The Shock of Freedom and the Reinvention of Racism | OLD PARKLAND CONFERENCE

[Music] okay well uh this uh i'm hoping is going to be a tremendous 45 minutes as most you know my name is ian rowe and uh when i started my first job gosh almost 30 years ago with arthur anderson i was one of the few black staff consultants and uh you know very high intensity environment very competitive and and i spent time with my fellow black colleagues because we there weren't that many of us it was always interesting that we got into these conversations where several of my colleagues felt um questioned why they were there you know they were they were uncertain of whether or not they'd really earn their place it was always just this is just this fascinating phenomenon i didn't really understand it um and and i noticed with many of my black colleagues there's always this question of our identity and just were we up to the task and uh someone shared a copy of this book the content of our character and uh i mean i could read many passages from this book but one of them says we as black people have a victim-focused identity that is at war with our own best interests that magnifies our oppression and diminishes our sense of possibility i think this identity is a weight on blacks because it is built around our collective insecurity rather than our faith in our human capacity to seize opportunity as individuals like when i read those words these words exploded off the page like someone had the courage to say these words in public he gave me a vocabulary to think differently about what it meant to be a black person and so it is uh with deep humility that i am now sitting on the stage with the person who wrote those words shelby steele thank you i'm ready to go now you're ready to go all right okay okay um so shelby let's uh let's actually uh step back because you know you you you have you have been a force for good for so many people in this room and you've been the tip of the spear you've had to take a lot of arrows and accusations over years and years you know you don't admit that systemic racism racism exists you said even last night oppression is over but let's go back even to your early years and the experiences that you had as a young person going to schools i've i've heard you describe the kinds of systemic racism that you faced in your own life particularly in schools talk a little bit about that and how your parents responded and how that's helped to shape your own worldview wow small question uh you're a big thinker well i was uh i was blessed with uh two really truly great uh parents my mother and father and every everything i am i clearly owed them and they they got married in 1944 they had met in this as founding members of core congress of racial equality uh i grew up as a as a core baby a core based little community of people who were members of core and so forth so i grew up in with the consciousness of civil rights and racial equality and and i like to say i was born right smack into it my mother who was white and i had a master's degree from the university of chicago my father had a third grade education he was from the from the deep south and uh they were probably most of a man a couple i've ever met i've been been around um but uh when my mother was ready to deliver uh uh she he took her to the hospital and wheeled her out and they brought her wheelchair and wheeled her and they they took her and they were going to put her in a room and where she was to give birth so my father then goes out puts the park the car and comes back in and says well my wife was just here could you touch this oh my god i think i know where this is going [Laughter] and they said nothing but they made some phone calls immediately immediately my mother was taken from the ninth floor to the basement where they were black women gave birth and the only place they were allowed to give birth and that's where i was born into this interesting dilemma they fought their entire life for civil rights they they were activists uh they every every um almost every night there were meetings in the house they were they integrated a church that was all white they they went and visited it and they were rejected the minister resigned took half the congregation with them and they created a new first integrated church in chicago area uh i went to school and the school was was segregated uh there were two schools in one district one was white one was black um they organized the parents for boycott of the school people took all their children out uh and um just finally the half the faculty was fired and the school was completely changed reform but it was a it was a school that was before that all white teachers who who got their jobs when they they had breakdowns and and so they would they would then be sent to the black school to teach and so i couldn't read in the sixth grade uh and uh any my parents stopped that the whole community took their kids out and and demanded so anyway that's what that's my uh by the time i got to high school i was a i was a veteran of uh and civil rights yeah wow um when you face that kind of discrimination i can't even believe that's the first time i've heard you share that story that you were born presumably because you were a mixed race baby they felt they had to have you be born only oh but when you face that kind of eve threw me into an identity crisis right right from the bat but people respond in different ways you can respond to that kind of experience and develop a deep sense of hate and resentment for a country or a system that is perpetrating that or it seems you can respond in the way that you and your parents did which was to try to liberate ourselves from that system what made the difference how does that how does that happen to explain how you didn't fall into a negative spiral well you know a lot of it had to do i think with faith they they believed in a in a christ that was was good was positive believed in in humanity and they believed in humanity and they and it sustained them uh and their friends the community of people they they were around uh reinforced that so they were my parents were happy people uh i never saw any any darkness they were happy wow and i was uh it segregation kind of just it uh was sort of quirky and funny to me as a kid and i would even ask people why can't i why i have to i have to stand on this side of the door jam to get a coke i can't go three inches over into the floor zopchenk's grocery it was down in the corner and i would wear