police. But that's the extent to which he engaged in it in the sense that if someone like him was going to have a moment on this.

it would require standing up to the argument and putting forward a different one, which says, actually, we need more cops in these communities in order to have more safety. And it's minorities who are hurt the most when we defund police outfits and the like. All things that a lot of experts, you know, on the right will say, but on the left, it seems to be something that is just a third rail now. Right. Yeah. It, it,

It looks like they're heading for a train wreck is what it looks like. But I don't trust my own perception of that. They may not be heading for a train wreck. My fear, how can you continue to get people in a free society to be so open to policies and so forth that defund the police that are so...

Obviously absurd. How can you how does that go on? Well, again, I think there I hate to go back to it, but I really think in the 60s, white America has we have not appreciated the degree to which white America lost its moral authority and has become insecure.

So that the insecurity white Americans feel about their own innocence becomes the impenetrable barrier to moving ahead. Because so often whites are going to say, look, I'm going to pretend to be innocent here. I don't have time to deal with reality. Right.

The reality is that 60 years after the civil rights bill, blacks are less developed than they were 60 years ago. That's the reality of liberalism for 60 years. And you would think everybody would say, oh, my God, we've got it. We got it. That's that's the end of liberalism. No, they come back with more new and better forms of it. And and, you know, we're going to defund the police now.

Do you really think that is going to have an impact on that 12-year-old black boy on the south side of Chicago where I grew up, walking around without a father, without strong familial connections anywhere, unable to read and write, unexposed to literature or even religion, lost in the world?

Is that going to somehow bring what you're doing as a white by supporting kneeling at football games or whatever? How long can you sustain this kind of inconsistency, this pressure?

breach of common sense. I will say this and I don't mean to be flippant about it, but I have joked as someone who's in the area is that the biggest cultural consequence to the reaction to George Floyd's death was actually the Washington Redskins lost their football team's name. I mean, it is kind of a thing where there's just a lot of storm, a lot of noise and

But then when you look at what would actually solve the problems, there doesn't seem to be an appetite for actually doing it because it's more complicated and difficult. That leads me to this question about something that you gave an interview on recently with the Wall Street Journal, which is the difference between equity and equality.

that's something that I think is on the minds of a lot of people lately because they're hearing it from the new administration in Washington, this push for equity, equity when it comes to vaccines, for instance, becoming more controversial. What is the difference between equality and equity and how should we think about that? Well, equity is black power.

Equality is just simply a reflection of whether one group is equal to the other, whether they have educational levels that they're achieving at the same level and that sort of thing. Old sort of common idea. Equity, it's like systemic racism. It's a new invention of black oppression, of black suffering. It is saying that blacks are behind in America today because

because of racism and so therefore we don't have equity. And that absence of equity is the oppression of Black people, comes out of that. And so it is simply a strategy. It's not an idea. It's a strategy for expanding, broadening the victimization of minorities and therefore broadening their entitlement.

It's a way to get more bucks out of guilty white people. To shake them down. And if they resist, then boy, we hit them with the racism card. And now we're fancy in the chattering classes. We say the equity is, you know, again, it flew out of my mind. But it's the same sort of thing where minorities are

shaking down whites are constantly finding ways to do it. And so equity, you don't know what it means. I don't know what it means. Nobody really can define it. But we know it means vaguely and broadly that racism is everywhere. And so we've got to fight it with this, this, this, and this. And so

It's a power term. There was an incident recently, just last week, where Brett Weinstein, the very sort of eccentric academic who talks about a lot of different subject matter, was participating in a clubhouse conversation

where he was invited to talk. It's that app where you can converse and that kind of thing. And they were shouting him down and basically kicked him out of the room for being a racist and said he could come back in if he cash-apped them all $1,000 apiece. So the shakedown, it's getting more nitty-gritty in the era of internet payments. With the time we have left, I just wanted to ask you a little bit

about how the changing conversation about race may have impacted you personally in terms of what you've seen happen in the past couple of years. It was mentioned in that Wall Street Journal piece, something that I did not know about you, which is that you have a twin brother and that you have personal disagreements about your views on race.

