All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 1, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:04:14
Shelby Steele | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 105
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Freedom is not that interesting in black America.
What's interesting is this enormous power that befell us in the 60s when America owned up to to its past.
The events of the past year have elevated the national conversation around race to degrees of tumult not seen for a generation.
Our guest today is no stranger to those conversations and has been a key figure in the scholarship of race relations for decades, Shelby Steele.
A renowned author, columnist, and documentary filmmaker, Steele is an advocate for individual freedom and liberty and has been a strong proponent of the civil rights movement of the 1960s for just this reason.
That movement, which was focused on the individual, has been perverted, he says, by a move toward government dependence.
Welfare and affirmative action programs have only furthered racial divides.
He argues these beliefs in his writing, including the popular book, White Guilt, How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.
Now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Steele recently produced a documentary in collaboration with his son, filmmaker Eli Steele, titled, What Killed Michael Brown?
It's an investigation into the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri shooting, just as George Floyd's death rocked the nation.
At the time of this recording, Steele was embroiled in a controversy with Amazon over the release of the film.
Without any clear basis for their decision, Amazon had refused to distribute the documentary.
There have since been new developments in the story, so we'll have to wait to see how it all plays out in the end.
In our conversation, Shelby details his struggles with Amazon and the journey he has gone through to get this important film made.
Seal and I also discussed the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and organization and the reasons President Trump and his supporters are so often labeled racist.
Hey Han, welcome back.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special.
We're so pleased to welcome Professor Shelby Steele.
The only way to get access to the end of our conversation, we do bonus questions at the end.
The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member.
You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
Shelby Steele, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Well, thanks so much for having me.
So for folks who don't know your background, maybe you can talk a little bit about your transformation on issues of race, because when you were younger, you really were more of a racial radical.
You talk in many of your books about your views on race and how they've morphed over time.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about that journey.
I was born into a civil rights family.
My parents met As founding members of CORE, Congress of Racial Equality in Chicago in the 40s.
So, I was a core baby.
I sort of grew up in the civil rights milieu, that world, demonstrations and so forth.
And I went on demonstrations as a toddler.
So, I was always aware of the issue of race.
And this was, again, when I was a kid, was deep.
segregation everywhere across America.
And so I was very aware of that.
And by the time I got to college, black power had begun to emerge.
Blacks had taken on a new militancy.
And I identified with that, and I still do.
You know, Patrick Henry is my ultimate hero.
Give me liberty or give me death.
And if you won't allow me in, and I can't come to the table, and I can't play with everyone else, then it's revolution time.
So I got to that in the late 60s.
I was the leader of my student, Black Student Union in my college, and we took over the president's office, and we did all the things that militant students did back in that era.
I won't march you through all of the details, but I graduated from college.
I went to work in the inner city in a government-sponsored program, poverty programs.
They were everywhere.
I worked in about three or four of them for about three or four years.
I began to see corruption.
I began to see people using the circumstance of poverty as a means to personal ends, and people started to come to work in Mercedes-Benz and to the poverty program.
By the time I left there, I had pretty much lost my innocence regarding poverty work, and I went to graduate school.
Began to live a much more traditional life from there.
But I began to feel that the militancy was hurting us more than helping us.
It's very good to have a very strong commitment to one's identity, one's group identity, and to be proud and all that sort of thing.
But that's not an end.
That's good, but you have to become competitive in the modern world.
Otherwise you will languish in poverty no matter what your identity is.
And so it became clearer and clearer as I sort of marched through graduate school and began my career as an academic, that it was time to grow up and to join America rather than fight America, that my future really was with America.
And also, by this time, one very important thing did happen.
I call this the Great Confession.
And that is that in the 60s, in the mid-60s, when the Civil Rights Bill passed in 64, America effectively confessed to colluding for four centuries with a horrific evil, racism.
But from President Johnson on down, America confessed to that in the 60s, owned up to it, and I think it is the most transformative moment in all of American history by far, and we've only just begun to really understand the fallout from that confession, the kind of pressures that's introduced into society, white guilt certainly being one of them.
But I did become aware that America This miraculous thing was going to actually admit what they'd done and try to correct it.
I don't know if that's ever happened anywhere else in human history, but it happened in America, and so I don't think we've given ourselves credit for that.
But I saw it.
I saw a fundamental change.
And that change has only broadened and deepened since then.
We live in a very different world today.
This is not a time for me to be blacker than thou and raise my fist.
This is a time to get busy and start a business or get prepared to join the modern world and live in a free, Democracy, an open society in which we have now, for the very first time, the opportunity to begin to live not as members of a race, a beleaguered race, but as individuals.
As human beings who are free to pursue their aspirations as they wish, I feel very fortunate to have lived through this transformation from the dark days of segregation to the America that is now wide open before me.
So in a second, I want to ask you why it is that while this transformation has occurred, and it's obvious on every objective level that a transformation has occurred in American life, why it seems so hard for so many people to accept that a transformation has occurred.
I want to ask you about that in just one second.
First, is politics stressing you out?
