 At Purdue, we are all, and with life-or-death matters of racial justice, we know we have work to do. We know the work is complicated, heavy, uncomfortable, let's do it anyway. Black lives and those who receive less than the justice and equity that each human deserves are dependent on it. And now is the time to educate ourselves and examine our own beliefs and behaviors. It's time to hear each other and be heard. It's time to pursue racial justice together. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome and thank you for joining us for this concluding event in the Pursuing Racial Justice Together Learning Series. My name is John Gates and I serve as Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion here at Purdue. In August, we began planning for a learning series that would focus on one central goal – to have a conversation as a campus community about the themes of race and racial justice. Moreover, we set out to have a conversation that would respect the many angles of approach that are possible by inviting guest speakers from different academic disciplines, professional roles and political perspectives. Among those who joined us this year are historian Abram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Anti-Racist, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva, author of Racism Without Racists, and experimental psychologist Majoreen Bonaji, author of Blind Spot, as well as journalists and political commentators such as Michel Norse, Soledad O'Brien, Yamichi Alcindor, Charles Blow, Anna Navarro, Michael Steele, and Juan Williams, as well as cultural producers such as Rebecca Nagel and Brian Terrell-Clark. Taken together, the series has presented viewers with range and scope, and that will continue with our closing speaker this evening, who I have the honor of introducing to you now. Dr. Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism and affirmative action. Dr. Steele has written widely on race in American society and the consequences of contemporary social programs on race relations. He has received the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race in America, was awarded the National Humanities Medal, and his work on the documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst was recognized with an Emmy Award along with other accolades. Dr. Steele received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book The Content of Our Character, A New Vision of Race in America. Altogether, he has written more than a handful of books, written extensively for major publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. Dr. Steele holds a PhD in English from the University of Utah, an MA degree in Sociology from Southern Illinois University, and a BA in Political Science from Coal College. Thank you so much, Dr. Steele, for joining us this evening. We're really delighted to have you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. If it's okay with you, I'd like to begin by just asking you your thoughts on the recently announced verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin. Well, it's hardly been a half an hour since we heard it, so I can't claim to have completely absorbed it. From what I've seen, it seems to be to show off the American judicial system in one of its finer moments. I think the final verdicts make sense from almost any point of view. It must have been a very difficult thing to go through if you were a jury member. My goodness, I think they did a remarkable job and are to be commended and make the point that the American justice system still can't be quite effective. Do you think African Americans should believe more in the justice system now than before? Absolutely. Yes, they should. This I think is a harbinger of where we want to go in the future. All I think African Americans are asking for in the long run is fairness, discipline. And this trial was a sterling example of fairness and discipline, sticking to the facts and marching through to a very, it seems to me, a well considered verdict. Thank you. Let's talk about your concept of white guilt. One strand that runs through much of your writing and filmmaking over the last two decades is an examination of the nature of white guilt, which you define as not a true feeling of guilt, but rather as an enduring loss of moral authority on the part of whites since the civil rights era. Can you unpack this a bit more for us? Sure. When we say to use the term white guilt, it's as though we expect people to be wringing their hands and anguished over something they've done, a mistake they've made or whatever. But what's interesting to me is I don't think many whites feel that kind of guilt. Some may. Certainly not anything we could depend on. But I think white guilt is really an anxiety, a terror, really, of being stigmatized as a racist and having to have that known in the world. And I think that whites often, because they are afraid in that way, I think they very often act guiltily, whether they feel guilt or not. And it's the acting that troubles me that I think really pertains to race. They may support things they don't believe in. They may sort of fish around for the right politics because they want to be able to say they are innocent of racism. So you look at many black organizations, I think, have learned to tap