I found an “old” essay written by Shelby Steele, author of recently released White Guilt. The main topic is individuality. I thought you might enjoy it. An excerpt:
Not long ago C-SPAN carried a Harvard debate on affirmative action between conservative reformer Ward Connerly and liberal law professor Christopher Edley. During the Q and A a black undergraduate rose from a snickering clump of black students to challenge Mr. Connerly, who had argued that the time for racial preferences was past. Once standing, this young man smiled unctuously, as if victory were so assured that he must already offer consolation. But his own pose seemed to distract him, and soon he was sinking into incoherence. There was impatience in the room, but it was suppressed. Black students play a role in campus debates like this and they are indulged.
…Here is a brief litany of obvious truths that have been resisted in the public discourse of black America over the last thirty years: a group is no stronger than its individuals; when individuals transform themselves they transform the group; the freer the individual, the stronger the group; social responsibility begins in individual responsibility. Add to this an indisputable fact that has also been unmentionable: that American greatness has a lot to do with a culturally ingrained individualism, with the respect and freedom historically granted individuals to pursue their happiness–this despite many egregious lapses and an outright commitment to the oppression of black individuals for centuries. And there is one last obvious but unassimilated fact: ethnic groups that have asked a lot from their individuals have done exceptionally well in America even while enduring discrimination.
Now consider what this Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in the year 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly points to far less racism and far more freedom and opportunity for blacks, the young man must find a way, against all the mounting facts, to argue that black Americans simply cannot compete without preferences. If his own forebears seized freedom in a long and arduous struggle for civil rights, he must argue that his own generation is unable to compete on paper-and-pencil standardized tests.
Emphases added.
Update: A libertarian on individual rights and the Duke rape case:
The Duke case presents, in a microcosm, a clear picture of life in a future United States in which the Politically Correct world of the college campus becomes the legal standard for everyone. That is a world in which all events are viewed through an extremely abstract prism in which there are only “group” or “collective” rights, and where all individual rights are destroyed. Ultimately, it is the world of the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin’s “Show Trials” of the 1930s, in which we saw this whole thing in full flower.
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The Duke case is an outrage on many fronts, but I argue here that the real battleground is abstract, but also very real, and that is where individual rights go against the zeitgeist of “collective rights” that are all the rage among our intellectual and political classes.
