Shelby Steele and his son Eli speak much truth about the state of black America. The Left hates them for it. Americans love it.

Close

Eli Steele: “Those who call themselves members of the woke tribe in America often point to communities like Pastor Corey Brooks’ South Side neighborhood as signs of systemic racism. They talk of white supremacy, redlining and block-busting as the major contributors to the poverty and violence while conveniently ignoring the devastating impact of post-’60s liberalism.

The woke find their audiences in universities, corporations, institutions and in school districts like District 65 in Evanston, a wealthy Chicago suburb 20 miles north of where the pastor lives and ministers. Teachers in that district have been teaching students about Black Lives Matter as part of Black History Month. The students are told: ‘We did not create race, racism or racist institutions but it is our job as global citizens to dismantle institutional racism. We can start by saying and believing Black Lives Matter.’ They are also told: ‘Racism and racists institutions like plantations, Jim Crow Laws, ‘ghettos’ and prisons are/were ethnoracial prisons that purposely impede the social and economic success of black people.’

Wokeism functions as a backward looking ideology that derives power not from creating opportunities and present day solutions but from the sins of America’s racist past. That is why the pastor rejects the empty ideology that exploits black pain and gives nothing in return. On the 94th day of his 100-day rooftop vigil to raise funds to build a transformative community center on the South Side of Chicago, the pastor hosted a video chat with Shelby Steele.”

Shelby Steele: “I think woke comes from a larger phenomenon of white guilt. America, in the mid-’60s … [admitted] that it partook of evil and it partook of evil for four centuries— wasn’t just a quick minute,” Steele said. “One of the consequences is that the moral authority of the American democracy was put at risk because of this history of evil that came to the forefront in the ’60s. Since that time, white America understandably has been trying to reestablish its moral authority, its moral legitimacy. In order to do that, it has to find ways to demonstrate that it is not guilty any longer of those old evils.

“Woke is just simply the spinning out of that guilt. Today, the president of the United States says he has to appoint to the Supreme Court a black woman — not a Hispanic woman, not a white woman, that’s old hat. He has to now show his innocence of racism,” Steele continued.

“Woke is a corrupt because it is more interested in retrieving the innocence of white America than it is in the development of black America,” Steele said. “And so we as blacks – even though whites are now saying, ‘look, we do this and we do this and we give you this and we give you that’ and so forth – we’re over here falling farther and farther behind…Wokeism is the greatest enemy black America has ever had outside of slavery itself,” Steele concluded.