Without prying too much into your personal and family life, do you still talk to each other about it? And what is it like to have those types of conversations with a close family member? Because I certainly know that that's the case in a lot of families across this country, where there are very strong, differently held views between brothers and sisters, parents and children and the like. My brother and I have not talked in 40 years.

So I don't know. I don't know what it would be like. Our disagreements are not whatever. I don't know what they would be at this point since we spent so long. But he took an idea from my work and published it as his own. And I felt very profoundly hurt by that. And yeah,

That's sort of the beginning and the end of it. And I wish it hadn't been that way. But those things happen in life. I hope someday he can come to terms with it, own up to it. But I doubt that that's going to happen. I know that the challenge of being in the position that you are as someone who is

that dreaded term, a public intellectual, is that you are someone known for defending very controversial ideas in public. Controversial ideas that I think in the history of America and certainly in the post-Enlightenment age should not deserve that level of controversy, perhaps.

Has that been difficult in recent years for you in terms of the consequences of being willing to stand up and have that courage to do that, either in an academic environment or just in the public square? Have there been consequences for you, basically, for taking that on? Oh, sure. Yes, there have. Back to the beginning when I first began to...

publish, write about race publicly. I pretty much lost every friend I had, lost family members, so forth. And so it lost more than I ever thought I would. I didn't really understand the degree to which we have, and in fact taught me a lot, the investment we have in our country

ideologically, it seems to me in my generation, my time was profoundly important. So yes, I lost every friend I had. I took on a gained other new friends that I was much happier with. And so I have absolutely no complaint whatsoever

um you don't regret it and i don't regret it i'm i'm a i'm a veteran of cancellation i've been canceled for 30 40 years now uh and og canceled yes and it i accept my fate my fate was to do this and um

If I have any regrets, it's that I haven't done it better than I have. But I've given it my best. I have a lot of faith in America. I believe in America utterly. I don't think there's anything else comparable. And so I think what I'm doing is good for America.

And that's what matters to me. I want us to truly be a liberated society. I grew up in segregation. I know what that's like. When I see the kind of sort of communistic approach to a problem like race today, it breaks my heart. It's sad to see people finding self-esteem

in the fact of their victimization, in the fact that whites are now guilty. And so it seems to me we've got to get through this patch or we're going to really begin to break down, it seems to me, as a society. Just one last question. Is there something in your experience that can be done or that can be argued that is effective at breaking the kind of indoctrination that you're talking about?

I think, you know, carefully listening to both sides is probably the, you know, it's sort of obvious, but, you know, I work by putting myself in the, wearing the shoes of the other side of trying to see who they are. Empathy is my sort of greatest method of working. I want to really sort of see

what the other side, I wanted, I wanted to see what white guilt was really like really and truly and why it was the great pressure it is and, and how it came to be and how it works in society. And, and I was a black nationalist in college and, and how did that happen? When I grew up in a family that was Martin Luther King civil rights,

But there was a moment when I became infatuated with the race. Thought that was black power was made sense. After all, white power had dominated the world forever. What's wrong now it's our turn. One sort of point that's important to me. One of the problems that you have as a minority is that you don't have much experience with freedom. The one thing we didn't get was freedom.

And finally, in the 60s, we began to actually get freedom. And I think now we are, in fact, free. But we don't know what to do with it. And it scares the hell out of us. And if we have to openly and freely compete with other people who've been developed for centuries and we haven't, we're at a disadvantage. It looks an awful lot like oppression. And that's just our fate. That's history. And so what we've done, because we're afraid of freedom,

is to retreat, I think, to tribalism. And it seems to me that that's a pattern that's almost universal. You can see in other societies, a group comes into freedom.

And inevitably, it's not what they thought it was going to be. Inevitably, it demands much more than they ever – they thought freedom was a – in King's language, it was a glorious, beautiful thing, a dream. They didn't realize freedom is really hard work. It's individual responsibility. It's no excuses. It's development. It's competition. It's all of those tough things.