It's stressing me out.
Also, my kids are stressing me out.
And this is why I need a mattress made just for me.
There's nobody on the planet like you.
So why would you buy a generic mattress built for everyone else?
Helix Sleep has a quiz.
It takes just two minutes to complete.
It matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.
Whether you're a side sleeper, a hot sleeper, whether you like a plush or a firm bed, with Helix, there's no more confusion and no more compromising.
Helix Sleep is rated the number one mattress by GQ and Wired Magazine.
CNN calls it the most comfortable mattress they've ever slept on.
Just head on over to HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
Take their two-minute sleep quiz.
They will match you to a customized mattress that gives you the best sleep of your life.
They have a 10-year warranty.
You get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it, but you will.
Helix is offering up to 200 bucks off all mattress orders for our listeners right now.
Get up to 200 bucks off at HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
That is HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
It is the most comfortable mattress you've ever tried because it's made just for you.
HelixSleep.com slash Ben for up to 200 bucks off.
So let's talk about the fact that America has obviously transformed.
There's a major difference between America circa 1960 and America circa 2020.
But the way that you hear so many people talk about America in 2020 is as though nothing has changed.
You have high profile authors, well-regarded writers, Pulitzer Prize winners like Nicole Hannah-Jones or Ta-Nehisi Coates, basically writing essays in which they talk about an atrocity that happened in 1915 and then immediately fast forward to 2020 and act as though there were no intervening events.
How is it that that has become intellectually credible?
It seems so perfectly obvious that things have radically changed since the 1960s.
Racism is the worst sin in American life and it is the thing that if you are called a racist, it can literally finish your career whether it's justified or not.
I mean, that's how much Americans abhor racism at this point and yet it is still treated.
The issue of racism is still treated as though systemic, as though most Americans secretly harbor racist feelings.
And you've talked before about the shifting definition of racism itself.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about why you think racism is still considered such a major part of American life despite the transformational change.
Okay, I'd be happy to.
For one reason, when there was this great confession that I mentioned that America owned up to its past and we created a war on poverty and we created all sorts of social programs, public housing, welfare, so forth, what became clear, one of the offshoots of that confession
was that victimization, our victimization as blacks, our victimization at the hands of broader America, became our power.
It was the first time in American history we had power to wield in American life because America itself had confessed.
And so we had that moral authority for the first time.
In American life.
And it became our primary source of power in society.
We could claim racism.
And what could America say?
They had already admitted to racism.
And so, we began to believe, and this is the tragedy of this, that victimization became our identity, became the center of who we are.
You want to make a black person angry?
Tell them that they're not a victim.
It's intolerable to hear that because, again, the idea that we are victims is our entree to power and to American society.
Hannah Jones at the New York Times is simply reinforcing the old theory of black victimization as power.
She's just saying, look at all of this victimization.
Look at what you owe us.
Look at how you must follow our lead, morally.
Look at how immoral you were.
And boy, that's a lot of power.
It has transformed our entire educational system, political correctness.
It's had a tremendous impact.
So even though we are now free, Freedom is not that interesting in black America.
What's interesting is this enormous power that befell us in the 60s when America owned up to its past.
And that's what we protect.
And the entire grievance industry in America It's based on that.
You owe us.
Our victimization is our ticket to ride.
It is our authority in American life.
You have to come to us.
One of the difficult things is to tell a group that never had any power.
Suddenly they have a kind of moral power.
It's difficult to accept that that moral power they now have is killing them, is hurting them.
A very difficult point to make.
They look at me and they say, oh my God, you're giving up, you're walking away from what we fought for.
We now finally have the power to make universities, get rid of the SAT test.
We can do all sorts of things that we never could do before, and you want us to drop that.
Well, I do, because the thing about victimization as power is that you become your own enemy.
You victimize yourself in the long run, and you get nowhere.
And so after 60 years now of using victimization as power, black America is farther behind white America than we were in the 50s when I was a kid.
When I was growing up.
So this power of victimization has turned on us and is choking us at this point.
It breaks my heart to go to campuses and you see young black kids and they're all huddled off and they're black power this and black power that and black lives matter and all that sort of struggling.
You see it's painful, it's struggling.
To keep victimization alive as power, as the power in the black community.
So, why do you think it is that so many members of the white community have gone along with this?
I mean, it would be one thing to say, you know, back in 1965 that huge swaths of Americans had acknowledged their guilt because they had in fact been complicit in racism.
I was born in 1984, so I was born 20 years after the Civil Rights Act.
And I frankly don't feel racial guilt because I don't believe that I've acted in racially intolerant ways.
But you see huge swaths of particularly young white Americans who are going along with this and browbeating others, engaging in malice struggle sessions in which they confess their own guilt for complicity in a systemically racist system.
What do you think is the attraction for white Americans to go along with the narrative where they are inherently the victimizers?
What happened to white America when America confessed its wrongdoing is that America endured at that moment a tremendous loss of moral authority.
And it's just human.
