The events of the past year have elevated the national conversation around race to levels not seen in a generation. Our guest today is no stranger to those conversations, and has been a key figure in the scholarship of race relations for decades. Professor Shelby Steele is a renowned author, columnist, and documentary filmmaker. He is an advocate for individual freedom and liberty, and a strong proponent of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He argues that the movement, which was focused on the individual, has been perverted by a move toward government dependence, welfare, and affirmative action programs that have only furthered racial divides. In our conversation, Professor Steele details his struggles with Amazon and the journey he has gone through to get this important film made. He also discusses the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and organization, and the reasons President Trump and his supporters are so often labeled racist. This is The Ben Shapiro Show: A Sunday Special with Shelby Steele. The only way to get access to the entire conversation is to become a Dailywire Member. You ll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests, and access to access to our bonus questions at the end of the conversation. Subscribe to Dailywire. Become a Member of Dailywire today! You'll have full access to ALL of the Full Conversations with Ben Shapiro's guests, including the Daily Wire's newest guests! Subscribe, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, and become a supporter of the show wherever you get your listening choices are available. Ben Shapiro is the Founder of the DailyWire Podcast. and the Dailywire Podcast is available on all major podcast directories and social media platforms. If you like the show, subscribe to the show Ben Shapiro Podcasts and other podcasting platforms, Ben Shapiro will be the first to know about Ben Shapiro on all things Ben Shapiro. Links mentioned in the show? Subscribe and subscribe to Ben Shapiro s Sunday Special? Subscribe at Dailywire Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro show on the show. Music: Subscribe on iTunes Music: "The Dark Side of the Road" and other links mentioned in this episode of The Daily Wire Podcast: "Hey Han" by Ben Shapiro, "Thank you Ben Shapiro: "Good Morning America" by Good Morning America? "Outro Music: Bad Girl, Good Morning, Good Day" by Bad Girl Outtro: "Outtro Music: Good Day by Good Day?
00:00:00.000Freedom is not that interesting in black America.
00:00:02.000What's interesting is this enormous power that befell us in the 60s when America owned up to to its past.
00:00:12.000The events of the past year have elevated the national conversation around race to degrees of tumult not seen for a generation.
00:00:18.000Our guest today is no stranger to those conversations and has been a key figure in the scholarship of race relations for decades, Shelby Steele.
00:00:25.000A renowned author, columnist, and documentary filmmaker, Steele is an advocate for individual freedom and liberty and has been a strong proponent of the civil rights movement of the 1960s for just this reason.
00:00:35.000That movement, which was focused on the individual, has been perverted, he says, by a move toward government dependence.
00:00:41.000Welfare and affirmative action programs have only furthered racial divides.
00:00:44.000He argues these beliefs in his writing, including the popular book, White Guilt, How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.
00:00:52.000Now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Steele recently produced a documentary in collaboration with his son, filmmaker Eli Steele, titled, What Killed Michael Brown?
00:01:01.000It's an investigation into the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri shooting, just as George Floyd's death rocked the nation.
00:01:07.000At the time of this recording, Steele was embroiled in a controversy with Amazon over the release of the film.
00:01:13.000Without any clear basis for their decision, Amazon had refused to distribute the documentary.
00:01:17.000There have since been new developments in the story, so we'll have to wait to see how it all plays out in the end.
00:01:22.000In our conversation, Shelby details his struggles with Amazon and the journey he has gone through to get this important film made.
00:01:28.000Seal and I also discussed the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and organization and the reasons President Trump and his supporters are so often labeled racist.
00:02:08.000So for folks who don't know your background, maybe you can talk a little bit about your transformation on issues of race, because when you were younger, you really were more of a racial radical.
00:02:19.000You talk in many of your books about your views on race and how they've morphed over time.
00:02:24.000Maybe you can talk a little bit about that journey.
00:02:26.000I was born into a civil rights family.
00:02:28.000My parents met As founding members of CORE, Congress of Racial Equality in Chicago in the 40s.