the power of white guilt. And there is real power there. I think it's maybe one of the most underrated social forces in American life because it has enormous power. You look at the last 60 years of governmental policy regarding blacks. You see the hand of white guilt in a lot of it. As we speak, you see corporate America. So you see Coca-Cola saying they have to have 30% of the employees of many companies they work with have to be people of color. And that is about, from my point of view, that is not genuine guilt. That is acting guiltily. So that you forestall any real serious, you're just simply trying to buffer yourself. And in order to buffer yourself and go along with this silly request that 30% of the people have to be minorities, you indulge in all sorts of distortions. And you put into place policies that really end up hurting the people that you claim to be helping. White guilt is that it leads to social policies that redeem whites, that give whites a way to feel better about our racial situation than anything else. It doesn't achieve these policies, don't achieve anything. They invariably fail. But whites get this innocence. They get this sense that their moral standing is returned to them by taking these sorts of positions. So white guilt, I think, is a dangerous thing for black Americans. I think we've sensed it. We've learned how to manipulate it very well. We've learned how to squeeze it out of whites and situations. Many of these situations like the current one, George Floyd, Michael Brown, so forth, we're sort of, you can see both races hovering around these events, trying to figure out who's going to get some moral authority out of it. And whites want, how do we get moral authority here? Blacks, well, what do we do? Is this, do we protest again? How do we handle this sort of dance? So I think white guilt is insidious. It never seems to go away because it's so easy to slip. I'll support affirmative action. I'm white. I'll support it. That shows you that I'm not a racist, that I'm innocent. Well, without ever looking at affirmative action. Maybe affirmative action is the absolute worst thing in the world for black people. But you support it anyway, because it serves you. It makes you look, it seemed to be innocent of racism. And so it's a corruption. It leads, it often leads to a corruption. And it's, I think really, it really gets in the way. Whites don't, you know, when they just sort of, again, they're just so anxious. It is to be born white in America is to be born under an accusation that you are guilty of racism. It's obviously untrue. You're just born. But that accusation is there. And it is a part of being white in America. I have a lot of sympathy for whites. When I think of blacks, though, you know, the false suit about us was that we were inferior with the moment we were born. And there was nothing we could do about that. We were trapped in that stereotype, that stigma. Whites are now trapped in this stereotype that they're guilty of racism until they can prove otherwise. And we're always facing that. And they're looking for the way out of a situation for themselves rather than whether the policy they're looking at does anything for minorities. Most of our social policies, I think, are what I call white guilt policies. They have restored some moral authority to whites. But they've utterly, absolutely failed minorities, particularly blacks. This, of course, begs the question, Ben, a question, about black victimization. Can you expound on your thoughts about black victimization? Well, because black victimization is for black America, even to this very day, our primary source of power. This is one of the great tragedies, it seems to me, of black American life, is that we've come to the point where our power in the society in which we live is based not on our achievement of anything, but on the fact that we have been victimized by the society and make the society look bad. And so, right away in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement won its great victory, 64 Civil Rights Bill and so forth, right away the president comes in and there's a war on poverty. There's a great society. There's affirmative action. There's school busing. There's welfare payments. There's public housing. That's guilty whites. Those policies did restore moral authority to the American government. We moved on as a country. But they constituted in total a new oppression of blacks. And that's what I, again, we keep coming back to that. And we have made the terrible mistake as blacks of believing that our real power in broader America is our history of victimization. It gives us a kind of immunity, a kind of entitlement. And that we can wield that entitlement within American institutions. University is a great example. But then the corporate world is now. Education generally has sort of fallen to that idea and embraced that idea of black people as victims. It's the worst thing in the world that could happen to a people coming out of four centuries of real, of horrific oppression. And then to say, well, I'm gonna make it on the reputation of all that oppression. I'm gonna use it now to squeeze guilt, squeeze the guilt of whites in order to achieve whatever it is I may want. And so it makes for a very cynical, symbiotic connection between black and