When you confess, I did it, all right, I'm sorry, well, okay, now you will pay a price.
And that is what happened to white America, is that they were judged to be racist, they had colluded with evil, and so now they lived under the accusation that they were racist, and that they had been a part of this.
And so they may have done absolutely nothing to justify feeling guilty whatsoever.
White guilt has no connection whatsoever to personal feelings.
It is a circumstance that you are living in a society that does not trust you.
that has this against you, that holds this history against you.
And so what whites then have to struggle for and have since the 60s is their innocence of racism, of proving, oh, not me, I'm not a racist.
And that need to prove is what blacks take advantage of.
Okay, then do this, and do that, and so forth and so on, and change your curriculum here, and start an HR program there, have another, so forth and so on.
And whites do it because they want that innocence.
They want to be able to say, look, I support affirmative action.
I'm all for it.
I support diversity.
Let's have different colored faces in everything we do, so that we can prove we are innocent of that historical accusation that we are evil racists.
Anything to get away from that.
And so, you know, one race begins to enable another race.
We have a sort of a symbiotic connection of whites exploiting blacks all over again in order, this time, to recapture some innocence.
And power.
Blacks sort of selling themselves out to guilty whites in order to have the illusion that victimization is their power and so forth.
So it gets to be a kind of sad symbiosis that we are caught in and we never honestly talk about it.
But we're all nervous about it.
We're all nervous.
We all hope for the best, I think, but history is powerful, and America has a very unique history.
We're far, far ahead of much of the rest of the world in this regard, but we have a long way to go.
It seems like there's something else that has happened here, too.
And that's not just that there's an attempt by both, you know, guilty whites and some black Americans to push for particular policy prescriptions and sort of gimmies.
But there's something now that's going on that's completely, I think, unprecedented, which is that You are only declared to be not racist for a certain period of time if you acknowledge your racism.
So in other words, if you say as a white person, I'm not racist, I'm colorblind, and I see everybody as an individual, this is in fact used as evidence of your racism.
Whereas if you then declare that you are in fact a racist by dint of the color of your skin and through racial essentialization, then you are not racist, but you are also racist because you just acknowledge that you're racist.
So it's a complete catch-22.
There's literally no way for white Americans to escape The charges of racism, either you admit that you're a racist, in which case we say, okay, well, at least you were honest enough to admit you're a racist, but that means you're kind of a racist because you just admitted it, or you won't acknowledge your own racism, in which case we absolutely 100% know that you're a racist.
That's right.
And the power to put whites in that position is what black power is, is the power that comes from our moral authority as victims, as historical victims.
And so we enjoy sort of squeezing whites in this impossible circumstance.
But it helps, again, obviously, Whites do not have, at this moment in America, I'm speaking broad terms here, whites do not have the moral confidence to resist this.
To say, hey, call me a racist, whatever you want.
I believe this.
I stand by this.
And I'll argue on the terms of whatever it is I stand by.
I'm not going to be blackmailed, intimidated about simply being white and simply having a connection to people in the past who were also white.
does not mean that I am evil and that I am a racist.
If you can't accept that, too bad.
Whites simply do not in America have the moral confidence to do that, to say that.
That's why we're stuck.
When whites begin to rediscover their confidence and accept the fact that they are not racists, and that they want to treat everybody as individuals, and they practice that, Race problem be over.
Black power will be over.
We'll have to take victimization and go home.
It doesn't work anymore.
Right now, it's just, whites just, this morning, Amazon canceled the film that I just am coming out with, just as they gave $10 million to Black Lives Matter and other left-wing black groups.
Well, that's white guilt.
They don't believe in the money that they gave.
They don't care what they do with the money.
They are buying their own innocence.
They're saying, our brand is not racist.
If you give money to Shelby Steele, or you just even put his film up on your platform, you're a bigot, you're a racist, you're a horrible person.
So forth.
Well, I suffer today from the lack of confidence that whites have.
That now is a big problem in my life and in my work.
I'm someone who grew up fighting against segregation.
Now I'm fighting against it all over again.
So in a second, I want to ask you about exactly that sort of turn where so many of the things of the past that were considered to be the beacons of hope, the things that we aspired to as a society, have now become the obstacles, the enemies that we have to get rid of in pursuit of anti-racism in the sort of pernicious definition of the Ibram Kendi's and Robin DiAngelo's.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, it's Halloween this month.
Policy genius would like to mark the occasion by making something less scary, life insurance.
Shopping for life insurance can seem like a daunting task, but PolicyGenius makes it easy.
They combine a cutting-edge insurance marketplace with help from licensed experts to save you time and save you money.
Right now, you could save 50% or more by using PolicyGenius to compare life insurance.
When you're shopping for a policy that could last for more than a decade, the savings really do start to add up.
Here's how it works.
First, head on over to PolicyGenius.com.
In minutes, you can work out how much coverage you need and compare quotes from top insurers to find your best price.
PolicyGenius will compare policies starting at as little as $1 a day.
You might even be eligible to skip that in-person medical exam.
