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A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America
Shelby Steele
a new essay collection that tells the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today.
HarperCollins Perennial
November 1999
208 pages ISBN: 0060931043 Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
From the author of the award-winning bestseller The
Content of Our Character comes a new 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 America guilt rather than the careful
development of true equality between the races. This "culture of preference" betrayed America's best
principles in order to give whites and America institutions
an iconography of racial virtue they could use against the
stigma of racial shame. 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.
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