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Abstract:
Weighing the consequences of post-liberal racial policies in the United States against the traditionally conflicting relations among whites and blacks and the present day unprecedented opportunity of reassessing the role of race calls for a better judgment of 1960's. Resurgence of religion, globalization, the role of education and the profound alterations undergoing the American creed blended in provocative instances demand a more accurate perception of transformations characterizing the black community and its identity at the beginning of the new millennium. Shelby Steele, one of the outstanding black conservative essayists and journalists takes the gauntlet of bringing a fresh outlook of race in nowadays America. The main thrust of his criticism focuses on the repercussions of affirmative action, showing that without warranting the black individual's free participating to the solving of the American community's impasses, will finally impair the credibility of American democracy.
Key words: cultural criticism, racial relations, guilt, stigma, victimization
"Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous everywhere. There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the hard-handed workingman. There is, worse of all, religious prejudice, a prejudice which has stained whole continents with blood. It is, in fact, a spirit infernal, against which every enlightened man should wage perpetual war."1
On rereading Frederick Douglass's excerpt, having as a backdrop the historical opportunity of witnessing a black candidate running for the presidency of the United States2, one should perhaps take advantage of the present moment to review the complexity of racial prejudice, remarking on its capacity to change, disguise and surface again in the imaginary of today's multiracial America. I have chosen the above fragment not only because racial relations have always been sensed as the inflammable heart of American democracy, a privileged field of anti-Americanism, but chiefly due to Douglass's emphasis put on the fact that racial prejudice was not the only enemy of American republicanism. In his time, Douglass warned his readers against the dissemination of racial prejudice in what today would appear as its "naturalized" components, merging into everyday habits, individual or collective experiences nurturing hostile racial differences. The overall picture of...