Once you apply, the PolicyGenius team will handle all the paperwork and the red tape.
The best part?
They work for you, not the insurance company.
So, if you hit any speed bumps during the application process, they'll take care of everything for you.
That kind of service has earned PolicyGenius a five-star rating across over 1,600 reviews on Trustpilot and Google.
So, if you need life insurance, head on over to PolicyGenius.com right now to get started.
You could save 50% or more by comparing quotes.
PolicyGenius.
When it comes to insurance, it's nice and very important to get it right.
So let's talk about what you're referring to there with regard to the sort of fight against segregation again.
It seems like there's so many of these ideals that were the purpose of the civil rights movement of the 40s and 50s and the early 60s.
These ideals that we build statues of Martin Luther King, not because we agree with his economic philosophies, but because specifically of his vision of individuals being treated as individuals.
I mean, that is what school children learn.
It's why he deserves his own day.
I mean, this is why people celebrate Martin Luther King on a broad scale across the United States.
And yet we have seen that the woke culture has pushed so far that individualism is now seen as a hallmark of white culture.
There was a display at the National Smithsonian, at the National Museum of African American History, in which they declared that aspect of white supremacy in American culture included things like being timely, having a work ethic, believing that you should delay gratification, a belief in individualism, a belief in problem solving. Now it seems to me that if you want anybody to succeed, these are just things that they need to engage in. But according to the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History, these were
aspects of white supremacy. And so we have to abolish all of our traditional notions of cause and effect of good behavior and bad behavior in pursuit of the belief that individual actions don't matter at all and all problems can be chalked up to broad societal discrimination. This is how desperate white institutional America is for innocence of racism.
They will go to these lengths Uh, to, to advertise, to try to advertise their own innocence to the world.
Um, these are people entire you, as you said, have not probably have no personal guilt, whatever.
And yet their, their whole politics, their whole, uh, orientation toward American life, uh, is, is, uh, is, is around again, victimization, uh, and their, their need for innocence.
They just will do anything to reclaim innocence.
I remember when I was in my black militant stage as a kid in college, and I ran into a white man one night in a hotel lobby, and just for the heck of it, I told him that he should give me $25, right then and there.
Uh, because he was white and he was a racist and he needed to pay off.
And of course he gave me about 40.
Well, you know, it's, it's, it's tempting.
You know, the imagination goes wild.
I could, I could really fan this into something and, and open up, put out a shingle and innocence here coming, you know, we've got, we've got a sale today.
Um, But it's not funny, it's tragic, and white America is lost to this.
The young are just preoccupied with this idea of establishing their innocence of this evil.
And people like Hannah Jones are just sort of smirking and smiling, and the puppeteer pulling all the strings.
Someday whites are going to wake up.
God knows when.
I thought it would have happened by now.
I thought they would have gotten tired of being jacked up like this, but apparently not.
So if you're trying to sell truth, if you're trying to point to—here's the truth.
Blacks went through four centuries of oppression.
You go through that, when you come out of it, finally, as we did in the 60s, you're going to be underdeveloped.
They didn't have Harvards for us back in the days of segregation.
That was our big liability when we walked into freedom, when we stepped into freedom, is that we needed desperately development, education, economic development.
We needed to join America, become a part of the great American experiment, and find parity with all other groups.
That's what we needed.
We were so drunk on our power as victims that we, to this day, 60 years later, cling to that victimization, and we hate any minorities who don't.
If you don't cling to your victimization, you're an Uncle Tom, and that's the end of you.
You're canceled.
So, again, the people who think They are helping blacks, are simply re-colonizing blacks.
And now blacks live and sort of facilitate white innocence, rather than actually move ahead on their own and become independent individuals functioning in a free society.
We don't have the cultural history.
We never had to deal with freedom.
Now we do.
Freedom is our biggest problem now.
Not racism.
Racism is so far down on the list, it means nothing.
We're afraid of freedom.
We don't know what to do with freedom.
How to live in it.
How to make it work for us.
That's our real world challenge.
And, again, whites who are longing for their innocence and rolling over for black victims, they now are the enemy, because they diminish us to nothing but sort of icons that facilitate their innocence and their power all over again.
I guess history does repeat itself in that sense.
So you talked about working in the social welfare system, and obviously in the 1960s there was a real push for a sort of racial reparation via social welfare programs and the Great Society programs.
The idea expressed by LBJ is that, well, now the sort of barriers had been removed, If you had all of the runners at the start line and one of the runners was 20 yards behind the start line, then somehow we had to find a way to get the person 20 yards behind the start line up to the start line. That's what the social welfare programs were for. But it seems like in many ways the social welfare programs actually inhibited the ability for that runner to ever catch up.
And there have been a lot of minority groups in the United States who have started off 20 yards behind the start line compared to white America.
Many of those minority groups now routinely outperform white Americans in terms of income, including many groups of African immigrants.
Nigerian Americans, for example, outperform white Americans in terms of income.
So maybe you can talk a little bit about social welfare programs.
Was it just well-intentioned and it went wrong?
