The real meaning of "Civil Rights"

Although Shelby Steele --who is as Black as Barack Obama--would not approve of the use I am making of his work, here is a telling section from The Culture of Deference.

I think the great unacknowledged event of the civil rights era was that white Americans became a stigmatized group. I also believe that our entire national culture of racial and social reform -- the policies, programs, norms, and protocols by which we address race-related problems -- has been shaped more by the stigmatization of whites than by any other factor, including the actual needs of blacks. 

Ironically, it was the idea of equality that brought stigma to whites. In the civil rights era, when white America finally accepted a legal equality that would extend to different races, it also accepted an idea that shamed it…As a result, equality in the United States has depended on a vigilance that associates this racial shame with whites and American institutions… 

So far equality has worked by bringing whites down into stigma rather than by lifting blacks and other minorities up out of it. 

Steele's The Content of our Character outlines the continuing game of "license and deference" that Whites play with Blacks in order to bargain for some kind of racial absolution. That absolution will never be given however. Dangling its (fruitless) possibility before Whites is the basic source of the moral power that Blacks now have, a moral upper hand that they otherwise have no claim to at all. Why would they ever give that up?

All this was encapsulated brilliantly in Burnham's Law in 1964:

"The liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself."

If you'd like an example of this perversity, check out how we Whites joined in the condemnation of Paula Deen merely for uttering the ultimate forbidden term nigger, --forbidden to Whites only, of course-- making her into a tearfully penitent pariah, while Negro freakazoid Dennis Rodman gets to pal around with Kim Jong Un, suffering no such opprobrium.

If that is not corrupt, I don't know what is. Such are the results of fifty years of "civil rights."

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