The civil rights movement was always about acknowledging shameful behavior, as difficult as that was to do, and whites finally made that acknowledgment. They took the challenge of Rosa Parks to redress the injustice and the shame of racism. The turnaround was neither smooth nor perfect, but it was genuine. Now it remains for the blacks, argues Shelby Steele, to acknowledge the shame of irresponsibility.
"In fact, true equality -- an actual parity of wealth and ability between the races -- is now largely a black responsibility," he writes in the Wall Street Journal. "This may not be fair, but historical fairness -- of the sort that resolves history's injustices -- is an idealism that now plagues black America by making black responsibility seem an injustice."
He follows the admonition of Bill Cosby, who challenged blacks to do a better job of raising their kids, to see to getting them properly educated. Only blacks can help other blacks overcome a sense of inferiority, he and Shelby Steele argue, and black responsibility means discipline with dignity. The lesson Rosa Parks taught in Montgomery is that shame redeems.
Racism has receded in America because whites accepted shame, took responsibility for redressing it, and did it. "Today," says Shelby Steele, "it has to be conceded that whites have made more progress against their shame of racism than we blacks have against our shame of inferiority."
Five years before Rosa Parks sat her ground, the Rev. Vernon Johns, pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that Martin Luther King Jr. would later lead, was humiliated by a bus driver when he accidentally dropped his dime fare to the floor. The driver ordered the black man to pick it up. When he refused he was ordered off the bus. He turned to the other black passengers and asked them to leave with him. No one moved. Vernon Johns recalled later: "Even God can't free people who act like that." There's a lesson here.
The black shame of inferiority, the result of oppression, not genetics, writes Shelby Steele, "cannot be overcome with anything less than a heroic assumption of responsibility on the part of black Americans." Rosa Parks lives.