What exactly happened with the social welfare programs?
Why didn't it help achieve this?
Very specifically, what happened was, because whites were longing for their innocence, what whites did was literally steal away from black people agency over their own fate, over their own lives.
LBJ said, put your life in my hands.
I will give you an Upward Bound program.
I will expand welfare payments.
I will have school busing.
I will have public housing.
On and on.
I am the actor.
I am the agent of your uplift, of your fate.
Not you.
You are nothing but a sort of cipher for my innocence.
We blacks, not quite knowing how to handle freedom yet, bought into that and sold our soul away.
We put agency, we said, okay, you be the agent of my uplift.
You're right, you did commit, you were ugly, you were racist, so forth.
So now you can redeem yourself by uplifting me.
Well, When you look at that, you're giving away agency to your own uplift.
You're putting it in somebody else's hands.
When, in all of human history, has that ever worked?
You don't give up agency and then think you're going to somehow miraculously get ahead.
You want agency.
Here's what we should have said.
We should have said to white America and to Lyndon Johnson, thank you, but no thanks.
You worry about your innocence.
We'll worry about our development.
We'll focus as individuals.
We will become better educated than you.
We will out-compete you.
We don't want your help.
We have our own honor, our own sense of dignity, our own self-possession.
We fail to do that.
The end of many, many, many, many, many, and I mean many, individual blacks did do that.
And they are thriving today.
And we see them everywhere in every walk of life, making the point that if one wants to really take charge of one's faith and move ahead, You're free to do that today in America.
You can become literally the president, if that's what you want to do.
You can become the CEO of a major corporation.
You can become an artist.
You can become a veterinarian.
You can do whatever you want.
And the government will never, ever, under any circumstances, be able to do that for you.
It's a kind of sick, Again, symbiotic bond that came out of this Great Confession in the 60s.
Both groups got blinded and made a very quick, down-and-dirty deal.
That's why I think of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society as a down-and-dirty deal.
He said, basically, I need the innocents to have legitimacy As the president and keep the government legitimate and so forth.
I need that.
So I'm going to give you all these programs even though they don't do anything whatsoever, but teach you corruption, embroil you in corruption.
I worked in those programs for three years.
I've never seen so much corruption in my life.
It was just wide open.
You have to fight for your life.
I had to get out of there or sink into that.
Uh, and I was lucky.
I was very lucky.
I had two good parents and talked a lot and finally found my way, uh, out of there.
Um, yeah, but that's what we, we, we, we now have to do.
We have to get away from that.
We have to get away from our symbiotic relationship to white people.
Uh, I don't want to have any, I want to be a human being.
I want to be a citizen of the United States.
I want to relate to all other human citizens.
What your race is, I don't care.
So let's talk for a second about why it is that so many, you mentioned there's so many prominent black Americans with wild levels of success.
There's so many black Americans who are middle class and above.
I know that the media tend to portray only poverty and suffering in the black community.
You hear politicians routinely talk about how to be black in America means to suffer.
in America as though the average income for a black household in the United States is in $58,000 or as though the vast majority of black Americans are living in abject poverty which simply isn't true. Why is it that we don't see more black Americans saying exactly what you're saying which is I've been able to make my way in this society.
If you make the right decisions, you can make your way in this society, too.
Instead, it seems like with increased levels of prominence, many black Americans speak out more loudly about how America is racist.
We've mentioned Nikole Hannah-Jones several times.
I mean, this is a person who went to a top university.
She obviously has been granted the keys to the car over at the New York Times.
You see Karen Attia at the Washington Post, who's the daughter of African immigrants doing the same thing.
You see people at the top of the entertainment industry.
LeBron James does this, making hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
Barack Obama became President of the United States and then suggested that America was still struggling with systemic racism and made comments about Ferguson, Missouri, which we'll discuss in a second.
The reason is they don't believe in themselves.
They don't believe in black people.
ignoring the facts of the case in order to make these particular comments. So why is it that we don't see more prominent black Americans say what so many prominent members of other minority races in America say to their kids and to their compatriots, which is what a great country and we can absolutely rise in this country. The reason is they don't believe in themselves.
They don't believe in black people.
I believe in black people. I believe they should do exactly what you just said, what you're talking about.
That's our only future.
You only get what you make for yourself.
That's the obligation of freedom, is you have to make something of yourself.
But they simply, one of the problems in black American life, this comes from four centuries of oppression, is faithlessness.
In your group.
Your group was oppressed.
Somebody's heel was on their neck.
They were denigrated.
They were dehumanized.
And part of the formerly oppressed person's struggle is to have faith.
In precisely those people, one's own people, who come from all of that, to love them and have faith in them.
The biggest problem in black America is faithlessness.
We don't believe in ourselves.
We don't believe we'll be able to compete.
All of the ugly bigotries of the white past, we on some secret level, where we don't admit it to ourselves even, Believe that, and therefore lack the faith to take our lives into our own hands and make something, and make a life.
We say to protect ourselves, that's a fool's game.
This is a racist world, a racist society.
