On May 1, Shelby Steele delivered the ninth of the 2005-2006 Bradley Lectures. Click here for more information about this speech.

I think I spoke here once before but I was a much younger man then. I want to take some of the ideas that I developed in this new book White Guilt and apply them internationally. Look at our foreign policy. We are at this point obviously a nation at war, and so it has been interesting to me to try to expand these ideas just to say something I hope is meaningful about the wars.

To begin with, one thing that has made me curious is that it seems that we have come since World War II to fight our wars in a rather odd way. That is, to say, though we have enormous power--as in military, political, cultural power--we have with the basis of what some people call our "exceptionalism in the world," or simply a kind of supremacy in the world, and yet somehow it is absolutely unthinkable that we would use that power, use anything approaching the full measure of that power in the wars we fight.

It seems to me that certainly since Vietnam, some people would argue even Korea, but I'm certainly more confident in stating this that since the Vietnam era we have the practiced the kind of minimalism in war, and we have sort of looked at our wars almost in a managerial way. "Well, we are going to devote this many resources, and we are going to do this and we are not going to do that and we are going to have this many troops in the ground and we are going to bomb," and so forth, and yet the brutal fact is we lost the war in Vietnam for all of our power.

We are now slogging, I think, in my own opinion, rather admirably but nevertheless we are slogging through what is turning out to be a long war against a tenacious insurgency in Iraq. Why can we not use the power that we have to definitively win the war, end the insurgency, and move on with whatever our mission might be? Why do we practice again a kind of minimalism that almost makes room for the enemy, almost makes room for an insurgency as though we sort of insist on it? Well, that is a question I want to try to--"answer" is too strong a word, but look at and try to get some understanding on today.

I think that it all goes back to what to me is one of the most remarkable events of the late twentieth century. Certainly the post-war era, I think an event far more important than the collapse of communism, which was, of course, a tremendously significant event that changed the nature of the world in so many ways. I think the larger event that happened in the last half of the twentieth century was the collapse of white supremacy, not just in America, but around the entire world. If you think about it, the world for many centuries was organized entirely by this idea of white supremacy and, of course, what it was, was an idea of authority.

The presumption was that whites have the authority, the right, to make the world their dominion, to conquer hither and yon, to subjugate people here, to exploit them in other ways, to take their resources. It was white supremacy that imposed the nation-state system on the world, and it was again an extremely important organizing idea. As late as the 1950s, if a white man met an African on a backwoods path somewhere, the African was expected to carry his bag. The idea of white having this kind of supremacy and black being a sort of automatic inferiority was so entrenched in the international culture that the two men in that situation could very easily have fallen to those roles that were prescribed, and if they did not fall to those rules, if the black said, "Well, I’m not going to carry your bags," revolution, then we would have war.

After World War II, we began to have revolutions across the entire globe, across all the major continents. Some of these revolutions were peaceful. The Indian revolution was a pacifist revolution, as was the American civil rights movement. The American civil rights movement I count as a part of this much larger worldwide phenomenon of revolutions against white supremacy. Some of them were bloody. Algeria was a particularly bloody one. Kenya, the Mau Mau uprising, was particularly bloody. All around the world, sometimes they were organized by ideology. Some of these movements were communist, some of them were nationalist, but you had the sense, so I think we know, given the time we had to reflect on it, that these movements were not so much driven by ideology but rather ideology was used by native peoples around the world to organize themselves and their society into a revolutionary force that would then enable them to overthrow and remove the Europeans from their hegemony over the society.

I think in many ways Vietnam was a struggle. Certainly Vietnam goes all the way back to the years the French and Dien Bien Phu; these people fought, were extremely tenacious fighters, and they finally did achieve a victory over America, which I think makes the point that when people are really fighting for what they think of as freedom, even though that at that moment it may come under a communist rubric. But when they are fighting for their own sovereignty, the right to determine their own fate, they are almost impossible to defeat. And they fought. These little weak countries defeated France and Britain and the United States over and over again.

The civil rights movement in the United States also was victorious. And finally, the federal government of the United States of America admitted that it had practiced segregation, passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which constituted an acknowledgment on the part of the American government and larger society that racism was an immorality. That white supremacy was no longer a legitimate organizing idea in human affairs. Wow, what a major, major event. What a huge world-transforming event to occur after white supremacy had given the world a tight coherence for so long, and then suddenly it is gone.

