By Emma Colton
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/author/emma-colton
Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele said that “racial victimization” pushed by Democrats has allowed them to expand their authority while stripping black people of their power.
“Black Americans, in the last 60 years since the '60s, we have made our racial victimization our primary source of power. If we are victims of racism, then that gives us a moral leverage in society to ask for all sorts of things, to introduce political correctness here, to have diversity programs there, to have affirmative action, public housing extended, well on and on. We can ask for all sorts of things based on the fact that we’re victims of racism,” Steele told Breitbart News Tonight.
“This is a dark thing because if you define yourself as a victim, you define yourself as impotent. Every time you go out to protest, you’re putting your fate in the hands of the people who you claim discriminate against you. You’re letting them run your life. You’re letting them say what is true and what is not true, and you continue to be in the same position that we were when we were formally oppressed in slavery and segregation," he continued.
Steele also addressed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, saying that institutions across the country changed “to accommodate this idea that blacks are victims.”
“So [with] an event like Michael Brown, the simple actual truth of what happened is irrelevant. It had the look of racism, and therefore, it is something that we seized upon, same with George Floyd and Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray and any number of other instances like that. We seize on them for the power they render up. … It’s enough power to have changed American universities, and now we see it having an impact in corporate America, where the institution itself changes to accommodate this idea that blacks are victims,” Steele said.
“These kinds of incidents where a young black is killed … where you have a white trigger finger shooting and killing a black, it duplicates that history of oppression,” he added. “So our leaders very often use it as proof that we blacks are still victimized and oppressed, and therefore, we are entitled. And so we play this game because we think we’ll get something out of it, that white America [and] the government will respond, and they very often do respond with all kinds of social programs. … The real truth is up against all of that corruption.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/shelby-steele-argues-racial-victimization-pushed-by-democrats-has-stripped-black-people-of-their-power