That's to work hard, and so that's for fools.
And a white man, those are Uncle Tom's.
White man always believes in them.
Well, you know, we have to face this problem of faithlessness.
And we have to raise our children ready.
We have to completely Are you reading to your children?
Are you developing them intellectually?
Are you developing them their academic skills, their interpersonal skills, the values?
Are you building strong, independent people who will be able to be responsible for their own advancement?
Are you doing that?
If you're not, you're worse than racism.
You're contributing to a life of inferiority and struggle.
We have it backwards.
It is heartbreaking.
Another problem is that we live in such an absolutely wealthy society.
Society can give us all—the figure I keep hearing is the last 50 years that America has spent $22, $23 trillion on social programs.
That's a lot of bait to tempt me away from this more rigorous self-development and into the idea that I can manipulate, maneuver, game my way ahead, and so forth.
In a wealthy society, you can do that.
Well, I'm on the wrong side of the fence.
I didn't get any of that.
Not a dime.
to continue to dump it on people. It's just an Amazon, 10 million dollars, they wake up and and give it, give that away. Well, I'm on the wrong side of the fence. I didn't get any of that, not a dime. They canceled me. So let's talk about that in just one second.
I want to ask you about the documentary, What Killed Michael Brown, that is going to be available somewhere, but apparently not Amazon.
We'll get to that in just one second.
But first, let's talk about censorship on social media sites and what you can do about it.
The left wants to silence and remove any voices they don't like.
Twitter and Facebook, these were supposed to be open platforms.
I don't need their content moderators acting like the op-ed section of the New York Times.
Instead of letting those social media sites revoke your right to free speech, how about revoking their right to your data?
Now, you could just deactivate all your social media accounts, but that would be giving the left just what they wanted in the first place.
Instead, use ExpressVPN the way I do.
If you've ever wondered how free-to-access sites like Facebook make their money, well, they track your searches, video history, everything you click on, and then they sell your valuable data.
When you use ExpressVPN, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding that IP address.
That makes your activity more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers.
And ExpressVPN could not be easier to set up.
You just tap one button on your phone or computer, and you're now protected.
ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your data to help protect you from hackers and internet bad guys.
So, now is the time to say no to censorship.
Take back your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash ben.
By visiting my special link, you get an extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free.
Again, that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vpn.com slash ben.
Expressvpn.com slash ben to get started.
Okay, so you've now referred to this documentary that you made, What Killed Michael Brown.
I had a chance to watch a large segment of it last night.
It is, you know, incredibly incisive and emotionally devastating because it really does take on some very serious issues.
So what was the impetus behind making a documentary about the Michael Brown shooting?
We wanted to debunk this idea of victimization as power.
uh michael brown the the reason michael brown would become so explosive and and uh more recently here george floyd and so forth and others the reason these events become so explosive is because they represent They seem to morally give moral authority to blacks as victims.
They seem to reinforce our whole black pathology, which sees victimization as our great power.
And my God, white cop with a shoots and kills a black teenager.
There it is.
That's four centuries of racism right there.
You owe me.
And I will grant you your innocence, but you'll have to pay for it.
So all of a sudden, the President of the United States, the Attorney General of the United States, everybody is in Ferguson, Missouri, anguishing over the shooting of Michael Brown, black teenager.
Well, they're there because it just flows over with black power.
If Michael Brown was really shot and killed out of a racial animus, Then think of all the power that redounds then to all of black America.
We can just sort of work that angle for ten more years.
And so all of these events like this, George Floyd and so forth, they're all this sort of This temptation, everybody knows power is to be had in these events.
Who's going to get the power?
And of course, blacks are, here it is.
We've now had 60 years of victimization being our primary source of power.
And so, anyway, we wanted to go in and show exactly that corruption and point to some of the damage that's done.
And then we wanted to look toward the end of the film at some positive activities that are going on in the black community.
There are people doing some miraculous work.
We interviewed a pastor who has his church right in the Woodlawn area, the south side of Chicago, where the murder rate is over the roof.
We talked to former drug dealers. We looked at public housing. We looked at all, again, the offshoots of this sort of thing, to try to point the way ahead.
And...
And I particularly liked the end of the film, where I go back to my father's childhood home in Kentucky.
And I remember, reminisce, of these people.
My grandfather was actually born a slave.
Not my great-grandfather, my literal grandfather was actually born a slave.
came forward in Camp Nelson, Kentucky.
And my father, how he, from the age of 14 on, was on his own and had to make his way in the world and teach himself to read and write.
And so I wanted to honor that selfless struggle on the part of black Americans.
Our greatness comes from those people.
They did it.
They didn't go around begging for white goodwill.
All they wanted was, don't discriminate against me.
My father hated the idea of public housing.
Thought it was just a ticket to hell.
He could see that coming.
And many other blacks in our neighborhood did.
And we rejected it.
But that white guilt is hard to, maybe they rejected it, but do their kids?
Pretty soon they begin to be bought off, one by one by one by one.
Here's an easier road for you.