00:03:48.000I was the leader of my student, Black Student Union in my college, and we took over the president's office, and we did all the things that militant students did back in that era.
00:04:01.000I won't march you through all of the details, but I graduated from college.
00:04:09.000I went to work in the inner city in a government-sponsored program, poverty programs.
00:04:25.000I began to see people using the circumstance of poverty as a means to personal ends, and people started to come to work in Mercedes-Benz and to the poverty program.
00:04:44.000By the time I left there, I had pretty much lost my innocence regarding poverty work, and I went to graduate school.
00:04:55.000Began to live a much more traditional life from there.
00:05:01.000But I began to feel that the militancy was hurting us more than helping us.
00:05:08.000It's very good to have a very strong commitment to one's identity, one's group identity, and to be proud and all that sort of thing.
00:05:23.000That's good, but you have to become competitive in the modern world.
00:05:31.000Otherwise you will languish in poverty no matter what your identity is.
00:05:37.000And so it became clearer and clearer as I sort of marched through graduate school and began my career as an academic, that it was time to grow up and to join America rather than fight America, that my future really was with America.
00:06:00.000And also, by this time, one very important thing did happen.
00:06:09.000And that is that in the 60s, in the mid-60s, when the Civil Rights Bill passed in 64, America effectively confessed to colluding for four centuries with a horrific evil, racism.
00:06:26.000But from President Johnson on down, America confessed to that in the 60s, owned up to it, and I think it is the most transformative moment in all of American history by far, and we've only just begun to really understand the fallout from that confession, the kind of pressures that's introduced into society, white guilt certainly being one of them.
00:06:53.000But I did become aware that America This miraculous thing was going to actually admit what they'd done and try to correct it.
00:07:06.000I don't know if that's ever happened anywhere else in human history, but it happened in America, and so I don't think we've given ourselves credit for that.
00:07:26.000And that change has only broadened and deepened since then.
00:07:32.000We live in a very different world today.
00:07:34.000This is not a time for me to be blacker than thou and raise my fist.
00:07:39.000This is a time to get busy and start a business or get prepared to join the modern world and live in a free, Democracy, an open society in which we have now, for the very first time, the opportunity to begin to live not as members of a race, a beleaguered race, but as individuals.
00:08:03.000As human beings who are free to pursue their aspirations as they wish, I feel very fortunate to have lived through this transformation from the dark days of segregation to the America that is now wide open before me.
00:08:23.000So in a second, I want to ask you why it is that while this transformation has occurred, and it's obvious on every objective level that a transformation has occurred in American life, why it seems so hard for so many people to accept that a transformation has occurred.
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00:09:34.000So let's talk about the fact that America has obviously transformed.
00:09:37.000There's a major difference between America circa 1960 and America circa 2020.
00:09:41.000But the way that you hear so many people talk about America in 2020 is as though nothing has changed.
00:09:47.000You have high profile authors, well-regarded writers, Pulitzer Prize winners like Nicole Hannah-Jones or Ta-Nehisi Coates, basically writing essays in which they talk about an atrocity that happened in 1915 and then immediately fast forward to 2020 and act as though there were no intervening events.
00:10:05.000How is it that that has become intellectually credible?
00:10:09.000It seems so perfectly obvious that things have radically changed since the 1960s.
00:10:12.000Racism is the worst sin in American life and it is the thing that if you are called a racist, it can literally finish your career whether it's justified or not.
00:10:20.000I mean, that's how much Americans abhor racism at this point and yet it is still treated.
00:10:26.000The issue of racism is still treated as though systemic, as though most Americans secretly harbor racist feelings.
00:10:32.000And you've talked before about the shifting definition of racism itself.
00:10:35.000Maybe you can talk a little bit about why you think racism is still considered such a major part of American life despite the transformational change.