white Americans that keeps us behind. Because we wanna be victims. Maxine Waters rushes to Minneapolis, Minnesota the night before the verdict hoping and praying that she will find some racism. She'd just be ecstatic to run across some racism, to have somebody racially snub her in some way because racism she sees, she believes is our power. Not the absence of racism, the presence of racism. Actually, many groups, let's see that in Black Lives Matter and so forth, exist entirely on the basis of black victimization. So if you wanna make many blacks mad, tell them they're not a victim. You're not a victim and you'll get a fight. You will have a fight. Well, that's part of this sort of symbiotic relationship that I'm talking about. We have to grow beyond that. I hope today's verdict which convicted this man of obvious horror, horrific murder. I hope that verdict goes a long way in convincing blacks that we can get fairness in American life and the judicial system. And we should be proud to be Americans in that sense. This is a vote for America today. Dr. Steele, how do we resolve this dual conflict of white guilt and black victimization toward a better, more inclusive America? I think, you know, it's, you know, I believe evolution is what really brings real social change. And I think we will evolve. I think already you are beginning to see among whites some backlash. No, you're not a victim and we're trying, we're trying to be acting as though you were a victim. We're not gonna pay off for victimization much longer. And that's, believe me, that has not gone very far, but there are the beginnings of that sort of a sentiment, that kind of a backlash sentiment. And I think that what will happen and there's also on the other side, there are blacks who are becoming openly conservative. And what I think they mean by conservatism is separating themselves, separating blacks from white guilt that makes you a black conservative. No matter what your politics may be, you wanna be independent of that and not influenced by it. And that, well, I subscribe to that sentiment myself. I think obviously it's time we separate in a healthy way in a healthy way from that codependency that we now, that we so easily get seduced into. And whites are so unrelentingly guilty, so unrelentingly ashamed of America's history as much more than we are, that they're just an easy mark. And look at the way Black Lives Matter has taken over much of the American education system. Public education in the United States by a radical black group with a radical black ideology. That's white guilt. No one is black, blacks are dubious about most of the reports like that, have reasonable doubts about it. Whites just add thank you, anything that I can use to dissociate myself from American racism is what I want. And it's hard to pass that up. It's hard to black, I understand. It's hard to pass that up. You can get a job that way, a career that way, a life that way. And all the more believe in the victimization of your own people as their sacred truth. That's what bothers me. You believe in a twisted way. It induces, seduces blacks into believing and doing business on the basis of their own inferiority. Yes, we are inferior, we need your help. You mentioned university. So let me ask you, what role do you think educators, particularly in higher education, play in perpetuating or counteracting such feelings as white guilt or black victimization? How should educators be thinking about presenting these topics, race and racism in college courses and on college campuses? They should stop offering nothing but black liberal intellectuals. They should mix it up, at least 50-50. Let's see some thoughtful people from the other side, there are not many. So that there is a debate. And the left has survived by becoming something of a cancel culture. They cancel what they don't wanna hear. What an opposing point of view. I haven't seen that on the right, but I see that all the time on the left. And so there is, particularly in universities, a preponderance of taking for granted the spurious ideas of liberal black liberal intellectuals have nothing against these people. Sometimes they make very good points, but my goodness, I bet you don't read much Stanley Crouch in the literature classes in universities today. Stanley Crouch is one of the greatest critics we ever, black America has ever produced. We don't read much Ralph Ellison. Ellison wrote the greatest American novel ever written. His criticism, his writing on black American culture is unparalleled, is unparalleled. So many, countless of his devoted students who like myself, who make it, who have learned to the meaning of life from people like that, Richard Wright and others, we don't get them. We just get people who do one thing and one thing only, reinforce our victimization, bemoan it, cry tears over it, weep. They're really embarrassing to indulge, to take pride in your weakness because it was caused by racist white people. And you can use that as sort of muscle. We're cutting ourselves off from our own strength. We don't believe in ourselves enough. That is the biggest problem black America has. We don't believe in ourselves. And so we play these games with white people. We out as we believe in ourselves, take a chance. Throw your hat in the ring. Compete