And you look up and you're under the power of people who are, look, it's the problem with white guilt.
Social programs that look out after white power.
White power, white innocence, and white power.
And you become, just again, a cipher, a means to that end.
At the end of the film, we try to really get into that and I think have some moving moments.
At least they were moving to me when we filmed them.
And so now you've found out that Amazon won't even offer the film for sale?
Is that where things are right now?
Nope.
They sent us a letter that Said, not only will we not do it, but don't try to resubmit it.
Don't change the title.
Don't do anything.
We don't want it.
Ever.
So, to make a statement, certain friends of mine have been cancelled from Twitter.
Think tanks are rearranging themselves.
And again, we've got this whole canceling phenomenon that I'm going to cancel evil.
I'm going to cancel some perniciousness in the name of the good.
Well, what's the good to Amazon?
The good is Black Lives Matter, Well, I'm not going to waste time getting into what they are, but I think they're completely on the wrong track.
They will keep us mired, celebrating ourselves as victims forevermore.
Well, so now I'm going to ask you to go on the wrong track there and actually describe what you think of the Black Lives Matter movement, because obviously it has had this massive impact on our politics, and we've seen corporations going woke across the country.
We've seen the NBA decide to dedicate entire sidelines on national broadcasts, to their sloganeering, changing the jerseys on the back of the jerseys so you can put the names of people who have allegedly been unjustly killed by the police.
You've seen every major politician pay lip service to Black Lives Matter, which is a semantically overloaded phrase.
I mean, it can mean a few things.
One, the obviously true statement that Black Lives Matter, because they do.
It can mean the movement, which is the assumption that America is systemically racist and that black Americans are at unique risk of being murdered in the United States, which is certainly not true from the police.
It may be true statistically, but it really has very little to do with white Americans doing the murdering, unfortunately.
And then it could mean the Black Lives Matter organization, which is actually just a neo-Marxist front group, But I want to get your thoughts on Black Lives Matter, which, again, has become this sort of tautological statement, and you have to say it.
And if you don't say it, then this obviously means that you're a racist.
Well, they break my heart.
They, first of all, make me sad to have lived through what I've lived through and to see what black America has stood for and fought for.
I think of my father's generation and earlier, Men and women who survived the most horrific sort of oppression, violent, murderous oppression for centuries.
And to come to a place and see our young people using that history of victimization to hide away from the challenges of freedom that we face today.
It's heartbreaking for somebody my age to see that.
You finally got a chance to do anything you want.
And all you're going to do is talk about victimization?
Well, when they talk about systemic racism and so forth, I call it compensatory racism.
It is a faith in racism, an emphasis on racism, because the reality is racism has declined.
radically declined.
It's just not there anymore.
And so we have to come up with new terms like systemic and structural racism and so forth to bring back that old oppression that we endured for four centuries.
That's sad.
We now, when we bring that back, we say, now we know who we really are as black people.
That's not who we really were.
We were the people who fought for freedom and finally won it.
But we don't get credit for that.
We don't give ourselves credit for that.
We whine.
We want whites to give us more junk.
And of course, they're rich, and they can do that.
And they do do that.
And so then we're inflated in our illusions.
And we think people like me, for example, are just hopeless over-the-hill Uncle Toms.
Well, again, it's heartbreaking.
It's sad to see young people sell themselves out that way.
To exhibit that level of faithlessness in their own abilities to develop and overcome.
I always ask them, well, what's your grade point average?
What are you doing to develop yourself?
Black students have the highest dropout rate and the lowest grade point average of any student group in America after 50 years of affirmative action.
We now have a bill to pay.
We're going to have to pay this bill.
And I don't know what generation will finally get there, but at some point, whites are going to turn around and say, we're done.
We're not enabling you anymore.
Enabling black people has become an American habit, a reflex.
that we do again because we just keep needing, wanting this innocence, wanting the power that comes from, the legitimacy that comes from being innocent, demonstrably innocent of racism.
So we'll give you more preferences, give you this, give you, give you, give you, as you sink, as you sink into this faithlessness in yourself.
in your cell.
Well, as you can see, it's kind of a stalemate that we've got going on here.
I'm not sure how it will break.
I know it will at some point.
I hope soon.
sooner than later.
And I think, you know, entered office with high hopes by most Americans that this was going to be maybe the final stage in the transition away from thinking racially in the country.
I mean, he sort of campaigned as, we're not red states, we're not blue states, we're the United States.
I'm both black and white, obviously, in my own ancestry.
Now, I can bring the country together.
It didn't end up that way.
I want to get your assessment of the Obama administration, of Barack and now Michelle, who's obviously a very prominent political figure in her own right, in one second.
First, I have to tell you, the amazing presidential election Is almost here.
We have an incredible day of programming for you.
Our live stream starts on Tuesday, November 3rd at 3 p.m.
Eastern, 12 p.m.
Pacific, featuring special guests, live interviews and more.
Leading up to our evening show, we'll be covering the results with you in real time.
It's going to be spectacular and exciting.