Well, this is a fascinating moment for me in history. Why, what, and how the revolutionaries around the world responded to their new freedom and so forth. I have looked a lot at this in terms of black America, but that is another lecture. Many of the things that happened, though, and I'll use America here as I think a good example, is that there was this, what I call, great acknowledgment on the part of American government and the largest society as well. We have President Johnson giving the famous Howard University speech in which he talks about taking a man from chains, and it is not right to take somebody from chains and bring him to the starting line, the implications being you have to do more. You have to develop them in some way, and it was this great sort of statement that in a sense told white Americans that they owed black Americans something. They had to do something for them.

Again, what was remarkable about that and a sort of way of thinking that is not the best idea in the world, but what was remarkable about that is that you had the president of the United States making an argument against white supremacy, which really had not happened before. No earlier president really took on that and said our society now has to do something to make up for the centuries of oppression that we have delivered on these people. So, I think this moment in history when there was this great acknowledgment was America's finest moment. It was a moment when America for the very first time in its entire history attempted to live up to its own principles, its own democratic principles, and say we are equal under the law, we judge people by their character, the content of their character and so forth. And we are going to fulfill America's great promise and so America should be commended.

I think we set the pattern for what happened in other countries around the world. People began to see. The French moved out of Algeria; Britain pulled back from its colonies around the world. There began to be everywhere in the West this recognition, this acknowledgment that white supremacy was not going to work.

The first, I think, unintended consequence of this is what my book is all about, White Guilt. What is white guilt? White guilt is, I think, when you have acknowledged a wrong as huge, a historical wrong that has had such a profoundly negative effect on people. As honorable as that acknowledgment is, you pay the price for it by losing moral authority. And the moral authority that you lose transfers to the former victim of the sin that you committed in the past, and so forth. That moral authority when it passes, in this case in America, it passes into the hands of the blacks; they take it on and it becomes their primary source of power in the society. Black power is in a sense the same thing exactly as white guilt: the lack of moral authority that existed in larger white society transfers to raw power in black America. And we have a leadership now that is rather devoted to wielding that power, to reminding whites that they do not have moral authority, that they cannot speak, that they cannot comment on this, they cannot comment on that, and that they owe us this, and they owe us that, and so forth and so on.

The biggest mistake, I think, black Americans made at this point in history was to try to rely on this power that came to us out of our victimization as a way to advance, as a way to get ahead in society and so we then... It was right after that. In 1967 you begin to hear black power for the first time, and suddenly there is this new militancy, and then there is the Black Panthers, and there is the culture, this whole sort of violent angry black.

What is always interesting to me is, if oppression made people angry, why were we not that angry in slavery? Why were we not that angry in segregation during those times? When I was growing up, there was nobody talking about black power. No one would dare do it. Well, you become angry, I think, at the moment you sense opportunity in the larger society. You sense that the larger society has a vacuum of moral authority, can no longer call the tune. Then all of a sudden riots break out and you watch huge violent riots, riots that begin to tear apart many of America's great cities, many of which have not recovered to this very day.

Well, my little pet theory is that black anger is really a form of opportunism. It is the perception that now anger will get me somewhere. Now they will have to listen, they will have to respond. And it is a form of opportunism. If you do not feel the anger then you manufacture the anger, because then that becomes the group's identity. That becomes the way the group says we are going to move ahead, and if you are not angry, you are an Uncle Tom. You are not helping us get the fruits, win the fruits of white guilt.

Again, I think our great mistake was to begin to rely on white guilt rather than on ourselves. White guilt operates by stigma; that is why it is effective. It is whites, after their great acknowledgment, who became stigmatized as racist. Now stigma is interesting. Blacks were always stigmatized as inferiors and, of course stigma, are absolutely irrational. They do not care who the person is. I always used the example of blacks being stigmatized as inferior, and so we had the bizarre absurd situation of somebody like Duke Ellington eating his dinner in the hotel kitchen where he performs, unable to eat in the dining room because he would offend the diners who were paying money to go hear him, one of America’s greatest composers.

That is the way stigma works. It does not care who you are, it does not care if you fit the stereotypes that the stigma revolves around the charges that it charges you with inferiority in the one hand. It does not care about that. It sticks all people in that group with that sort of reputation, and so white guilt is enforced by this so that every white is in the position then of certainly interracial situations and interracial encounters of having to prove the negative, of having to do something, "I'm not really a racist." The sort of classic example is the way some of my best friends are.

Well, why do you need to tell me that some of your best friends are black? What would be the purpose of you telling me that? Why would I really care? Well, you are telling me that as a way to say, "I'm not a racist." I know I'm stigmatized. I know just because I'm white for no other reason. I know you are going to think that, you are going to say that, but I want you to know it is not true but some of my best friends are.