00:10:44.000For one reason, when there was this great confession that I mentioned that America owned up to its past and we created a war on poverty and we created all sorts of social programs, public housing, welfare, so forth, what became clear, one of the offshoots of that confession
00:11:10.000was that victimization, our victimization as blacks, our victimization at the hands of broader America, became our power.
00:11:22.000It was the first time in American history we had power to wield in American life because America itself had confessed.
00:11:33.000And so we had that moral authority for the first time.
00:13:53.000They look at me and they say, oh my God, you're giving up, you're walking away from what we fought for.
00:14:01.000We now finally have the power to make universities, get rid of the SAT test.
00:14:07.000We can do all sorts of things that we never could do before, and you want us to drop that.
00:14:18.000Well, I do, because the thing about victimization as power is that you become your own enemy.
00:14:25.000You victimize yourself in the long run, and you get nowhere.
00:14:29.000And so after 60 years now of using victimization as power, black America is farther behind white America than we were in the 50s when I was a kid.
00:14:45.000So this power of victimization has turned on us and is choking us at this point.
00:14:54.000It breaks my heart to go to campuses and you see young black kids and they're all huddled off and they're black power this and black power that and black lives matter and all that sort of struggling.
00:15:07.000You see it's painful, it's struggling.
00:15:10.000To keep victimization alive as power, as the power in the black community.
00:15:16.000So, why do you think it is that so many members of the white community have gone along with this?
00:15:22.000I mean, it would be one thing to say, you know, back in 1965 that huge swaths of Americans had acknowledged their guilt because they had in fact been complicit in racism.
00:15:31.000I was born in 1984, so I was born 20 years after the Civil Rights Act.
00:15:35.000And I frankly don't feel racial guilt because I don't believe that I've acted in racially intolerant ways.
00:15:41.000But you see huge swaths of particularly young white Americans who are going along with this and browbeating others, engaging in malice struggle sessions in which they confess their own guilt for complicity in a systemically racist system.
00:15:55.000What do you think is the attraction for white Americans to go along with the narrative where they are inherently the victimizers?
00:16:02.000What happened to white America when America confessed its wrongdoing is that America endured at that moment a tremendous loss of moral authority.
00:16:21.000When you confess, I did it, all right, I'm sorry, well, okay, now you will pay a price.
00:16:31.000And that is what happened to white America, is that they were judged to be racist, they had colluded with evil, and so now they lived under the accusation that they were racist, and that they had been a part of this.
00:16:48.000And so they may have done absolutely nothing to justify feeling guilty whatsoever.
00:16:55.000White guilt has no connection whatsoever to personal feelings.
00:17:02.000It is a circumstance that you are living in a society that does not trust you.
00:17:09.000that has this against you, that holds this history against you.
00:17:14.000And so what whites then have to struggle for and have since the 60s is their innocence of racism, of proving, oh, not me, I'm not a racist.
00:17:28.000And that need to prove is what blacks take advantage of.
00:17:35.000Okay, then do this, and do that, and so forth and so on, and change your curriculum here, and start an HR program there, have another, so forth and so on.
00:17:48.000And whites do it because they want that innocence.
00:17:51.000They want to be able to say, look, I support affirmative action.
00:17:59.000Let's have different colored faces in everything we do, so that we can prove we are innocent of that historical accusation that we are evil racists.
00:19:01.000We all hope for the best, I think, but history is powerful, and America has a very unique history.
00:19:12.000We're far, far ahead of much of the rest of the world in this regard, but we have a long way to go.
00:19:21.000It seems like there's something else that has happened here, too.
00:19:24.000And that's not just that there's an attempt by both, you know, guilty whites and some black Americans to push for particular policy prescriptions and sort of gimmies.
00:19:34.000But there's something now that's going on that's completely, I think, unprecedented, which is that You are only declared to be not racist for a certain period of time if you acknowledge your racism.
00:19:44.000So in other words, if you say as a white person, I'm not racist, I'm colorblind, and I see everybody as an individual, this is in fact used as evidence of your racism.