them out you'd wear them out yeah uh and i i i learned to to uh to you know give no quarter uh to uh you know we were they were activists and uh you know it was not about apologizing and and multiplying people it was about standing for what was right what was and so forth uh and they expect my parents expected that of their their kids so did you feel when you now started to become part of the civil rights movement itself did you feel you were now part of a group of kindred spirits that thought the way that you did or i did i knew nothing else that was what i what i knew and i had a happy childhood i was the people that were in that founding members of core and the little community south south chicago and it was just they were wonderful people they were all people who believed in in the rightness of their cause they had no doubt and they they acted on that and did that shift over time where where did the movement start to take a different direction uh the movement started to take a different direction um i was going to give a talk a lot a lot about that but i i'll pass it up for the wild it it started to take a different direction when it was clear that blacks were going to be a free people uh and that we were going to the 64 civil rights act made it against the law of discriminate it was a true liberation a true proclamation uh and at that at that time uh it's what i call the shock of freedom we experienced this supported by law our freedom and it was so radical actually in term culturally that people didn't really admit it for a long time i don't think people admit today you want to make a lot of black people angry say that they tell them they're free well you see what you said right well last night last night for those that were here you made a statement that said black people are no longer repressed right and you may have noticed in the room there was a moment of silence i think because people weren't sure how to respond is that true so i i want to i want to dive deeper into that statement but you said this idea that people who've been once enslaved even once freed reinvent their oppression yes talk about that what what is what is now that the physical shackle symbolically is gone but you're saying the mental shackle stays on the first thing i i think the first thing people do when they are in fact free uh is deny that they are free denial is the first response to freedom not me you're crazy i'm you know i was abused yes but i'm not free uh because freedom becomes an extremely threatening situation it means you have to be responsible entirely now for your life and for the kind of person you are and for what you pursue in life and and and when you have been oppressed for four centuries you don't have the habit of that that kind of self-examination how could you you had to adapt to what to limitations you had to figure your way around impossible situations just to have the slightest dignity all of a sudden now you have the you got the you have the freedom and and you you have this awesome responsibility so that i look at you and i say whatever your life is you did it it's in the your fate was in your hands and i began to realize it took a long time for me to get to that place but i i finally discovered probably not that long ago i'm actually free i'm actually what was that i'm actually i am was there a moment was there a moment that that was kind of a moment yeah what was that it was creeping up on me i realized for a long time what uh did i yeah whoa i can do anything i want i don't have any excuses really this book i'm trying to write that's driving me crazy i could throw it out i could get deeper into it i everything is you have to make i have to make up find a way to commit myself to two things in life and become take responsibility for the decisions that i make and that's that's that's scary uh and and difficult uh well you have a whole race of people put in that position where they're forced to do to uh finally to do that they've we were adapted to oppression we learned to survive it we were we were masters at it we you know art forms came out of it you listen to jazz you hear improvisations that you know where people are so in reinventing themselves well all of a sudden you don't have to do this is one of the real differences between white and black people white people are born into freedom and and and are more as asked of them whereas er born into oppression the first mother thinks her real first responsibility is to protect her children from humiliation and so she tamps down their ambition she she you know tightens down their spirit uh and they live within the boundaries wow so do you think it's reasonable then that as you say most black people can't handle our freedom if there is this it's a it is freedom is is our problem is not remotely racism our problem is freedom way big bigger than racism racism is a joke compared to freedom if you look at look at most of what we do and you you understand it's driven by this anxiety look at what happened the moment they passed the 64 civil rights bill within months stokely carmichael was screaming black power from the black we just won the civil rights bill for goodness sakes no black power the idea that your identity is your power we we just had one of the civil rights revolution saying no we're citizens of a democracy we have freedom that's our power we didn't have faith in that it scared the hell out of us it was a challenge so right away we grab identity and we make a big deal about being black and being black is you look my hair was out to here i wore an african dashiki so you bought into it got it so you bought into it that was a source of pride yeah i i uh oh absolutely so what's wrong with that and and i remember my parents who for the first time would look at me a little anxious what my father would say what what's the word identity what do you mean by what's that why can't you just be a citizen i mean what do you what has race got to do with it well we black people have begun to use race to hide out from the challenges of freedom wow okay all right so the flip side of black power is what i think you call white guilt yes or it's certainly a source of black power in your so talk about how that presumably victim-focused identity as you are describing led to a sort of reckoning for how the white community was now dealing with the history of our country and their role in it well the the the white community i think um in america in the 60s and again the civil rights movement was you know building