This is the way stigma works: it forces itself on you in that way and so around 1965, 1966, 1967, and since then, white Americans may have marched in Mississippi. It does not matter. They are going to be stigmatized as racist, and blacks are the ones with the moral authority over race and poverty and social issues and they are going to call the tune, and whites are going to find a way to again to prove that they are not racist. So stigmas are cruel things and when you talk about race relations and the impact it has, you have to understand that that is how it is enforced, that's how it is made into a real force.

My point again is that white guilt then, because it is enforced by stigma, became a huge force and power culturally, economically, and politically in American life that we have yet really to acknowledge and fully examine. When you are stigmatized, and again this is not just white individuals, this is in the institutions of the society are also stigmatized as racist institutions, and they better find ways to prove the negative, prove that they are not racist institutions. And if they do not do that, then their legitimacy as an institution in a free democracy is going to be lessened and so institutions are greatly obsessed with proving the negative, that they are not a racist institution, that they are open to everybody, and again they have to do this because again, their legitimacy is at stake.

This works; the pressure of white guilt presses people in one particular direction, and I will use the word "dissociation." What it forces whites to do is find a way to dissociate from that stigma, to say, "I'm not a racist." And so my point is that because white guilt is such a huge force in society, dissociation is a huge component where the individual might say, "I have a black friend." Well, that is the way the individual is dissociating from the stigma being a racist. The institution that is stigmatized as a racist in all American institutions are dissociated by saying, "We practice diversity here. We are obsessed with diversity. We have diversity. We wallpaper the walls with diversity. Because we are dissociating from the stigma that we are a racist exclusive institution like what whites used to be in the era of white supremacy. Oh, that is so over here in this institution."

Well, institutions do that again because their legitimacy is at stake. You have to in the university world. You look at the Ivy League. The Ivy League has to have about eight percent black in every single freshman class no matter what. If they did not have affirmative action that number will probably be one or two percent, so you got six or seven percent that are there by virtue of affirmative action. The university does not care whether or not they are stigmatized. It does not care what impact this policy has on the black students. Harvard University, Yale University, are saying, "Damn it, we had to have a way to dissociate, otherwise we lose our status as a democratic institution, we lose our legitimacy. So those black students are serving us more than they are serving themselves. We need them and we are going to have them. We do not care what the implication is."

It is our way of dissociating. The great society was the first big dissociation President Johnson came up with and said he was going to end poverty in our time. He is going to spend billions and billions of dollars. He invented all sorts of new social programs, almost all of which we know now to have failed completely, but again whether those programs were successful in eradicating poverty, in bringing blacks up to a level of equality, was absolutely relevant. The importance of the Great Society was that it dissociated America from its racist past. It was basically Johnson saying, "We are a new America. We are not like that old America that we ourselves just acknowledged was racist, and so we are going to have a great society just to prove to ourselves and the world that we are not like that."

And so there was again, in a sense, what Johnson was doing was stigma-fighting. He was fighting off the stigma and he had good reasons. The pressures were enormous. L.A. was up in smoke in riots, Detroit, Newark. There was the suggestion in the air that passive nonviolence was over, and that if America was not able to really show itself to be beyond its past bigotry, that there was going to be hell to pay. There was going to be disruption in American society. Again, as we mentioned earlier, black groups suddenly became...emerged all this militant black groups with a kind of military patina, wearing ammunition belts across their chest and machine guns and so forth, at least symbolically saying, "We will either get everything we want or we will bring the society down." So the Great Society, though it was one of the most enormous failures in terms of what its announced goals, was a tremendous success in the sense that it dissociated America from its past, its racist past.

Welfare Reform in the 1970s is a very similar thing. All of a sudden because blacks are demanding to get welfare, it becomes the subsidy that you give people, it brings them a little bit over a subsistence level of living for the rest of their life, and they do not have do anything at all for it. They do not have to raise their children. They do not have to educate their children. They do not have to develop any skills themselves. They do not have to do anything at all.

What society would come up with a policy like that other than a society that is desperately trying to dissociate itself from its sinful and shameful past? Common sense tells you, you do not give people money for nothing. That is not how you develop people, and those policies, I believe again, that contribute to the rise of the black underclass and all of the problems associated with the decline of black family and so forth.