00:19:53.000Whereas if you then declare that you are in fact a racist by dint of the color of your skin and through racial essentialization, then you are not racist, but you are also racist because you just acknowledge that you're racist.
00:20:05.000There's literally no way for white Americans to escape The charges of racism, either you admit that you're a racist, in which case we say, okay, well, at least you were honest enough to admit you're a racist, but that means you're kind of a racist because you just admitted it, or you won't acknowledge your own racism, in which case we absolutely 100% know that you're a racist.
00:20:23.000And the power to put whites in that position is what black power is, is the power that comes from our moral authority as victims, as historical victims.
00:20:37.000And so we enjoy sort of squeezing whites in this impossible circumstance.
00:20:47.000But it helps, again, obviously, Whites do not have, at this moment in America, I'm speaking broad terms here, whites do not have the moral confidence to resist this.
00:21:02.000To say, hey, call me a racist, whatever you want.
00:21:10.000And I'll argue on the terms of whatever it is I stand by.
00:21:15.000I'm not going to be blackmailed, intimidated about simply being white and simply having a connection to people in the past who were also white.
00:21:29.000does not mean that I am evil and that I am a racist.
00:21:44.000When whites begin to rediscover their confidence and accept the fact that they are not racists, and that they want to treat everybody as individuals, and they practice that, Race problem be over.
00:22:07.000Right now, it's just, whites just, this morning, Amazon canceled the film that I just am coming out with, just as they gave $10 million to Black Lives Matter and other left-wing black groups.
00:22:38.000They're saying, our brand is not racist.
00:22:44.000If you give money to Shelby Steele, or you just even put his film up on your platform, you're a bigot, you're a racist, you're a horrible person.
00:22:57.000Well, I suffer today from the lack of confidence that whites have.
00:23:04.000That now is a big problem in my life and in my work.
00:23:09.000I'm someone who grew up fighting against segregation.
00:23:14.000Now I'm fighting against it all over again.
00:23:16.000So in a second, I want to ask you about exactly that sort of turn where so many of the things of the past that were considered to be the beacons of hope, the things that we aspired to as a society, have now become the obstacles, the enemies that we have to get rid of in pursuit of anti-racism in the sort of pernicious definition of the Ibram Kendi's and Robin DiAngelo's.
00:24:36.000When it comes to insurance, it's nice and very important to get it right.
00:24:39.000So let's talk about what you're referring to there with regard to the sort of fight against segregation again.
00:24:46.000It seems like there's so many of these ideals that were the purpose of the civil rights movement of the 40s and 50s and the early 60s.
00:24:53.000These ideals that we build statues of Martin Luther King, not because we agree with his economic philosophies, but because specifically of his vision of individuals being treated as individuals.
00:25:03.000I mean, that is what school children learn.
00:25:06.000I mean, this is why people celebrate Martin Luther King on a broad scale across the United States.
00:25:11.000And yet we have seen that the woke culture has pushed so far that individualism is now seen as a hallmark of white culture.
00:25:18.000There was a display at the National Smithsonian, at the National Museum of African American History, in which they declared that aspect of white supremacy in American culture included things like being timely, having a work ethic, believing that you should delay gratification, a belief in individualism, a belief in problem solving. Now it seems to me that if you want anybody to succeed, these are just things that they need to engage in. But according to the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History, these were
00:25:47.000aspects of white supremacy. And so we have to abolish all of our traditional notions of cause and effect of good behavior and bad behavior in pursuit of the belief that individual actions don't matter at all and all problems can be chalked up to broad societal discrimination. This is how desperate white institutional America is for innocence of racism.
00:26:10.000They will go to these lengths Uh, to, to advertise, to try to advertise their own innocence to the world.
00:26:18.000Um, these are people entire you, as you said, have not probably have no personal guilt, whatever.
00:26:24.000And yet their, their whole politics, their whole, uh, orientation toward American life, uh, is, is, uh, is, is around again, victimization, uh, and their, their need for innocence.
00:26:40.000They just will do anything to reclaim innocence.
