Speaking Truth to Power: Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele on The Great Society:

STEELE: All of these government programs were bound to fail from the start, because the people they were meant to serve had not taken responsibility for using them. If you have a good family with a mother and a father, as I did—and most of the people in the community where I grew up did—you didn’t need these programs.

By accepting the idea that government is somehow going to take over the responsibility that only we can take, we relinquished authority over ourselves. We became child-like, and our families began to fall to pieces. Welfare—which promised a subsistence living for the rest of your days for doing absolutely nothing—provided a perfect incentive to not get married, yet still have babies. Then the babies will be state wards, and their babies, and so forth.

The incentive is just to stay in that rut. And so the goodwill of America finally did do to us what slavery and segregation failed to do. It destroyed our family, destroyed our character, and now black America is in a struggle. We struggle to stand up like men and women and take charge of our lives, and become competitive with other people in the modern world. If we don’t do this, we’ll always be behind. But if we do take charge of our own lives, we’ll be men among men.