Monday, Aug. 12, 1991

Nothing Is Ever Simply Black and White

By SYLVESTER MONROE/MONTEREY Shelby Steele

Why are so many African Americans concerned about Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court?

On the deepest level, he touches the very soul of the debate in black America, which is a debate between using the principle of self-sufficiency as a means to power as opposed to using our history of victimization. We have taken our power from our history of victimization, which gave us an enormous moral authority and brought social reforms, to the neglect of self-reliance and individual initiative. And now, any time you talk about self-reliance in relation to black problems, you are automatically considered a conservative.

You don't consider yourself a conservative?

No. I think of myself more as a classical liberal. I focus on freedom, on the sacredness of the individual, the power to be found in the individual.

But other black thinkers from Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X to Jesse Jackson have preached self-reliance, and nobody called them conservatives.

Clarence Thomas is considered a conservative today because of the context, and the context is that for the past 25 years civil rights organizations have focused one-dimensionally on our oppression and demanded redress based on that. Well, here comes a man in 1991 who stands for self-help, and so he is anathema. The principle of self-reliance seems to devalue victimization as a source of power. I don't think it necessarily does, but it seems to. And so Thomas seems to be against the interests of black people merely by standing for self-reliance. He's not remotely anti-black. He's just asking that we develop another source of power.

You have said that you are against preferential treatment, not affirmative action per se. But the widespread perception is that you are anti-affirmative action, and so is Clarence Thomas.

What I've tried to say, and I think Clarence Thomas stands for pretty much the same thing, is that by opposing racial preferences we stand for black strength rather than weakness. The thing that disturbs me about affirmative action, about preferences, is that they can and will be taken away. They will diminish over time. And in the interim they encourage us to believe that redress is our power. I don't take any simpleminded black-and-white view and say racial preferences have never done a bit of good for anybody. All I've tried to do is point out the down side and that we've probably come to the point where they are doing more harm than good.

Are you letting white people off the hook?

I don't mean in any way to let white people off the hook. I think as American citizens, they have a profound responsibility to black Americans. I favor every form of affirmative action except preferences. I favor the government improving the education system in the inner cities. I favor programs that go down to the teenage mother and try to break that cycle of poverty by teaching her parenting skills.

The most important thing that people who have been victimized can understand, whether it is fair or unfair, and it certainly is not fair, is that change will have to come from themselves. Thomas and I are not hardhearted people who are simply saying, "Get up off your butt, pull yourself up by your bootstraps." We need government intervention to help us. But we've also got to help ourselves. Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.

You once said that liberals are no friends of blacks. What did you mean?

Watch out that your closest friend may be your greatest enemy, is my feeling about liberals, because they encourage us to identify with our victimization. It is one thing to be victimized; it is another to make an identity out of it. I am not willing to be a boy because I am inferior, and I am not going to be a boy because I am a victim. I reject both avenues to being a boy. The one thing a white liberal can never do with a black is be honest and tell him what he tells his own children.

Which is what?

Which is that you have to work hard and your life in many ways will reflect the amount of effort you put into it. They teach that every day to their own children, but then they come out in public and talk about blacks as just victims who need redress. This is racial exploitation by white liberals, who transform this into their own source of power. We're being had by them, and we really need to know that.

Liberals are screaming for racial preferences. But as soon as they give you the preference, they hold it against you. "Hey, you were helped by affirmative action," they say about Clarence Thomas. "You wouldn't be where you are if it was not for affirmative action." That's one reason I have a problem with preferences. How can he win? He can't.

How much impact does racism have on the lives of black Americans?

I think being lower class has a much greater impact. You and I both know, as a middle-class black you can send your kid to any school you want. But if you and I were on the South Side of Chicago and not doing very well economically, then clearly you would not be able to send your kid to whatever school you wanted. At this point, class, poverty and isolation are far more difficult variables for blacks than racism. That does not mean racism is gone; I think you'll meet it wherever you go. But it does not have the power to contain your life that it used to have.

According to you, there is a great deal of opportunity that blacks are simply not taking advantage of. Many blacks disagree with you.

It depends on how you define opportunity. I don't see opportunity in a one- dimensional sense as something that is simply there either waiting or not waiting for somebody to come and grab it. I think of opportunity as something that one creates, that you generate opportunities for yourself.

A Jewish woman told my brother something I think is absolutely vital for . black people to understand. It was a simple phrase: "Don't wait for people to love you." We are too preoccupied with whether white people love us or not, whether they are racist or not, what they think about the color of our skin or the texture of our hair. Who cares? We have to go forward and make our own opportunities.

You've told me that you admired your father and that he saved your life, taking you to the YMCA when other black parents said it was too far to go or too expensive. Clarence Thomas talks much the same way about his grandfather. How do you duplicate that experience for less fortunate blacks?

This is one of the heartbreaking things about the politics of victimization. We have always had the tradition of self-reliance in the black community, but this tradition gets squashed because it conflicts with victimization. We think we are here because of affirmative action, but we are not. We are here because of those people who let us get into a position to be able to take advantage of what society was trying to do for us. But this victimology causes us to denounce as a race our greatest source of strength, which is people like that, who ought to be held up as role models.

Clarence Thomas ought to be held up as a role model. But no, we say, he made it by himself too much. He's not a victim. We don't want him.

But one major criticism of Thomas is that he thinks he did make it all by himself.

This is the shortsightedness of victimology. You're goddam right he made it by himself. Now you are going to take that away from him and say he made it because of affirmative action. He didn't have affirmative action back there in Pin Point, Ga. His grandfather made him go to school and study hard, and then he gets into the position where, yes, maybe he could benefit. But if all that early work had not been done, we wouldn't know Clarence Thomas today.

What are you telling young blacks?

The most important thing for young black people to do is what you and I did -- become educated. If you are educated, then at least you have some kind of chance. Learn to think, to read, to be in touch with the larger world. One of the saddest things I see is black students who say to me, "I only read black writers." And what they really mean is they are reading people like Don L. Lee and Louis Farrakhan. I say, Have you ever read any Jean-Paul Sartre? Have you ever read any Ralph Ellison or Albert Murray or James Baldwin? Nope. But they read Don L. Lee's tract on what a black man should be, as though this is different from what any man should be. And so there's this sort of intellectual segregation that I think is absolutely a death knell for our future.

Many blacks accuse you of allowing yourself to be used by white neoconservatives, who are no longer willing to deal with the problems of race and poverty.

Some of them do use me, and I think some of them do not have the best interests of black Americans at heart. But if everybody is hip enough to ask me this question, then my use to the neoconservatives is neutralized.

In many ways, the fear that I'm being used by neoconservatives reflects a paranoia that has always been part of black life, and it is part of the life of any oppressed group, a paranoia about what you say in front of the Man because he'll use it against you. One of the things I stand for more deeply than anything else is that I do not see the white man as all that powerful, all that smart. Blacks really need to begin to understand that these people do not control our fate as much we think they do.

What has this debate and being labeled a black conservative done to Shelby Steele?

It has put a lot of stress on me. It's not fun to be labeled when you know that it's very shortsighted. On the other hand, overall I am very, very happy because I think the terms of the debate have been really opened up. I don't think things will ever be the same again. And I think Clarence Thomas' nomination drives that nail home. There will now forever more be diversity of opinion in the black community. People will think about these things a great deal more than they did when we were a sort of one-party system. I feel very good about that.