00:26:48.000I remember when I was in my black militant stage as a kid in college, and I ran into a white man one night in a hotel lobby, and just for the heck of it, I told him that he should give me $25, right then and there.
00:27:08.000Uh, because he was white and he was a racist and he needed to pay off.
00:27:21.000I could, I could really fan this into something and, and open up, put out a shingle and innocence here coming, you know, we've got, we've got a sale today.
00:27:32.000Um, But it's not funny, it's tragic, and white America is lost to this.
00:27:39.000The young are just preoccupied with this idea of establishing their innocence of this evil.
00:27:48.000And people like Hannah Jones are just sort of smirking and smiling, and the puppeteer pulling all the strings.
00:28:02.000I thought it would have happened by now.
00:28:04.000I thought they would have gotten tired of being jacked up like this, but apparently not.
00:28:13.000So if you're trying to sell truth, if you're trying to point to—here's the truth.
00:28:21.000Blacks went through four centuries of oppression.
00:28:24.000You go through that, when you come out of it, finally, as we did in the 60s, you're going to be underdeveloped.
00:28:32.000They didn't have Harvards for us back in the days of segregation.
00:28:39.000That was our big liability when we walked into freedom, when we stepped into freedom, is that we needed desperately development, education, economic development.
00:28:51.000We needed to join America, become a part of the great American experiment, and find parity with all other groups.
00:29:03.000We were so drunk on our power as victims that we, to this day, 60 years later, cling to that victimization, and we hate any minorities who don't.
00:29:17.000If you don't cling to your victimization, you're an Uncle Tom, and that's the end of you.
00:29:25.000So, again, the people who think They are helping blacks, are simply re-colonizing blacks.
00:29:38.000And now blacks live and sort of facilitate white innocence, rather than actually move ahead on their own and become independent individuals functioning in a free society.
00:30:21.000And, again, whites who are longing for their innocence and rolling over for black victims, they now are the enemy, because they diminish us to nothing but sort of icons that facilitate their innocence and their power all over again.
00:30:44.000I guess history does repeat itself in that sense.
00:30:49.000So you talked about working in the social welfare system, and obviously in the 1960s there was a real push for a sort of racial reparation via social welfare programs and the Great Society programs.
00:30:59.000The idea expressed by LBJ is that, well, now the sort of barriers had been removed, If you had all of the runners at the start line and one of the runners was 20 yards behind the start line, then somehow we had to find a way to get the person 20 yards behind the start line up to the start line. That's what the social welfare programs were for. But it seems like in many ways the social welfare programs actually inhibited the ability for that runner to ever catch up.
00:31:23.000And there have been a lot of minority groups in the United States who have started off 20 yards behind the start line compared to white America.
00:31:29.000Many of those minority groups now routinely outperform white Americans in terms of income, including many groups of African immigrants.
00:31:35.000Nigerian Americans, for example, outperform white Americans in terms of income.
00:31:40.000So maybe you can talk a little bit about social welfare programs.
00:31:43.000Was it just well-intentioned and it went wrong?
00:31:48.000What exactly happened with the social welfare programs?
00:31:52.000Very specifically, what happened was, because whites were longing for their innocence, what whites did was literally steal away from black people agency over their own fate, over their own lives.
00:34:14.000And we see them everywhere in every walk of life, making the point that if one wants to really take charge of one's faith and move ahead, You're free to do that today in America.
00:34:26.000You can become literally the president, if that's what you want to do.
00:34:30.000You can become the CEO of a major corporation.
00:35:27.000So I'm going to give you all these programs even though they don't do anything whatsoever, but teach you corruption, embroil you in corruption.
00:35:37.000I worked in those programs for three years.
00:35:40.000I've never seen so much corruption in my life.
00:36:22.000So let's talk for a second about why it is that so many, you mentioned there's so many prominent black Americans with wild levels of success.
00:36:30.000There's so many black Americans who are middle class and above.