with the best in any profession without regard to race. Let's talk about affirmative action. Over the years, you have offered several critiques of affirmative action programs, which you believe have largely prevented African-Americans from competing with their white peers. Can you share your thoughts on these programs? They are the horror of horrors. They are the very, they are the public policy that grows out of that dark, symbiotic bond that I'm talking about, black and white America. Now white America comes up, we're proud of our affirmative action, probably now they call it diversity and inclusiveness and unconscious bias and I can't remember all of it. But that's what we, well, I lost my train of thought there for me. What was the first part of what you said? Over the years, you've offered several critiques on affirmative action. How do you think affirmative action programs have helped or hurt black America? One of the things we notice from affirmative action, you can go into, let's say a medical school, good medical school that has, and they all have affirmative action programs. They all admit blacks and they all admit blacks who have trouble doing the work. There are many blacks who have no trouble doing the work and do fine, but if you go to those schools, you look at the distribution of grades from top to bottom, you see blacks at the bottom. And how could that, it couldn't be otherwise. Affirmative action takes you out of the level of accomplishment that you're actually at and puts you precisely into the level of accomplishment that you're not yet ready for. It engineers your failure. It makes you believe in your weakness rather than your strength. It corrupts you morally in terms of character and walks away and says, aren't we doing a wonderful thing? We have 8% more blacks here this year. We're ruining that we're breaking. We're making them make a Faustian bargain with the devil. We'll give you this racial preference. It's a horrible thing. It shows you how far we have to come yet in terms of developing our consciousness, our pride, our dignity, our self-esteem. We have to take possession of that. Whites can't give that to us. There's an affirmative action that's not gonna do it. It's just gonna put you in a situation where you experience humiliation and failure, mediocrity. And you're gonna buy it because you're afraid to open your mouth against affirmative action because everybody you know will hate your guts, which is true. And so there we sit. We have got to begin to open ourselves to other points of view. Just this, we just really have to have to have to be, one of the reasons Western civilization is so undisputably great is because everybody had a voice. You have great thinkers in every community, every country, every age, take on a thinker from 200 years ago and learn something from them. We don't, universities today cancel out. People like myself. And think highly of, that's a good thing that they're doing. They're fighting the cause because they don't want white people to hear what I'm saying. They're utterly terrified that whites would feel a license then to believe that the blacks, that they're corrupting the people they're trying to help. But now, Doc, you know several scholars and commenters, commentators have pointed out the outsized benefits of affirmative action programs for white women when compared to advances made by African Americans and other groups. How does this asymmetry connect to your critique? Well, it's just part of a garbage public policy. Affirmative action is garbage. Women are gonna use it. You're throwing at them a chance to step ahead and get ahead in the line when they've gone to the same preparatory schools as their brothers. They haven't endured the level of deprivation that most blacks endure. And so it's an easy thing. They fill the quotient very quickly and that's been the case since the very beginning of affirmative action back in the 70s. So it's just another obvious corruption. But it's, you know, affirmative action is inherently, we're saying we will use a corruption to advance black people because if we don't, they'll never get anywhere. They can't compete, they're not competitive. We don't believe in them and they don't believe in their selves and they beg for affirmative action because they want that, they don't believe that they can do it themselves. And so you end up with a dirty bargain where nobody gets ahead. So you go in to see a doctor and you say, and he's black and you, I don't care who you are, you're gonna scratch your head. What's going on? You're stigmatizing blacks as inferior, as mediocre, as bottom of the class. Well, again, coming out of four centuries of oppression and you turn around and do that to the people you oppressed and think that you're a wonderful person in the process, that you're a friend of blacks and you're against racism when this is what you're doing? So, you know, many, many programs that are on college and university campuses to support black students and scholars are really geared around mitigating deficits, what are perceived to be deficits. Very few are focused on the excellence that our students and scholars bring. Should we maintain the posture of supporting blacks to come up to speed, as it were? Or should we lean in, perhaps, on their demonstrated