Up From Obscurity

By SYLVESTER MONROE SAN JOSE

When Shelby Steele heard about the racially motivated murder of 16-year-old Yusuf Hawkins in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn last August, his first reaction was fear -- the same fear he used to feel as a young black boy growing up in Chicago in the 1950s. There was, he recalled, "a sense that an ugly element of our history had somehow crawled forward into the present and made our belief in racial progress feel like an illusion." But Hawkins' death also evoked in Steele an overwhelming sense of what he calls "racial fatigue," that inescapable burden of color that all black Americans still bear.

During the past two years, Steele has argued in a provocative series of essays that a generation after the Watts riot and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is time for blacks to drop the crutch of racial victimization and rely on their own efforts to gain access to the American mainstream. The opportunities are there, he says. Blacks have only to stop hiding behind racism and take advantage of them. Last May he focused a PBS television special about Bensonhurst on that recurring theme. And next month a collection of his essays will be published in his first book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (St. Martin's Press), raising him to center stage in America's tortuous debate over race relations.

Why is this reclusive 44-year-old San Jose State University history professor receiving so much attention? His boosters say it is because Steele's deft prose has invigorated a stale debate. "There is a freshness to his writing," says producer Thomas Lennon, who persuaded Steele to do the PBS special Seven Days in Bensonhurst after reading one of his essays in Harper's. "By making himself his own laboratory, he cuts at familiar issues in a very unfamiliar way." Says author Stanley Crouch, like Steele a critic of affirmative action: "One of the most important things he is doing is questioning Pavlovian racial responses. What's important is not that other people agree with what he says. It's that serious discussion is brought to the discourse dominated by slogans and cliches."

Nonsense, say Steele's critics. They consider him only the latest of a small but widely publicized band of black intellectuals who have been lifted from relative obscurity by a white establishment bent on promoting any African American who publicly attacks mainstream black thinking on affirmative action and other civil rights causes. Like other black conservatives, including Crouch, Stanford economist Thomas Sowell and Harvard political scientist Glenn Loury, Steele takes a heavy verbal beating from black thinkers who argue that the mavericks are undeserving of the attention they receive. Says Martin Kilson, Harvard's first black tenured professor: "Steele's stuff is simpleminded, one-dimensional psychological reductionism. It's slick sophistry." Declares Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the N.A.A.C.P.: "These people have nothing to offer except a conservative viewpoint in a black skin."

Such criticism makes Steele bristle. He describes himself not as a neoconservative but as a "classical liberal focusing on freedom and the power of the individual." He admires Crouch, Loury and Sowell, he says, because they are not willing to accept racism as the total explanation of black difficulty in society. "A black writer or thinker who is somewhat at odds with the civil rights establishment or with black nationalism is automatically a black conservative and lumped together and sort of cast out as a heretic," Steele says. "Some of us are conservative. Some of us are not."

Even Steele's admirers concede that his works could be used to undermine support for affirmative action, including the rights bill that the House approved last week despite the threat of a presidential veto. "The origins of his essays are not political," says producer Lennon. "But the net effect of them is extremely political." Steele disagrees. "That criticism implies a view of white people as omnipotent," he says. "It is as though white people are in charge of our fate rather than ourselves. White people will find whatever excuse they need to avoid dealing with us. They don't need a few black conservatives around the country." He also vehemently denies the accusation that his writing lets whites "off the hook" while blaming black victims for their plight. "I don't think I blame victims," he says. "I challenge blacks. To me the goal of society is absolute social equality. That's what the civil rights movement was after, and we took a left turn into racial preferences that has allowed everybody to get off the hook."

The bottom line, says Steele in his forthcoming book, is that "black Americans are today more oppressed by doubt than by racism and that the second phase of our struggle for freedom must be a confrontation with that doubt." But that view has obvious shortcomings -- most notably that, as Yusuf Hawkins' fate demonstrates, racism remains a virulent and all too widespread phenomenon. Steele's personal experiences suggest that the opportunities he claims blacks are neglecting are far less available than he contends. After obtaining his doctorate in history from the University of Utah in 1974, Steele had to send out 60 applications before finally being hired by San Jose State. Sixteen years later there are still only two black tenured professors in the school's 110-member history department.