But again, there were policies that stayed in place until the late 1990s, when many people still fought for them but their purpose again was dissociation. They made us seem like a society that was not racist anymore, that had gotten over it, and so they stayed in place long enough to do an enormous amount of damage. The Michigan Affirmative Action Case that came before the court a few years ago is just one of the most stunning examples of dissociation I have ever seen. Yet over 100 briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, I think more than any case in the entire history of the Supreme Court, every one of those briefs was from an American institution, including even the military, which said, "We want racial preferences," and then they began all sorts of administrative reasons why they concoct the word of diversity which is the sort of golden dissociational word.

But what those institutions were saying, notice that there was no march on Washington of black Americans saying, "We demand affirmative action." Blacks were not demanding and were not doing anything. Even the civil rights organizations were relatively quiet, but a hundred different American institutions, public agencies, universities, the military, corporations, Microsoft, submitted briefs in favor of affirmative action because in the sense they are saying, "Damn it, we need it. We need it for protection. We need it to dissociate so that we can vet this institution as not being a racist and we can avoid discrimination suits that might come if we did not have this imprimatur to say we are not racist."

So affirmative action is the price of our doing business, whether it worked for you or not or for the people and what effect it has on black Americans, the fact that you are giving it only to the very best and the brightest Black Americans, precisely the ones who ought to be in full-out competition with the best and brightest whites and Asians and others, that you are actually preventing the most talented blacks in the country from competing openly with their peers in other groups. You are stopping them from doing that, saying, "Just because you are black you cannot do that. You cannot compete because you need the imprimatur. You need the dissociation that separates your institution from the shameful American past." When your enemy begins to feel guilty toward you, he becomes your enemy again in just another way, and in the sense that that is what white guilt has been all about and why it has had such a negative effect, I think most of all, on black Americans.

Let us move down to foreign affairs, how does all this sort of play out to foreign affairs, again this collapse of white supremacy, the stigmatization of white guilt, and so forth. For one thing, it makes the American exceptional, the fact that America is the most powerful, has the biggest military, the biggest economy, it has all sorts of cultural influence around the world, and certainly political power as well.

We clearly have a kind of supremacy. Because of the white Western past, that supremacy now looks like white supremacy. In other words, our supremacy is stigmatized with our past, and so Americans do not even want to say they have supremacy because if they do, they would sort of intuit that they will be seen as sort of rejoining that old white supremacist world. And so again, the simple supremacy that we have attained, and I think it came to us because of our way of life, freedoms, the many people who come here to make contributions and so forth, but it is a supremacy that is easily stigmatized elsewhere in the world.

We can be called imperialist and racist and so forth and so on. And why is this important? It is profoundly important, I think, because it affects our legitimacy. It affects the legitimacy of the things we do in the world. We have to, in other words, as a nation, we have to dissociate from that racist stigma from that past. My feeling is that much of our foreign policy in America has become an obsession with dissociation, with finding ways to dissociate from the white Western past so that when we do things in the world like going to war, those efforts can be seen as legitimate.

When we go to war as in Iraq, and we are therefore I think not just in one war, we are in two wars. One war is a war in which we are fighting to achieve a military victory. The other war is where we are fighting to achieve a good dissociation from the past, from the white Western past. We are in other words fighting for our legitimacy in Iraq as hard, maybe even harder than we are fighting for military victory because our power is so stigmatized with the past.

This, I believe, is why we suddenly in the ’90s became so obsessed with coalitions, to walk across the street outside of our own borders as though we have got to get a coalition of the entire world to say it is okay. Well, what are those coalitions really about? They are certainly not contributing much to the military effort. A little just for symbolic reasons, but we are carrying by far the largest, but what are they about? Well, the coalition dissociates us. The coalition says, "Okay, they are not the white racist supremacists of old. They have got an actual real reason to do this, and it is a legitimate reason."

And so the larger the coalition, the more legitimacy we have so we are frantic. We see now our secretary of state in Europe trying to get the coalition together for Iran. The problem is that is now ruling out there and soon that looks to come to some kind of a hit. Well, she is militant-planning. I'm sure they are but you do not see our government announcing, "Well, we are now making military plans to solve the Iran problem." What you see is our government saying, "We are going to go around the world and get a coalition together, of people who support whatever military action in Iran."

So again, we have these dissociations. The United Nations at this point seems to have almost no other purpose than to provide the United States with dissociation, with the legitimacy it needs for its various actions. We go to the security council, we get this resolution, and we get that resolution. Why do we do that? Because again, we want the world to say, "You are not the same old imperialist power that just goes around the world and does what you want and oppresses people and steps on people and so forth. You are a new power and again dissociated from all of that."

