"White Guilt and the Western Past" by Shelby Steele

Black conservative author Shelby Steele asserts that America has stopped short of using massive military force in Iraq and around the glob because of “white guilt” over past sins. This, Steele argues, paralyzes American policy.

“There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II. For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency. Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.”

“Today, the white West–like Germany after the Nazi defeat–lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.”

TheStateOf . . . White Guilt. Steele writes from the eerie perspective of a black man counseling white readers on how to regain a “lost” sense of power and pride. His writing wreaks with excessive apologies for uncomfortable change and adulation for the “good ol’ days.”