Fifty Years After Little Rock

THE CONFRONTATION at Little Rock, Arkansas, fifty years ago, was the moment where the United States had to choose between democracy and white supremacy, writes Shelby Steele.

It was an epochal moment. The world has always believed in racial supremacy, my race over your race. For two thousand years Christianity had said it was wrong. For two hundred years the Enlightenment had said it was wrong.

And so it was that in the fall of 1957 “[President] Eisenhower enforced democratic authority over white supremacy.” The United States used its political and military power to mark the end of the age of white supremacy.

But that wasn’t all.

Because of television, America—and the world—got to see the ugly side of white racism.

Every day for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking.

And America was ashamed. So we set to work and got busy.

The country got busy self-consciously redeeming itself. Redemption would be our big, ingenious achievement.

But what we got was not really a proper chastening, a truthful learning from our sins. What we got was today’s busybody liberalism,

a busybody, interventionist liberalism that was more bent on erecting an American redemption than ensuring freedom. The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation.

Fifty years later, we still haven’t moved on.

There is too much invested in white guilt and black innocence, for the busybodies enjoy the power they got from the redemption movement too much to give it up.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: david phillips on 11/03/07 6:39am

i want to know is this the movie i saw about black and white kids at high school and how thier home life effected thier school life.. it looked like an today .new movie or doc, a good one please respond