all the way up to i think it's crescendo was was a civil right that civil rights bill um but but whites were more and more uh asking themselves how they what racism really was was about were they racist were they evil was it when i was growing up people had whites had absolute confidence about racism they would say to me a lot of them that would would befriend me i had an english teacher as sweet as she could be she would say now shelby you're the only black in the in the class they're going to blame you for this and blame you for that you know you in other words she would coach me on how to live how to adapt to race to a racist society and thinking i'm sure that she was doing a wonderful thing and in many ways she was because that's what the society was um all of a sudden in the 60s we told that woman she was a racist uh she'd be in a virulent racist today well you know again we we made identity the thing and and whites then also had a separate burden how do you live with with what certainly would was arguably the most disgraceful human act of of sustained inhuman man's inhumanity to man imaginable in slavery and jim crow and and segregation and so forth and i remember all that vividly i was old enough to really uh experience it and uh on a daily basis um we were telling white people that they had practiced a monumental evil they've been under the hammer ever since yes tell me about the power of wielding the ability to call someone a racist yeah it's a two of people who just five minutes ago were impotent couldn't call any anything to account couldn't couldn't stop any form of abuse all of a sudden we had the first white white guilt is the first our first experience of power and freedom and freedom in in [Music] in our democracy in our society um the problem with most social reform is that it's more designed to take white people give them relief from from this this charge of racism than it is into the development of black people so we get all we get a war on poverty we got all these these these programs but they're all for whites we say they're for blacks but they're all for whites who whites say what do you what do you want we're giving you this we're giving you that so forth and so on and and uh you owe us and and then we develop again this grievance elite which says uh uh i'm here to collect i'm here to collect and uh that's our symbiotic bond that's our our uh our connection to each other it's that's what and it's tragic i mean when you talk about the grievance elite you know you often talk about white guilt i'm curious what you think about black guilt one of the things i'm often struck by are black people in our country that are quite successful who have embraced the principles of strong family faith strong education entrepreneurship they've actually leveraged the pillars of our country that have led to prosperity and yet they're often the ones maybe saying defund the police even though they don't live in communities in which they would want the police defunded but it's it it it potentially almost is a a way to make your authenticity as a black person more real so is do you do you see that is there a phenomenon of black guilt that is also as powerful as white guilt that's a good question you know i i don't think so i i don't think they're i don't think we feel we have a collective guilt as uh as as whites do and in the case of whites it's enforced with stigma with stigmatization um and we'll call look if you're in the university today and you get some you you know you say some word that is just is the faintest bit off of color then then you pay for it yes we we whites are live under a beautiful and oppressive stigma threat of stigma that i think we completely under underestimate the power of it drives our culture and our whole way of seeing ourselves as people and it completely defines the political left in america uh all that comes out of race and and uh our moral sense comes out of the race uh and well i'll go down the wrong road there let me take a quick aside now try to get back push me back yeah we won the civil rights movement because we introduced we made we tied to to political power a demand for morality what martin luther king stood for is his morality he was a christian he was he believed in a in a christ he believed in good versus evil and we had kept that completely out of the story out of politics certainly out of race relations and nothing to do with this we we just god wanted us all to be with our own kind and never no nothing immoral um king made one point and president kennedy was the first to sort of say it that that racism is immoral if you're a racist if you don't black black people you're an immoral person you're in in league with evil uh that took over the whole country that won us our freedom the our attachment of morality to our our we may we put your morality at stake if you keep oppressing us then you are you are evil you are uh at odds with god and we won we just won like bam like that in the 60s when that really came to the the full i think uh that's i think in many ways it's wonderful but in many ways it's terrible uh because we we can we we still are grappling now with this this connection of our our political needs our needs as uh as as a people is still tied to morality so people still think of race as essentially a moral issue our problem as blacks is not immorality our problem is blacks is under development we are not four centuries of oppression kind of slows down your development and that's where we suffer we don't suffer from a lack of freedom we don't suffer from immorality uh we we suffer uh from from this idea that everything has to be moral uh and and judging ourselves that way do i one of the things i like about conservatism is that it's that way too but it's not as as strictly that way as as requiring moral testimony and and so forth i'm i'm i'm struck by this this idea that you at some point in your life you had this epiphany moment that you realize that you are free right despite all of these issues and last night when you said that one of the points of progress we've made is because of the civil rights act this other legislation we are no longer oppressed so i'm very curious if i were to ask everyone in this room to raise their hands are black people still oppressed in this country hands raised yes i mean if you raise your hand the answer is yes well we had we had two hands raised that's very interesting if this had been a meeting of the naacp [Laughter] what do you think what do you think the