00:36:33.000I know that the media tend to portray only poverty and suffering in the black community.
00:36:39.000You hear politicians routinely talk about how to be black in America means to suffer.
00:36:43.000in America as though the average income for a black household in the United States is in $58,000 or as though the vast majority of black Americans are living in abject poverty which simply isn't true. Why is it that we don't see more black Americans saying exactly what you're saying which is I've been able to make my way in this society.
00:37:02.000If you make the right decisions, you can make your way in this society, too.
00:37:05.000Instead, it seems like with increased levels of prominence, many black Americans speak out more loudly about how America is racist.
00:37:14.000We've mentioned Nikole Hannah-Jones several times.
00:37:16.000I mean, this is a person who went to a top university.
00:37:17.000She obviously has been granted the keys to the car over at the New York Times.
00:37:20.000You see Karen Attia at the Washington Post, who's the daughter of African immigrants doing the same thing.
00:37:25.000You see people at the top of the entertainment industry.
00:37:28.000LeBron James does this, making hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
00:37:32.000Barack Obama became President of the United States and then suggested that America was still struggling with systemic racism and made comments about Ferguson, Missouri, which we'll discuss in a second.
00:37:42.000The reason is they don't believe in themselves.
00:37:45.000ignoring the facts of the case in order to make these particular comments. So why is it that we don't see more prominent black Americans say what so many prominent members of other minority races in America say to their kids and to their compatriots, which is what a great country and we can absolutely rise in this country. The reason is they don't believe in themselves.
00:39:26.000We don't believe we'll be able to compete.
00:39:29.000All of the ugly bigotries of the white past, we on some secret level, where we don't admit it to ourselves even, Believe that, and therefore lack the faith to take our lives into our own hands and make something, and make a life.
00:39:49.000We say to protect ourselves, that's a fool's game.
00:39:54.000This is a racist world, a racist society.
00:39:57.000That's to work hard, and so that's for fools.
00:40:02.000And a white man, those are Uncle Tom's.
00:41:05.000Another problem is that we live in such an absolutely wealthy society.
00:41:10.000Society can give us all—the figure I keep hearing is the last 50 years that America has spent $22, $23 trillion on social programs.
00:41:23.000That's a lot of bait to tempt me away from this more rigorous self-development and into the idea that I can manipulate, maneuver, game my way ahead, and so forth.
00:41:36.000In a wealthy society, you can do that.
00:41:40.000Well, I'm on the wrong side of the fence.
00:41:43.000to continue to dump it on people. It's just an Amazon, 10 million dollars, they wake up and and give it, give that away. Well, I'm on the wrong side of the fence. I didn't get any of that, not a dime. They canceled me. So let's talk about that in just one second.
00:42:01.000I want to ask you about the documentary, What Killed Michael Brown, that is going to be available somewhere, but apparently not Amazon.
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00:43:16.000Okay, so you've now referred to this documentary that you made, What Killed Michael Brown.
00:43:20.000I had a chance to watch a large segment of it last night.
00:43:23.000It is, you know, incredibly incisive and emotionally devastating because it really does take on some very serious issues.
00:43:31.000So what was the impetus behind making a documentary about the Michael Brown shooting?
00:43:37.000We wanted to debunk this idea of victimization as power.
00:43:42.000uh michael brown the the reason michael brown would become so explosive and and uh more recently here george floyd and so forth and others the reason these events become so explosive is because they represent They seem to morally give moral authority to blacks as victims.
00:44:05.000They seem to reinforce our whole black pathology, which sees victimization as our great power.
00:44:13.000And my God, white cop with a shoots and kills a black teenager.
00:44:26.000And I will grant you your innocence, but you'll have to pay for it.
00:44:31.000So all of a sudden, the President of the United States, the Attorney General of the United States, everybody is in Ferguson, Missouri, anguishing over the shooting of Michael Brown, black teenager.
00:44:43.000Well, they're there because it just flows over with black power.