Even better, join DailyWare right now, get 25% off with code election.
So you can watch all of our election coverage live on our Apple TV or Roku app.
Members get our articles ad-free, access to all of our live broadcasts and show library, the full three hours of The Ben Shapiro Show, and exclusive Reader's Pass content available only to DailyWire members.
If you're considering an All Access membership, you get to join us on All Access Live every night for online and live stream discussions with our hosts and an amazing online community.
You also get not one, but two leftist tears tumblers with your membership, as well as early and sometimes exclusive access to new DailyWire products.
Watch the election with us at dailywire.com.
Get 25% off your Daily Wire membership with code election when you sign up today.
Alrighty, so let's talk about the Obama administration and Barack Obama.
As I say, for everybody, even people like me who did not vote for Barack Obama, I thought that he was a bad candidate.
I thought that he would be of the radical left politically.
I thought that he basically campaigned on a bunch of Warm Dover sloganeering.
But even for folks like me who didn't vote for Barack Obama, didn't back him, it was obviously an inspiring thing for the United States, which is a majority white country, to elect a black president after our history of slavery and Jim Crow.
Just that symbol is an inspiring thing.
It didn't appear to end that way.
You look at the polls of race relations, they really markedly declined during the Obama administration, even preceding the Trump administration.
What do you make of Barack Obama was a perfect sort of white fantasy.
And he was elected entirely, I think.
Entirely.
Now Michelle Obama, who's widely perceived to be maybe the future of the Democratic Party.
Barack Obama was a perfect sort of white fantasy.
And he was elected entirely, I think, entirely because he was black.
America's simple, and he was, as Joe Biden once said, He was clean.
I guess he showers every day and he spoke eloquent English.
And so he was, he was, in other words, he was innocuous.
He had no vision for the country that he ever articulated, no set of policies, coherent policies that would reflect some important vision for the country.
He just was a nice black kid who white people realized on some level wouldn't do much of anything except be black and be in the White House, so that White America could say, we're innocent of racism.
We are redeemed.
This is our redemption.
And so Obama was just a small player in a white, self-promotional sort of historical event.
That's all he was.
Again, he couldn't tell you today what his vision was for society, nor could all the white people who voted for him.
They don't know what he stood for.
He didn't stand for anything.
Again, that's the point.
He didn't get in the way of his message.
Which is that I'm a black person who's going to be the most powerful man in the world, and that's how innocent America is.
That's how wonderful America is racially.
They've overcome that shameful history of slavery and so forth, and now they have a black man in the White House.
Aren't they wonderful?
What did it mean in reality?
Are blacks somehow more equal today than they were before?
Have they somehow caught up with whites economically, educationally, otherwise?
No.
Nothing.
Except that whites can say, We're innocent of racism.
We elected a black president.
So, I mean, I think he has to be seen in the context of white guilt.
He's a white guilt president.
Beginning and the end.
And Michelle?
Same.
I don't see much difference there.
That's the game they both play.
Just a little bit every now and then of edginess around the race issue, just to keep their bona fides with militant blacks.
But no leadership, no sense of what ails black America, how it has to be overcome.
None of that.
So now I want to ask you your opinion of the Trump administration.
There's been a lot of talk about racism surrounding President Trump and the supposed innate racism of the American people in electing Trump in 2016.
Joe Biden has suggested that he's running almost entirely to repudiate Trump's personal racism.
What do you make of Trump as a figure, Trump's election, and the Trump administration?
I think that Trump is pretty much what he claims to be.
He wants to fix things.
He's a kind of Mr. Fix-It president.
And he does.
He's fixed any number of things.
But he is vulnerable because the left in America is driven by white guilt, defined by white guilt.
That couldn't be farther away from where Donald Trump is.
He just is not in this sort of... He offers no innocence to white America.
And therefore he's a racist and he's a bigot and he's regression to oppression and he wants and so forth and so on.
But the fact is he's just a pragmatic sort of unimaginative president who really does fix our trade relations with the Chinese, who changes, look at what he's done in the Middle East, really marvelous things that The Obama administration never got close to doing.
But again, he has no vision of white innocence.
And that's what the left wants today.
And that's what much of America still wants today, is this sort of white innocence.
I don't know whether we have to elect another Obama or not, but at some point there will be blacks who are themselves as human beings and who represent the politics, political point of view of the whole nation.
In a second, I want to ask you a couple final questions, starting with whether you think that white guilt or black victimization is going to alleviate first.
Which side in the sort of symbiotic racial relationship you've talked about is going to change its behavior first?
But if you actually want to hear Shelby Steele's answers, then you have to head on over to dailywire.com.
You can subscribe over there and hear the end of our conversation.
Well, Shelby Steele, as you know, I'm a big fan of your work.
People should go out, watch the documentary.
They should purchase all of your books, including White Guilt.
Really appreciate your time.
It's been an honor.
Well, it's been an honor to be here.
I've admired you.
You are your own man.
I admire you.
Hey, thanks so much.
much appreciated.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
And our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
▲
Export Selection