excellence and expect high standards and excellent results? My answer to that is, suppose we were running a basketball camp and we're trying to get the most talented people to play basketball. And we say, here come a group of blacks. Are we gonna say that, well, they're black and they probably come from a single home and they probably went to poor schools and so we're gonna put them on our basketball team anyway as affirmative action. How is it that we came to dominate that sport? Was it through affirmative action? Was it through somebody taking responsibility for our development? No, we love basketball, we work at it demonically. We make an art form out of it. We transform the game. Now, if you look at all the players, they have all of the social abilities blacks everywhere have. They probably don't have a father around. They maybe have siblings with all different daddies, the whole scenario. When they come out on the basketball court, we do not make any excuses whatsoever. We don't care if your mothers are strung out on drugs. We don't care if you name it. Can you, have you got any moves? Can you really, can you play this sport? If you can do it, the world opens to you. The point I'm making is that excellence beats all. Excellence resolves arguments. It wipes away stereotypes. I can remember when they said, in football, blacks can't be quarterbacks and baseball backs can't be pitchers. Well, what an excellence put that all that to rest. Nobody says that today. I don't see any difference between that and becoming a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman or whatever, get good at something, compete in the world, learn from that competition, get better and better, like everybody does. My thing is that if, I wouldn't tear me up if I saw him raise the standards for blacks higher than those for whites, then we get the kind of respect I think we deserve. You know, I wrote a few years ago, doc, a piece about I Dream America and in there, I said that, you know, I love being black, I wouldn't be any other race if I could, but I would exchange being black for being considered excellent any day of the week. How do we get America? How do we get white people and black people and all people to see blackness as excellence rather than inferiority? Well, boy, I guess I've struggled with that on my life and there are so many areas of life and where blacks are dominant. I mean, during the 20th century alone, we created one of the great literatures of the world. Some of the greatest writers of the 20th century were black Americans. You know, certainly we have transformed music from one end of the globe to the other. I was in had occasion to be in Poland some years ago and walking down the main street of Warsaw, Poland, and I saw a bus go by with Jay-Z's picture on the side of it in Warsaw. That's because there's something that people in Warsaw want that, whatever it is he's doing and selling. Well, boy, there's no question there. Excellence prevails. It prevails everywhere it appears. We have to value excellence as opposed to the idea that you help black people by being militant and looking out for racism around every corner. You wanna criticize me, to me, that school is racist and so forth, let me see your grade point average. How hard are you working in school? What are you, what a achievement, accomplishment? This is the way we live in a society free enough to allow us to do this. People are coming here by the hundreds of thousands as we speak to get an opportunity to have that kind of chance in life. We have it, we have it. Now it's time for us to stop wallowing in the past, using the past to shape down the society's guilt. That's where we're falling to pieces. That will, that is, when I think of the black community that I grew up in and I remember the families in that community, all of us were poor. It was segregated off the South side of Chicago. All those people wanted something better for their families. Everybody had a father in the home. Maybe he drank too much, but he was there. He performed his duties. There was honor in that. I remember they were talking about public housing. My father and his friend next door, they saw that as for losers. The government is never gonna give you anything or worth anything. This was in the 50s. Now we've had 60 years of government help and we're farther behind whites than we were back in my father's day. I'm very proud of him, by the way. I'm proud of all the people in that neighborhood. And there was some people, Melvin Van Peoples came out of that neighborhood. Mary Berry and Actress came out of that. Just nothing, nowhere. Black neighborhood off the South side of Chicago. But they had families. And a little community that wanted them to do well. That's how you do it. So, you know, a lot of people, Doc would argue that the conditioning, the current conditioning of black people in black America stems from slavery. And many people believe that slavery was 400 years ago, but as I look at my own lineage, my grandparents' grandparents were slaves, right? It wasn't that long ago. My grandfather was a slave. Wow, wow. So we're talking about a relatively contemporary time, right? Some people have made it through and excelled. Some people have not. Are we grappling with the remnants of a slave mentality with regard to