00:44:51.000If Michael Brown was really shot and killed out of a racial animus, Then think of all the power that redounds then to all of black America.
00:45:02.000We can just sort of work that angle for ten more years.
00:45:09.000And so all of these events like this, George Floyd and so forth, they're all this sort of This temptation, everybody knows power is to be had in these events.
00:45:26.000And of course, blacks are, here it is.
00:45:29.000We've now had 60 years of victimization being our primary source of power.
00:45:33.000And so, anyway, we wanted to go in and show exactly that corruption and point to some of the damage that's done.
00:45:47.000And then we wanted to look toward the end of the film at some positive activities that are going on in the black community.
00:45:55.000There are people doing some miraculous work.
00:45:57.000We interviewed a pastor who has his church right in the Woodlawn area, the south side of Chicago, where the murder rate is over the roof.
00:46:09.000We talked to former drug dealers. We looked at public housing. We looked at all, again, the offshoots of this sort of thing, to try to point the way ahead.
00:49:32.000The good is Black Lives Matter, Well, I'm not going to waste time getting into what they are, but I think they're completely on the wrong track.
00:49:47.000They will keep us mired, celebrating ourselves as victims forevermore.
00:49:52.000Well, so now I'm going to ask you to go on the wrong track there and actually describe what you think of the Black Lives Matter movement, because obviously it has had this massive impact on our politics, and we've seen corporations going woke across the country.
00:50:04.000We've seen the NBA decide to dedicate entire sidelines on national broadcasts, to their sloganeering, changing the jerseys on the back of the jerseys so you can put the names of people who have allegedly been unjustly killed by the police.
00:50:18.000You've seen every major politician pay lip service to Black Lives Matter, which is a semantically overloaded phrase.
00:50:26.000One, the obviously true statement that Black Lives Matter, because they do.
00:50:29.000It can mean the movement, which is the assumption that America is systemically racist and that black Americans are at unique risk of being murdered in the United States, which is certainly not true from the police.
00:50:39.000It may be true statistically, but it really has very little to do with white Americans doing the murdering, unfortunately.
00:50:45.000And then it could mean the Black Lives Matter organization, which is actually just a neo-Marxist front group, But I want to get your thoughts on Black Lives Matter, which, again, has become this sort of tautological statement, and you have to say it.
00:50:57.000And if you don't say it, then this obviously means that you're a racist.
00:51:03.000They, first of all, make me sad to have lived through what I've lived through and to see what black America has stood for and fought for.
00:51:14.000I think of my father's generation and earlier, Men and women who survived the most horrific sort of oppression, violent, murderous oppression for centuries.
00:51:32.000And to come to a place and see our young people using that history of victimization to hide away from the challenges of freedom that we face today.
00:51:45.000It's heartbreaking for somebody my age to see that.
00:51:48.000You finally got a chance to do anything you want.
00:51:52.000And all you're going to do is talk about victimization?
00:51:57.000Well, when they talk about systemic racism and so forth, I call it compensatory racism.
00:52:07.000It is a faith in racism, an emphasis on racism, because the reality is racism has declined.
00:52:24.000And so we have to come up with new terms like systemic and structural racism and so forth to bring back that old oppression that we endured for four centuries.
00:53:26.000It's sad to see young people sell themselves out that way.
00:53:33.000To exhibit that level of faithlessness in their own abilities to develop and overcome.
00:53:41.000I always ask them, well, what's your grade point average?
00:53:46.000What are you doing to develop yourself?
00:53:48.000Black students have the highest dropout rate and the lowest grade point average of any student group in America after 50 years of affirmative action.
00:54:22.000Enabling black people has become an American habit, a reflex.
00:54:27.000that we do again because we just keep needing, wanting this innocence, wanting the power that comes from, the legitimacy that comes from being innocent, demonstrably innocent of racism.
00:54:43.000So we'll give you more preferences, give you this, give you, give you, give you, as you sink, as you sink into this faithlessness in yourself.
