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The Content of Our Character
By Shelby Steele. 1991, New York, NY. HarperPerennial, a division of HarperCollins, xii + 175 pp., $11.00 (paper).
My intention when assigned to review Steele's The Content of Our Character was to produce a more-or-less standard review essay suitable for publication in a refereed social science journal. I realized, however, even before completing the volume's first ten pages, that the review I would ultimately produce was unlikely to conform to that intention.
The overarching reaction generated by those first few pages was one of deja vu: It was as though I was back in 1968 or 1969 (I cannot recall which) reading the Grier and Cobb sizzler, Black Rage (1968). In my estimation, at that time, the Grier and Cobb volume was, indeed, a sizzler, but a sizzling and unfair indictment of a people. There was virtually nothing in my background, at least my conscious background, that prepared me for the volume's self-defeating landscape of Black people; a landscape of a people immobilized by their feelings of race-based inferiority and insecurity. "But these are psychiatrists writing about clinical populations," I cried to those as I vented the rage that reading Black Rage spawned in me. "These are not people typical of the race; they are people victimized by some form of insanity!"
I found the book, frankly, to be an embarrassment, as well as a lie. I certainly was not to be tarred (no pun intended) by the same brush that painted Blacks as consumed by thoughts of race, eviscerated by self-hatred, and, consequently, unable to, in warrior-like fashion, wrest what was needed from a hostile environment in order to achieve their fullest possible potential, and their full humanity. As I would later say often-a statement that succinctly summarized feelings I had in 1969, and before-"We are going to prosper, regardless of the adversity, because we have no other choice!" Neither I, nor the people closest to me, were to be or had ever been Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1969), nor would we ever find ourselves subsisting in accordance with Fanon's existential views of the effects of racism as noted in Black Skin, White Masks (1967).
Little did I know at the time that I was...