Good grief. Nice writing on race and related issues by ‘mixed race’ writer Shelby Steele who knows a few things about the history of race relations in the USA and has written a book on the subject, White Guilt.

Thus:

Today’s black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and ’60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere…

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace.

The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch…

And this nails it. It’s not about moral authority. It’s about these spent volcanoes puffing out feeble smoke-signals that hope to define the debate on their terms and thereby keep whatever dwindling rhetorical control and political authority they can still muster:

The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a “poetic truth.”

Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one’s cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: “America is a racist nation”; “the immigration debate is driven by racism”; “Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon.” And we say, “Yes, of course,” lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.

Pow!

And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment’s mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it.

And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.

There are in fact subtle ideological undercurrents to all this, going to the very definition of racism and what if anything should be done about it. Remember this?

The anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa produced much sophisticated analysis on “racial” issues. Careful distinctions were drawn by Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and others between “multi-racial”, “non-racial”, and “anti-racial” approaches.

Multi-racial meant that you accepted that there were separate races but tried to devise constitutional arrangements to create a fair political balance between them. This was favoured by the mainly Zulu Inkatha movement and in a sense by the Afrikaners themselves.

Non-racial meant that you accepted that different races existed but refused to take this into account in political or constitutional arrangements – all men are equal, one man one vote etc. This was the policy of the African National Congress and its Communist allies.

Anti-racial meant that you did not accept the very idea of races – there is only one race, the human race. This was the approach taken by the Pan Africanist Congress who tried to mobilize ‘indigenous’ Africans against “European settlers” on an African nationalist platform. They had some good jokes. They were asked about their famous slogan “one settler, one bullet”. “We are a poor organization – we can only afford one bullet for each settler!”

The real-life problems facing South Africa have absolutely nothing in common with those facing Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But on the level of constitutional practice there are some issues in common. You too have to reconcile different philosophies. Using the South African terminology, are you multi-ethnic, non-ethnic or anti-ethnic? How if at all is the very idea of ethnicity incorporated into your political and constitutional arrangements?

The intellectual power of the Steve Biko Black Consciousness approach was that it had nothing much to say about the attitude to Africans of ‘whites’. He instead focused on helping Africans free their own minds from ideas of inferiority. In a strange Ayn Rand sort of way he urged Africans to define themselves on their own terms, not on white/European/settler terms:

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

The intellectual problem with the elderly black leadership and its silly noises over Zimmerman (and the race relations industry here in the UK) is that they are trapped in a strange mutli-racial paradigm where the so-called races are endlessly locked in struggle, and neither ‘whites’ nor ‘blacks’ can ever free their minds. In fact their whole raison d’être is that these minds must never be freed – otherwise they would be out of a job!

Last word with Shelby Steele:

One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

To which the answer is ..?