00:55:08.000And I think, you know, entered office with high hopes by most Americans that this was going to be maybe the final stage in the transition away from thinking racially in the country.
00:55:26.000I mean, he sort of campaigned as, we're not red states, we're not blue states, we're the United States.
00:55:30.000I'm both black and white, obviously, in my own ancestry.
00:55:34.000Now, I can bring the country together.
00:55:36.000I want to get your assessment of the Obama administration, of Barack and now Michelle, who's obviously a very prominent political figure in her own right, in one second.
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00:56:42.000Alrighty, so let's talk about the Obama administration and Barack Obama.
00:56:47.000As I say, for everybody, even people like me who did not vote for Barack Obama, I thought that he was a bad candidate.
00:56:53.000I thought that he would be of the radical left politically.
00:56:57.000I thought that he basically campaigned on a bunch of Warm Dover sloganeering.
00:57:02.000But even for folks like me who didn't vote for Barack Obama, didn't back him, it was obviously an inspiring thing for the United States, which is a majority white country, to elect a black president after our history of slavery and Jim Crow.
00:57:14.000Just that symbol is an inspiring thing.
00:57:19.000You look at the polls of race relations, they really markedly declined during the Obama administration, even preceding the Trump administration.
00:57:25.000What do you make of Barack Obama was a perfect sort of white fantasy.
00:57:30.000Now Michelle Obama, who's widely perceived to be maybe the future of the Democratic Party.
00:57:35.000Barack Obama was a perfect sort of white fantasy.
00:57:40.000And he was elected entirely, I think, entirely because he was black.
00:57:54.000America's simple, and he was, as Joe Biden once said, He was clean.
00:58:00.000I guess he showers every day and he spoke eloquent English.
00:58:05.000And so he was, he was, in other words, he was innocuous.
00:58:11.000He had no vision for the country that he ever articulated, no set of policies, coherent policies that would reflect some important vision for the country.
00:58:23.000He just was a nice black kid who white people realized on some level wouldn't do much of anything except be black and be in the White House, so that White America could say, we're innocent of racism.
01:00:51.000So now I want to ask you your opinion of the Trump administration.
01:00:55.000There's been a lot of talk about racism surrounding President Trump and the supposed innate racism of the American people in electing Trump in 2016.
01:01:03.000Joe Biden has suggested that he's running almost entirely to repudiate Trump's personal racism.
01:01:10.000What do you make of Trump as a figure, Trump's election, and the Trump administration?
01:01:15.000I think that Trump is pretty much what he claims to be.
01:01:29.000But he is vulnerable because the left in America is driven by white guilt, defined by white guilt.
01:01:43.000That couldn't be farther away from where Donald Trump is.
01:01:46.000He just is not in this sort of... He offers no innocence to white America.
01:01:55.000And therefore he's a racist and he's a bigot and he's regression to oppression and he wants and so forth and so on.
01:02:03.000But the fact is he's just a pragmatic sort of unimaginative president who really does fix our trade relations with the Chinese, who changes, look at what he's done in the Middle East, really marvelous things that The Obama administration never got close to doing.
01:02:26.000But again, he has no vision of white innocence.
01:02:34.000And that's what much of America still wants today, is this sort of white innocence.
01:02:44.000I don't know whether we have to elect another Obama or not, but at some point there will be blacks who are themselves as human beings and who represent the politics, political point of view of the whole nation.
01:03:01.000In a second, I want to ask you a couple final questions, starting with whether you think that white guilt or black victimization is going to alleviate first.
01:03:10.000Which side in the sort of symbiotic racial relationship you've talked about is going to change its behavior first?
01:03:16.000But if you actually want to hear Shelby Steele's answers, then you have to head on over to dailywire.com.
01:03:21.000You can subscribe over there and hear the end of our conversation.
01:03:25.000Well, Shelby Steele, as you know, I'm a big fan of your work.
01:03:28.000People should go out, watch the documentary.
01:03:29.000They should purchase all of your books, including White Guilt.