White Guilt by Shelby Steele

Pg 17 Like most people in the MLK era civil right movement, they were Gandhians because nonviolent passive resistance was the best way to highlight white racism as an immorality

Pg 20 Oppression, in itself, pushes people neither to anger nor to revolution. If it did, black slaves would have been so relentlessly rebellious that slavery would have been unsustainable as an institution. Anger in the oppresses is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice

Pg 24 Whites must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it, but once they acknowledge it, they lose moral authority over everything having to do with race, equality, social justice, poverty, and so on. They step into a void of vulnerability. The authority they lose transfers to the victims of historical racism and becomes their great power in society. This is why White Guilt is quite literally the same thing as black power

Pg 27 Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise

Pg 31 the hipster is a kind of existential hero who preserves his humanity by seeing through to the irony and absurdity of his situation. the true hipster is never surprised, he is therefore "cool", because he already knows

Pg 35 Affirmative action explicitly violates many of the same principles, equal protection under the law, meritorious advancement, that the MLK era civil-rights movement fought for

Pg 38 What proves that black rioting in the 60's and the 90's has been more a manipulation of white guilt than an honest expression of black rage it that whites themselves have only rarely been the targets of violence

Pg 58 Black America faced 2 options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurial ism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lions share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late 60's, and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next 4 decades, grew out of black Americas complete embrace of the latter option

Pg 60 Still today, the best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement

Pg 68 Almost always, oppressed groups enter freedom by denying that they are in fact free, this as a way of avoiding the daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes

Pg 104 Accommodationist: someone who showed kindness to blacks by helping them accommodate to white supremacy

Pg 140 Paradoxically, oppression always conveys a sense of superiority along with its abuses. This is why it is so profoundly mistaken to assume that racism and oppression automatically cause low self-esteem in blacks. The opposite is more likely the case

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