black people's thinking? Is there still the infrastructure of slavery and Jim Crow, or have we really gone beyond all of that? Let me tell you a quick story by one of my favorite writers, Albert Camus, the French writer writes this story. It's set in Algeria. White man schoolteacher lives in the mountains and teaches Arab children in his school. They bring him a prisoner who was a revolutionary in Algeria, and they're transporting him to the city, to prison. And they have to leave him off at night with this white schoolteacher, who takes him in, leaving out a lot. Next morning, he has to walk him to prison. And he says to himself, he's a native, he's an Arab. I'm not, we shouldn't, I don't even know if we have a right to be here as white Frenchmen, but I'm certainly not gonna walk him anywhere. I'm gonna set him free. So he gives the man a lot of money, maybe $10,000. He gives him food, and he points to the, he says, this road is to prison. This road, the opposite direction, is back to your people who will take you in. He then leaves them there. After about 100 yards or so, he looks back and he sees the man is in absolute anguish. He is pained, he doesn't know, he just doesn't know what to do. The white man grits his teeth and keeps walking away. Finally, he stops even further down the road, he looks back and he sees the Arab has taken the road to prison. Chosen the white man's prison over freedom with his people. That's what oppression does to people. That's the psychology of oppression. Its mark is to breed into them a lack of faith in themselves, faithlessness in themselves. And then they don't need, you don't need to oppress them anymore. They oppress themselves. They go to prison. They walk to prison. Black America literally goes to prison rather than freedom. Freedom's difficult. You gotta work hard. You have to be responsible for yourself. You have to have ambitions and you have to work so forth and work hard. And we have been, that's been taken out of us by oppression. It seems to me today, that's where our real struggle is, is in self-belief. You can't raise children in a holy positive way if you don't pass self-belief onto them. This is why my favorite black leader of all time and all is Malcolm X. Malcolm said, it's self-help. Don't even ask the white man for something. Well, you know, I don't know that maybe that's extreme, but the point is absolutely on the money. Malcolm said, believe in yourself. And so I apply that framework. And I love to see, nothing makes me happy to see when blacks achieve excellence. That just warms my heart. Since the 1960s, there have been many organizations that have claimed to follow in the footsteps of the civil rights movement, including contemporary groups such as Black Lives Matter. What is your reading of these organizations and their political philosophies? Are they reflective of a contemporary civil rights movement? Yeah, they are. They're, they believe in the power of victimization and nothing else. They take us backwards. All they do is take the wound of oppression at you and just rub, massage it. Just rub it and live off of it and rub it in white people's face and you'll be wonderful. You'll get along fine. They are the enemy of black American advancement and development. They don't know it. They're innocent of it. Cause all around them, everybody's telling them that that's wonderful. But they end up being, they make excuses for black people. They don't help us develop it. Here's the big thing. I don't really care what your social policy is whether you're Democrat or Republican, none of this matters. None of this really matters, except that you take responsibility for yourself and make yourself into something, make an effort. And these organizations wait for situations like George Floyd to see if there's a little kernel of victimization in there that can rub in white people's face. And of course, that was one of the, again, one of the most horrific things that anybody's seen killing the man with the knee. So boy, if you put an overlay that with race, my God, it looked ugly. It exploded all over the world. Black Lives Matter was born in response to black suffering and victimization. They trade on black suffering. They're happy with it. When they don't have it, they're impotent. They have nothing to work with because they don't develop themselves. They squeeze black victimization for all his work. They're hustlers. And we need to stand up to that and we're gonna have to. There's gonna come a day because it's unavoidable. Where we start to say, what's wrong with you people? It's whatever, all the fighting that went before and this is what you come back to. Somebody needs to say what, tell them the truth, which almost nobody dares to do. We've received some important questions from students here at Purdue, but before we turn to them, I'd like to close this portion of our discussion by asking you to speak about your conviction that there must be a greater emphasis on citizenship as a common theme in the American experience. Can you talk about that a bit for us tonight? The one of the things that has made America a melting pot is its concept of citizenship, which I'm a strong believer. I am a citizen of the United States before I'm black. My citizenship is my collective, my group identity. I'm an American. I