This one comes via Jack and Jill Politics:
White Americans have made more moral progress in the last forty years than any people in the history of the human condition.
What is up with you folks named Steele? How do you people come up with this nonsense?
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Hm, well, if you consider that a student who starts the year getting Fs, and finishes it getting Cs, when the rest of the class consistently got As and Bs all year, can be said to have made more progress than any other student…well, no, it’s still stupid. It might have been a somewhat defensible statement if it weren’t for the last ten words.
To which I can only reply:
Mighty white of you to say so, Mr. Shelby. Mighty white of you.
I wonder who gets to be the judge of what constitutes progress?
That was my first thought too, Renee.
Seems to me that what passes for civilization in ‘White America’ has been going backwards at a rapid pace for the past 28 years.
It’s not a comfortable thing to say, but I oughta own it: even making a joke about it, now I think on it more, that was some of my privilege talking in #1 above, and I should’ve given it more thought before trying to be clever. There is of course ample evidence that whatever moral progress “White America” may have made in certain respects, such as arguably in certain areas of domestic policy, we (and to paraphrase Zappa, this is one of those times I wish I didn’t have to say “we” there) have probably at least canceled it out with our failings in others. In terms of foreign policy the Iraq war alone, a project of “White America” if ever there was one, has reduced our moral stature to a nadir possibly unprecedented in the history of this country.
@smadin: Nah, you’re cool. You’ve been around these parts long enough to know that if I felt you were out of line I would have said something. Maybe it’s the teacher in me, but I got the joke and appreciated it.
Dear Shelby Steele: I don’t think that “moral progress” means what you think it means.
@Kevin: this is surely true, and I appreciate it (and I’ve failed to mention it before, but I’m very flattered at finding my humble self on your blogroll!), but all the same, on reflection I wasn’t comfortable with what I wrote — the last sentence in particular, I think; without my reflexive “I mean, we have made some progress, right?” reaction the joke would’ve stood on its own.
I’ll stop introspecting all over your comments section now, though.
@smadin: Fair enough. And I do appreciate that you are honest enough to come back and own up.
And hey, we like introspection around here. Keeps the trolls away.