To answer the question I sort of began with, why do we not fight our wars to really win them? Why do we fight wars in modern times with the kind of minimalism, a sort of managerial minimalism where we leave just a little room for the enemy to stay alive and keep fighting us rather than using all of our power to end it? Again, I think this minimalism is also a form of dissociation. It dissociates us from the old imperialist armies of the past.

So we say we are not going to have a big imprint in the country we have gone to war with. We are not going to have many boots on the ground. We are not going to do all the things it takes to win the war because what we are really trying to do is win legitimacy for the war more than the war. And so if we actually lost the war and it dissociated us, dispelled the stigma of us being an imperialistic power, it would be down to our advantage. We would have legitimacy that in Europe they would say losing the war was the price you had to pay to join the human community and to dissociate yourself from that imperialist ugliness that you were so enthralled to, that cowboyism. You have not proved to us by losing the war that you are not cowboys.

And so again I think that has a lot to do with the sort of limping along and now we are drawing down the troops and we are going to put an Iraqi face on it and we are going to--I’m not a minimalist. We also have to do something else in the war aside from practice a kind of minimalism and fighting the war.

We also have to define the war not as a war in which we defeat an enemy, but we have to define the war as social work. It is a kind of social work and we say democracy, we are going to bring democracy there and we are going to create a new relationship between men and women, thank you so much. We cast democracy as a policy, really, of social transformation as we talk about it in Iraq and we say it is going to do so much good. It is going to change relations between men and women. It is going to change the educational institutions there and open them up. It is going to create the idea of individual autonomy, and we are going to rebuild the infrastructure, and we are going to do this and so that we are not defeating an enemy anymore, we are now practicing social work. We are now going to completely reconceive this country.

Now, my point is not that that will not happen. I happen to think that if we do ever succeed in bringing democracy to Iraq it might in fact have at least some of those benefits, and I think President Bush is quite sincere in his desire to see democracy in the Middle East. My point is only the America today cannot simply go to war to fight an enemy and win. You cannot do that. That is not possible. We have to shroud it in, again, all of this dissociation that proves that we have not somehow as a wealthy white, still largely white power, retreated into our old habits of white supremacy and where we are going to go to a brown nation and occupy it, and rip it of its resources and so forth. We just have to keep working and finding ways to dissociate from all those things. We are not going to do any of those things, and so again my point is that our foreign policy, I think, has become rather obsessed with all of this dissociation, much more so than it has with the business of fighting and winning wars.

This is a tragedy, I think, that our soldiers sort of pay the price of because they are--then always sort of--in these long, passionless, half-hearted wars that we just almost refuse to win. So we are not going to win this war. We are going to be mired, that is what we are going to be. Again, our soldiers, I think the Iraqi people themselves in this particular case pay a terrible price for the fact that we seem to refuse to win.

Another thing that I think is important, another outgrowth of this, is that when we do go to a war we are very muddled. We become very muddled and very confused about victory. Victory, out of the mouth of an American, again is stigmatized. What do you mean victory over a poor, weak, brown enemy? And so again victory is a word that we draw back from. It seems to be racist; it seems to be imperialistic. It seems to be oppressive and so forth and so we are at war and yet we are drawing down our troops. There is no idea that we will actually achieve something like a military victory.

Certainly we did not do that in Vietnam. I think this is a problem because in war, victory and defeat are extremely important because they are not just military victories. Victory is also a victory for a good idea, a better idea, and it is the defeat of a bad idea, of a weak idea, and certainly in the Middle East an idea that truly needs to be defeated, is the idea of Islamic extremism. This is a bad, bad idea, a terrible danger to the world. It is not an idea that should be negotiated with. It is an idea that should be so profoundly and utterly defeated that all the people who might have fallen under its thrall say, "Not for me." That is not the way to go, and then turn around and say, "Maybe we will consider joining the modern world." But if you go to war and you do not defeat the idea you are against, what is the point? If you do not defeat it, you enervate it. You bring it back to life. You give a new life. You make it something glamorous, because here it is it is staving off the great American power.

Well, again, our dissociational obsession, I think, stops us from seeing the extraordinary importance of victory and defeat in war. Certainly this was abundantly clear in World War II; Japan and Germany were utterly, absolutely defeated and so was the bad idea that had motivated them. They then turned around and said, "Okay, we are going to come in a new direction," and obviously they did do that. But when you do not defeat something, again the Western world is in this sort of tender period where it is spending, I do not know what percentage, but certainly a little bit over 50 percent of its energies in dissociating and just proving that its powers in proving that it is longer racist. It is no longer imperialist.