reaction would be how fast would those hands have gone up you and i would be you know way down the street so this is this is just intolerable the idea that we're free to the to the american left because their whole innocence is built on the uh on the idea on the on the opposite on the fact that we're oppressed they have no other source of power beyond it is so it is necessary for blacks to be to be oppressed and angry about it if you if you don't have angry blacks then you don't have it in your corner you don't have any power in american life it's the biggest problem we're talking about the republican party republican party can't get angry blacks if you could get angry blacks you you'd win every election [Laughter] it's it's it's yeah it it's uh well who got mr biden elected that's angry blanks uh mr clyburn and and uh uh and so forth redeemed his his uh weak candidacy uh by by uh bringing in blacks to go to south carolina uh where he won his campaign came back to life uh we thank that thank miss angry blacks for mr biden uh yes so doesn't this though highlight our central challenge even the central challenge of our conference which is that in a room like this when i asked that question only two hands say that black people in this country are oppressed but we have a high degree of confidence if we went into a different room with a predominantly large number of black people the hands wouldn't go up fast enough so what is it that we need to do to have the ideas that are so agreed upon in this room transcend courage right back at you uh there is no i don't believe in magic there's no magic bullets there's no tricks there's no schemes or public policy that is going to do it i strongly feel that people have to want it i mean people have to really truly want it to sacrifice for it as long as they don't really want it they'll continue to suffer the suffering will have maybe it'll it will focus people but we spend all of our time we shoot down you and i have been shot down how many times i mean it's a constant two times yesterday then wednesday um it's we're in a tough spot again it's a it's a symbiosis we each need each other or think we do and so if if if steel says he's a free a free man then i can't count on him means he's of no value to me if he's saying he's a victim he's suffering because indirectly because of his race then i can turn that into something i can i can make a make a hay some make some hay yeah well i could continue to uh dominate the questioning but we have an opportunity to open a floor for anyone that might have a question for shelby the the there you go okay well i'll come to you i'll come bob we'll come to you second to be honest i i think i'm in the middle in regards to oppression because in a literal sense you would say no we're not oppressed but when you identify some of the other things that are put um far as a restriction on african americans or black people would you say that there is a great area there because to get to the point where you feel that you're completely free the mindset of the black people are thinking i'm not completely free because of a b c and d and i am oppressed because of a b c and d which of course like you said is a mind transformation but what are those things that are dictating the the mindset to continue to not die so what are some of those things uh fear um it's you know uh though we we one of the aspects of this this i call is the shock of freedom that that we are suffering from the first thing you do is you deny that you are free and the second thing you do is to reinvent which means create some narrative which shows you we'll see over there that's why i'm not free that there's racism right over there in other words all of our our focus thinking concentrating is designed to keep alive racism so i'm saying go crazy and say well there's no racism now now what what would you do if there's no racism then my advice would be do it go there take that's how we're going to get ahead that's our the only only way and so if there's still racism everybody knows there is still racism in the world bigotry prejudice so forth there always will be uh and they're always it's always going to be evil and bad and so forth uh i'm going to let that stop me i only got one life i i'm going to let that stop me there's just no it's an existential circumstance life is choice and uh we have to again that's a mark of oppression to not understand that uh i think you look look at a figure like elon musk that's an american that's a that's you know whether you agree with him or whether you don't agree with him that's it you you take it you take freedom uh and you try it it doesn't work you take it again you keep on and you get at some point you get the united states of america the greatest freest country that ever lived that ever existed uh so when people say but you know there's racism over here or there's some back there behind that guy right there he's not showing it go for all it i got one question and then bob woodson thanks ian um thomas soul talks about it in white liberals and and uh black rednecks he talks about a cracker culture that explains part of black culture and you have a completely or somewhat different uh take on it that it's more of a uh as you saw as you said 400 years of oppression that results in a almost a mindset uh that uh that colors your view of the world can you just talk about how those are two different views of culture and how you see souls versus yours uh i'm not sure that i'm not sure see a little more i'm not sure i i get this the difference well well i think there's a difference in that he's trying to find a root of of black culture that was adopted from um from whites a long time ago whereas yours is much more of a psychological explanation yes yes um the most interesting area for me is this is the uh the the psychology of oppression uh and it seems to me we don't like to talk about it it makes everybody nervous but i i think that's what we we talk so we talk about everything else everything else but that uh and and that i could tell you a story if you give me two or three minutes just a a story that uh makes the point i think this story written by albert camus the french writer french algerian writer is called the guest if you want interested in reading it and it's a story of a of a um it's set in algeria and 50s this revolution against the french and and who occupied the country and have made it a colony and the story of a man a teacher named daru who lives out in the desert uh and and runs a