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September 26, 2007
Little Rock, TV, and innocence
Shelby Steele writes in the Wall Street Journal on The Legacy of Little Rock. He makes the interesting case the the televised nature of the Little Rock incident made white America come face-to-face with its own evil, which in turn paved the way for, among other things, a new willingness to see the evils of America and a desire to redeem itself for that evil.
Americans watched by the millions and, in this watching, saw something that would change the country fundamentally. Every day for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking. Worse, it was there for the entire world to see, and so it broke through the national denial. The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day. After Little Rock whites stood permanently accused. They would have to prove a negative--that they were not racist--in order to claim decency. And this need to forever beg one's innocence is the very essence of white guilt.
Technorati Tags: culture, racism, shelby steele
politics | By maphet | 04:54 PM