Otherwise, you'll fail and suffer. Well, rather than approach that, deal with that, we say, no, it's tribe. It's the tribe. My blackness is what I'm proud of, and I'm going to move ahead that way, and it's going to nourish me in some way. We're going to discover, and I think we're black Americans beginning more and more to discover, that's never going to happen.

We're going to have to make it like everybody else has to make it through basically individual responsibility. Make your own life. Make it as good and successful as you possibly can. And that's your contribution to the group.

that's the way to handle freedom, not tribalism, not the, because then you're just always in a fight with whites and they're always in a fight with you and they're guilty one minute and then punitive the next minute and you're, and we get absolutely nowhere. We have the absurd situation we have today of people making hundreds of millions of dollars protesting at football games. That's a joke.

That's a sad, it's an image of pathos that our race relations are at at the moment. Hopefully we can find the courage on both sides to face the challenges that history gives both groups, honestly, and make some progress. Shelby Steele, thank you so much for taking the time to join me for this conversation today.

Well, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it. I want to thank you all for listening to this first conversation, first of many here on the Fox News Podcast Network. If you want to look up some of the different things that we discussed in the show today, you can look up Tunku Varadarajan's interview with Shelby Steele at the Wall Street Journal. It's from February 12th, 2021. It's entitled How Equality Lost to Equity.

You can also find David Shore's interview, which I read from. It's an interview with Eric Levitz at the New York Magazine Intelligencer. Its title is David Shore on why Trump was good for the GOP and how Dems can win in 2022.

I wanted to talk about a couple of other things that I've been reading and listening to lately. I had an interesting experience listening to the latest podcast from the folks over at Red Scare, the two ladies there reacting to President Trump's speech at CPAC, which I found to be a really interesting thing. They basically made the argument that

That in terms of the media coverage of that speech, that they failed to appreciate how much the president was benefiting from the new role that he's going to play. Being a former president who still has the option of running for office again, it's an interesting thing to check out.

I also would say that you should check out a couple of other articles that I've been reading of late this week on the internet. There's a piece at Tablet Magazine, which you can find at tabletmag.com, called Can a Healthy American Society Exist on the Internet?

It's by Rachel Alexander, and it has, I think, a lot to do wrestling with the different toxic nature of social media and the Internet in general. That's something that we definitely will be talking about in the future on this podcast. Another main line kind of approach that I think is interesting, even if I don't agree with its conclusions, is over at The Hollywood Reporter where they have a piece titled Racist Sexist Classic.

How Hollywood is Dealing with Its Problematic Content by Rebecca Keegan. That's from March 4th, 2021. Basically, it's dealing with all of the different problematic pieces of content that exist across so many different platforms, including films like Gone with the Wind, The Searchers, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Woman of the Year, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and the like that have all been included in this demand that basically

that basically these old films be required to go through the ringer in order to be seen again. Basically, Hollywood trying to provide context for what they did when it comes to racial or gender issues or the like. And then there's a piece over at our own publication, The Federalist, by Joy Pullman from, again, March 4th, 2021. I haven't used Amazon for almost three months and I don't miss it one bit.

It's really hard for me to agree with this piece, and I appreciate the fact that Joy wrote it, but the fact is that I use Amazon constantly, and so breaking away from it, it's really the big tech giant that would be the hardest for me to break away from versus the Apple giant.

Uh, and the like that are a lot easier to, to cancel or walk away from, uh, as I did with Disney plus. So I wanted to just share that with you all. Uh, and we'll probably be updating those types of things every week. Uh,

Just different articles that are worth your time, worth checking out online. It's a pleasure to have you along for the first episode of the Ben Domenech podcast. I hope you will listen to it again. It's on the Fox News Podcast Network. And for more of this, you can go to foxnewspodcast.com. Please rate and review this one wherever you download your podcast. We'll be back next week with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

Pull up a chair and join me, Rachel Campos Duffy, and me, former U.S. Congressman Sean Duffy, as we share our perspective on the discussions happening at kitchen tables across America. Download From the Kitchen Table, The Duffys, at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you download podcasts.