school for arab kids is is you know quote the the archetypal white liberal uh and he's he's out there alone doing this this this this work uh one day they are bringing they have to bring prisoners to go through his his school property and before they go down off the plateau into the city to prison he's tired of this he feels he's facilitating colonialism and the oppression of the arab people so they drop off a prisoner one day and the prisoner uh and daru was like i'm not you know i just i don't even want to talk to the scholars i don't want my filthy my hands with this i'm holding this man captive they spend the night they end up sleeping in the classroom very nervous but talking to each other as human beings the next morning they wake up and the people who were supposed to come and and and march this guy down the plateau to prison uh don't show up so daru says that's it i've had it he makes up a package of food he takes a thousand francs which is considered a nice piece of money and he walks the arab out to the rim of the plateau and he says the road there goes back to your people they'll take you in and hide you from the french the road in this direction will take you to prison they're waiting for you here's the food and here's the money you are free the the arab looks at him like completely panic stricken he starts to implore daru to not set him free please he he begs but deru has had really had it he looks at him and he says i'm leaving now turns his back and he walks away and he walks to the to the other end of the the the plateau and finally his curiosity gets to him he stops he looks back and way off in the distance he sees this hunched over figure walking down the road to prison the end of the story well i think that we black americans are that arab uh we we uh uh have just we don't know what to do with with freedom we're and we we've hated the people we've tried everything hate each other hate people help black conservatives maybe if we hate them in the right way we can we can really that'll work uh well we maybe we just have to play all this out i don't know but i know we have we much of what we do as a people at this moment is driven by fear and america has put food packages of food and money in our hands constantly and we still uh we still are stopped by our anxiety over over freedom our inability to imagine ourselves finally as what would like to be free to to become well we are free we are free now and and uh it's it's a gift from god uh but what we do look at what we look at why this group exists it exists because uh we black people are afraid of are afraid of us afraid of this group and afraid that you're going to really actually treat them as free people uh and and so we're happy to be together you know uh to uh assuage some of that that uh that anxiety and so forth uh but so what i just feel again is with a group like this is like all important and we should be unapologetic and uh enraged forward uh and and we're gonna have to be critical of our own people black people we're gonna have to be really critical uh white people at some point if they want to be free they're gonna have to do the same thing and and they do have an advantage they do have experience much more experience with freedom than we do and know how it works and that's what i want uh my father used to tell me when i come home from college and i'd say i i couldn't stand it and blah blah blah and he would say you you you be a pirate you take everything you can get take everything you can get go let them call you the n-word all whatever doesn't you take everything you can get um he he came around before black power so uh well bob i believe has the last question um but shall we we are determined to not have that arab go down the path to prison everyone in this room is determined to get an uber to get that person [Laughter] to go the other way bob shelby i am of your generation but i must say i have a a slight dissent from your analysis i believe um i think it was well it's because you're uncle tom huh that's right but now i agree with you that as you said if you condition people to enter the back door even if there isn't one they'll demand that you build one and that comes so i totally agree with that but i i also think that part of living free is tied to your identity and we came out of the civil rights movement with an identity crisis within our group over skin color there were there were there were deep divisions within our whole sororities and and fraternities and and whatnot but based upon your skin color there were places in the black community you couldn't get in if you looked like me and ian and so we have to acknowledge and so what the black power movement at least did and i was a part of both it did address the issue of identity to say that you should be proud of who you don't have to straighten your hair that's true that and so i think the black power movement served a a useful purpose of of destroying these these bifurcations that existed within our community so that we could live free and also marcus garvey was driven out of the country by the civil rights leaders because he was the champion of blacks of deep skin color and so i think it's important um when we're discussing this to tell a complete story and and i wouldn't uh decry the whole issue of identity identity determines how you walk through the door and and finally i would say that i am to deal with white guilt i have become a self-certified racial exorcist all you white folks [Laughter] you absolved of slavery you absolved of jim crow i'm thinking about charging fifty dollars and i'm gonna get in on the race also too will you you you're gonna pass the plate now right yeah exactly i'm gonna pass the tape okay so on that note uh we are going to come to a close and i will uh i will actually close by reading the closing words of the content of our character wow we are on the other side of martin luther king's mountaintop on the downward slope toward the valley that he saw this is something we ought to know but what we must know even more than this is that nothing on this earth can be promised but a chance the promised land guarantees nothing it is only an opportunity not a deliverance shelby steele thank you thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 8,948

Keywords: AEI, American Enterprise Institute, politics, news, education, shelby steele, ian rowe, civil rights, old parkland conference

Id: s2EChHUrRwg

Length: 49min 59sec (2999 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022