The Guilt Trip

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, by Shelby Steele (HarperCollins, 192 pp., $24.95)

SHELBY STEELE casts White Guilt as an internal monologue on a solitary car trip, undertaken as the Monica Lewinsky scandal was erupting. It occurs to Steele that if Dwight D. Eisenhower had been discovered to have engaged in such sexual escapades, he would have been out of a job in short order. On the other hand, it is rumored that Eisenhower used the N-word occasionally in private conversations-and Steele points out that if Clinton had been heard doing the same, he’d have been on the street in a second. In the late 1960s, he writes, “race replaced sex as the primary focus of America’s moral seriousness.”

JM

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John McWhorter

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White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, by Shelby Steele (HarperCollins, 192 pp., $24.95)

SHELBY STEELE casts White Guilt as an internal monologue on a solitary car trip, undertaken as the Monica Lewinsky scandal was erupting. It occurs to Steele that if Dwight D. Eisenhower had been discovered to have engaged in such sexual escapades, he would have been out of a job in short order. On the other hand, it is rumored that Eisenhower used the N-word occasionally in private conversations-and Steele points out that if Clinton had been heard doing the same, he’d have been on the street in a second. In the late 1960s, he writes, “race replaced sex as the primary focus of America’s moral seriousness.”