Steele, who is himself African American, noted that the contemporary civil rights movement under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” was deeply unserious, catering to an old form of victimization that has accomplished nothing to lift up black people.
Here are some of Steele's remarks:
There’s a pathos here. It’s like we’ve done this too many times. We’ve been here too many times, we’ve seen this kind of thing and there’s a big hullabaloo and then it sort of fades away and this is already beginning I think to fade. What was it all about? What was the point? What did these various groups, what did they want?
Striking to me about this particular one is that there was not even a list of demands. Usually there’s always a long, elaborate list of demands. That wasn’t the case here. There’s nothing that you could come away from, this entire episode, the last two weeks or so, that’s meaningful.
Steele denies that our recent social convulsions were really about police reform. He asserted instead that the current generation of young people is a "lost generation." Why they're lost he explains a bit later on in the interview.
In response to Al Sharpton's remarks delivered at George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis, Steele said this:
Al Sharpton is the master of this old form of politics that comes out of the ’60s where we as blacks cry victimization and demand the larger society give us things of some kind or another.
I will take Al Sharpton seriously - I know him, he’s a nice person - I will take his message here seriously when he stands before a congregation like that, of black people in America over a tragic event, and says what black Americans can do to get out of the situation that we’re in.
No one from the president on down anywhere says what role, what’s going wrong with black America?
Why are they so dependent on white America, on the government, that all they can think of is themselves as victims, which of course deflates themselves as human beings, undermines their best energies, their best intentions, and so after 50, 60 years now, past the civil rights bill, we’re worse off in many socioeconomic categories than we were sixty years ago.Steele went on to explain that this African-American dependency emerged out of white Americans desperately seeking to prove themselves as non-racist.
White Americans live under this accusation that they’re racist. They need to prove that they’re not racist. In order to prove that you’re not racist, you need to take over the fate of black people and say, go with us, we’ll engineer you into the future. We’ll engineer you into equality,” Steele said. “Life doesn’t work like that. We have to engineer ourselves. Period. There is no other way.
This is a trenchant observation. White liberals infantilize blacks while at the same time they exploit them. They infantilize them by encouraging the perception that their problems are beyond their ability to solve, due as they are to an inveterate white racism, and they exploit them by promising to help them in exchange for their vote.
The votes are given, but the help never seems to materialize.
In response to the claim that the protestors do indeed have a list of demands, including defunding the police and reparations, Steele puts his finger directly on the biggest impediment to black achievement and the most salient cause of dysfunction in the black community:
I will take those things seriously when I also hear from Sharpton and others the argument that we need within the black community to work on the institution of marriage. Our families have fallen to pieces. Seventy five percent of all black children are born out of wedlock without a father.
I don’t care how many social programs you have. You’re not going to overcome that.
This is why so many African Americans are what Steele called a lost generation. Fatherlessness is for many young blacks, especially males, is a barrier to advancement almost impossible for all but the fortunate few to surmount, and the fact that so few people on the left are willing to talk about it is the most pernicious expression of racism among whites today.
Steele concludes with this:
We as black Americans need to begin to take our fate back into our own hands, and stop crying racism. There's a little racism out here. there always was and always will be. Why is that an argument to stop, to not move forward, to not be responsible for your own fate?
You can send the police to as many sensitivity training sessions as you want, it's not going to read a story to a child at night before he goes to sleep so he's developing his mind...so he can someday compete in the most advanced society in the modern world.
Meanwhile, at least these two of Steele's books - The Content of Our Character and White Guilt - should be on the summer's reading list of everyone concerned about race relations in America.