A war like this, if we feel it is worthy, we feel we should go. I'm not arguing here for or against the war but if you say you are to go, you should go and you should try to make the shortest space of time between your entry and victory as possible. And no doubt you then begin to save lives, but we are now a society today, that, because I think of white guilt, are unable to do that and we are just muddling along.

This all causes one other thing. White guilt causes another phenomenon that, I think, we see internationally as well as domestically and that is anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism sort of runs by the same mechanism as white guilt, when Europe, certainly even on our American left, spend a good bit of their time wielding the stigma that comes from white guilt saying what our American left says, what the Europeans say is, you know, you are really an evil racist country, an imperialistic country. You are motivated by the same old things you used to be, Haliburton, and so forth. And you cast out, you demonize the country, and so forth and so then you even make them more obsessed with stigma. And in Europe, we did exactly the same thing.

So, anti-Americanism, it works by that mechanism where you enforce the stigma, then the country has dissociated, but when you enforce the stigma as the American left does and the international left does, you automatically take the moral high ground. America is an evil country, is a racist country, is an imperialistic country. I, therefore, am none of those things. I’m completely dissociated. I’m virtue itself and so power ought to come to me, not to those conservatives, those imperialists, and so forth. Conservatives--the stigma has been used against them very, very effectively.

The point is that anti-Americanism, because it works by this formula of white guilt, that when you stigmatize and you then take the high ground, you then turn that into power. Our universities today are completely built, propped up by the moral virtue that comes from them from their dissociation and from their stigmatizing the rest of society. They sit there in a sort of privileged enclave and look at the rest of America as though they were pigs, they are beer-swilling idiots who want to go to war and so forth, who are secretly racist, and they are above all of that. They therefore have the right to run the word and to run those institutions and any other that they can sort of get their hands and get themselves involved in.

So again, anti-Americanism becomes a perfect sort of formula for power. I think it is the primary power of the American Left and of the international Left and is practiced by people as diverse as Jacques Chirac in France and Al Sharpton in America. They both do the same thing. They both keep using that stigma and keep you off-balance, having to prove that you are not guilty of all these things. So anti-Americanism has become, I think, really appealing around the world because of the power in it. It is the way you sort of. . .that people who have no military, economic, or cultural power can nevertheless have a moral power that is very effective in any given society. And so you see politicians in Europe use it to run for office and you see people in our own society use it to take power. They do not use it to in any innocent way. It is always a power move.

I think the American Right in America has been a victim of this and has been stigmatized and with the shames of the past with white supremacy, has been sort of invigorated since the ’80s at least, maybe before that, but invigorated by fighting off the absolutely stupid, corrupt, dissociational policies of the left. The Right in America brought about welfare reform. We fought against that kind of corrupt welfare, against affirmative action. Universities again are consumed with oppression studies. You do not just take literature any more, you study race, class, and gender in literature. The Right has seen through that diversity.

Internationally, the right has not been happy with this obsession of our foreign policy around coalitions and UN imprimatur and all that kind of dissociation and so forth. And so theRight in America, I think, has had a faith that America is not a bad country, that we are not the same old ugly racist country that we once were, and the Right says in a sense we have to act that way. Our character is our moral authority and not whether we just dissociate from some stigma or from the past and that is why I joined the Right, and to its credit, I think, fought certainly a good fight against this obsession with dissociation.

One last point--and that is this is something that I think is much overlooked because, again, we are in a society that is so wracked by white guilt that nobody can say it; nobody can say it out loud--is it forbidden to say the following: since the mid-1960s, white Americans have achieved one of the greatest moral transformations in all of human history. There are no serious whites today who advocate white supremacy. It does not mean that the world is cleansed of every little niggling racist, but it means that I now live in a society that is shamed and disgraced by the idea of white supremacy.

Now, my only point is that I think we are at a time in history where this truth, this fact, this extraordinary transformation, needs to be integrated into our public life. It needs to be, even on a policy level. We have got to start making policy in our institutions, not just in our foreign affairs and domestically and outside the borders of the United States. We have got to start making policy that is based on a moral confidence in ourselves as a decent people rather than just constantly making policy, where we try endlessly to beat back a stigma and therefore we keep empowering midgets. We keep empowering people who have no power and we cannot even go to work against a third-world, weak country and do have the mercy to win it quickly.

And so I think this is what I see as the hope of the future, that we can begin to live off of who we really are, and live out of who we really are, rather than constantly trying to prove a negative.

Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.