also happen to be black and that has led to a certain experience in America, in American life and so forth and I'm proud of much of it. But I am an American citizen. I have the same exact rights as people or other Americans, same responsibilities as other Americans and the beauty of America is that it removes people from their adivistic identity. Your color, your fate is not the color of your skin. It's the content of your character and that's why I love citizenship. It is the Martin Luther King content of your character all in a nutshell and it is the way forward. The way forward is not to isolate and sort of go off into cobbles of anger and resentment and so forth, it's to join the wider world, the broader world. That's where life is, that's where possibility is. That's where our future is. It's not by becoming, as I did in the 60s when I was in my black power mode and become a cultural nationalist, we used to call ourselves and hate all white people. That's not gonna work. I'm glad I found that out pretty early on. But we overrate race, we give it too much importance and then we ask people not to hold our race against us. Well, we hold it against ourselves. Here's our first student question for you. Okay. Hi, my name is John Righi. I'm originally from Indianapolis, Indiana. I'm a sophomore in economics at the Kranich School of Management. My question is regarding a lot of the diversity initiatives adopted by universities and other institutions. I do not believe that they were adopted after fully weighing the consequences. And so I'd like to know once everyone has been classified by their immutable characteristics and treated accordingly, do you believe that we've made the world more equal or are you concerned that we let the idea of equity lead us down a path towards a new form of segregation? I believe in the latter part of the last sentence that you're right on the money. When people are hit with freedom, it's so difficult, so it rocks them. That they very often go right back into denying, they deny that they're free. They reject freedom. And what you see in a lot of policies today re-segregate America because we're afraid of freedom. If I meet somebody white, boy, well, maybe they're racist. I don't know. And so I better keep my racial chops alive because I might have to deal with whites here and whites there. And so I'll make public policy like the one you're referring to that sort of re-segregates the world in a way that I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable being around my own kind. And I think you are absolutely right. The result of that is that we re-segregate, we recommit our own oppression because we're afraid to move beyond it. And yet that's the challenge. I just want to know who you are. If I meet you, I just want to know who you are and what you think about things and what you feel. If your race has informed you in some way and made you more interesting as an individual, then fine, let me know. Maybe I can use some, even though it comes from another race. I'm not against learning from anybody. Indeed, thank you. We'll move to the next question. Hi, my name is Taneel. I am a junior from Westport, Connecticut studying computer science and political science. Thank you for being with us here today. I'm grateful to be able to ask a question on behalf of the Political Discourse Club. We are a student organization that fights political polarization by promoting civil discourse on college campuses. As someone who studies the polarizing subjects of affirmative action, multiculturalism, and race relations, how do you engage in constructive conversation with those who disagree with your viewpoints? Well, you know, I just talk to people. I just, you meet people and my feeling is that, you know, as you go in unbiased, you check your biases at the door and you try to enjoy people. It's one of the things that's important to me. I feel honored to be able to talk to people and find out what they really think and push them a little bit and maybe they push me a little bit and we have an interesting conversation. I think it's pretty easy to do, actually. It's just that one is intimidated at the start, but if you hang in there, usually you connect as human beings rather than as representatives of a race or a politics or an ideology of some kind, you connect as human beings and that's always what I'm looking for. Hello, I am Sneha Jogi. I'm a senior studying agricultural communication at Purdue University and I'm from Fishers, Indiana. Today I'm representing the Purdue Foundation Student Board. Since George Floyd was murdered, it seems like the media has started to report on the injustices around black murders and shootings. The number of murders have seemed to increase during this time of COVID. As these murders have increased and injustices among the black and Asian community have increased, I've noticed the media and the general public becoming more desensitized and unfazed to these deaths. With the combination of burnout, emotional exhaustion and lack of empathy or society faces, how can we keep the momentum of providing justice, educating people and keeping others accountable going? Could you say the last part again? I'm not quite sure I heard that right. Or is she not? An unfazed to these deaths. With the combination of