"Steele has given eloquent voice to painful truths that are almost
always left unspoken in the nation's circumscribed public discourse on
race." --New York Times
From the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our
Character and White Guilt comes an essay collection that tells the
untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today.
In A Dream Deferred Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of
black freedom in the United States--the first one being
segregation--emerged from the civil rights era when the country was
overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame.
According to Steele, 1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming
goal the expiation of American guilt rather than the careful development
of true equality between the races.
In four densely argued essays, Steele takes on the familiar questions of
affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group
preferences, victimization--and what he deems to be the atavistic powers
of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression. A
Dream Deferred is an honest, courageous look at the perplexing dilemma
of race and democracy in the United States--and what we might do to
resolve it.