burnout, emotional exhaustion and lack of empathy or society faces, how can we keep the momentum of providing justice, educating people and keeping others accountable going? I think that the way to do that is to be a decent person, try to be a decent person, try to be fair-minded, try to be kind to people in whatever ways is possible. In other words, all I've got here is a string of cliches, but all of which I think are true. Treat people like you like to be treated. Be sincerely interested in what they have to say, why they say it. Is there, for example, an experience or a set of experiences that led you to this question, led you to think about this? And now we're here, our final question. Hi, Dr. Steele. I'm Claire Baney, an upcoming senior in agricultural economics and agricultural communications from the College of Agriculture. I'm from Fishers, Indiana, which is a suburb of Indianapolis. And tonight I'm representing Purdue Foundation Student Board. My question for you is based on an interview you did with Brett Baer in June of 2020. You shared that black Americans need to, quote, engineer themselves into equality and not rely on white Americans who initially, quote, took over black Americans' fate to do it for them. How do you balance that idea with the fact that white Americans manufactured systemic racism and we still feel its legacy today? And as a follow-up, what do you say to Americans who are predominantly white and conservative, who quote you to fuel their own confirmation bias and believe that systemic racism and white privilege don't exist and that anti-racism is a farce? Well, I'm glad they believe systemic racism does not exist because I certainly believe it does not exist. This is the freest country in the world. Black Americans are some of the freest people on this planet. If you're black in America, you can do anything you want. You can become the president of the United States. You can become the CEO of a major corporation. You can become a movie star. I'll be here all day outlining the enormous, the immense volume of possibilities that are open to you. And when you say systemic racism, I know one thing. You're afraid. That's your security blanket. Take away the systemic racism and you have to look at what? I'm free? You're like that era I was just talking about. You walk to prison. You say, no, no, I'm not free. There's systemic racism. It's out. Oh, it's after me, too. It is restricting my life. And everywhere I go, there it is. Just, you know, a quarter inch underneath the surface. And I have to deal with it and so forth. And I'm a victim. You owe me entitlement. And you're right back in that symbiotic bond with white people that destroys us, doesn't destroy white people. It's a casual thing for them, but it's everything for us. And so when people tell me that the white people don't understand systemic racism, I'm happy because here's another unspoken reality. In since the 1960s, white America has accomplished a moral evolution far greater than anything ever in the world. Where else have you seen a people transform themselves? From that kind of racism, living off of it, to a place where they actually have goodwill toward blacks. There's a lot of goodwill in white America. There's a lot of people who want to see us do well. Who want to support us. Who would like nothing better than to see us thrive. So again, when you see people talking about systemic racism, they're just saying, and I fully understand them saying it. I felt it myself. They're just saying that they don't know how. They're a little nervous and insecure about the future. And they're going to keep alive the idea of white, of systemic racism as a case they have to have a crash landing. It'll be a little bit of a buffer. Well, it's because I'm black. Well, I'm here to say that's over. There isn't any systemic racism. You can do what you want. I remember when I grew up when there was real racism, real segregation, real discrimination in every single walk of life. So somebody to tell me today that there is systemic racism out there. Then you know that you're just dealing sadly with people. And this is where I take responsibility as a black American. We need to stop each other from telling those kinds of lies. We need to stop that because we are the ones who get hurt. We're the ones who pay by disbelieving in ourselves. We need to stop that. There's no systemic racism. If systemic racism is going to stop you, then you are going to stop anyway. Dr. Shelby Steele, this has been a really important conversation. On behalf of Purdue, I want to thank you once again for joining us for your insightful and instructive commentary this evening. And thank you to all of our students who submitted questions for Dr. Steele. Thank you also to everyone watching from home and all who registered to attend the events in pursuing racial justice together this year. I hope that you have found this series to be informative in terms of content, provocative of further thought and engaging in his virtual delivery. As we close, I send my heartfelt thanks to all of our faculty moderators, collaborating units and divisional staff for their contributions, as well as to Purdue Convocations and the Hall of Music productions for their efforts throughout the series. Be well, take care and have a wonderful evening.