Okay, we getting verbose up in here. I decided to make the flaws in Shelby Steele's latest in OpinionJournal absolutely clear. It's in three parts, below the fold so the RSS readers can skip it if they like.

Here's part 1.

Steele begins with a barrage of subjective facts. This is not ad hominem...read the first paragraph, see if anything he reports is external to his own mind.

Probably the single greatest problem between blacks and whites in America is that we are forever witness to each other's great shames. This occurred to me in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, when so many black people were plunged into misery that it seemed the hurricane itself had held a racial animus. I felt a consuming empathy but also another, more atavistic impulse. I did not like my people being seen this way. Beyond the human mess one expects to see after a storm like this, another kind of human wretchedness was on display. In the people traversing waist-deep water and languishing on rooftops were the markers of a deep and static poverty. The despair over the storm that was so evident in people's faces seemed to come out of an older despair, one that had always been there. Here--40 years after the great civil rights victories and 50 years after Rosa Parks's great refusal--was a poverty that oppression could no longer entirely explain. Here was poverty with an element of surrender in it that seemed to confirm the worst charges against blacks: that we are inferior, that nothing really helps us, that the modern world is beyond our reach.

Assuming honor on his part, the most we can assume is he truly felt the feelings he reports. Since the second paragraph is pure projection...

Of course, shame is made worse, even unbearable, when there is a witness, the eye of an "other" who is only too happy to use our shame against us. Whites and blacks often play the "other" for each other in this way, each race seeking a bit of redemption and power in the other's shame. And both races live with the permanent anxiety of being held to account for their shames by the other race. So, there is a reflex in both races that reaches for narratives to explain shame away and, thus, disarm the "other."

...I do believe he genuinely experienced those feelings, that the feelings are, to him, true subjective facts that demand a response.

Ultimately though, these two paragraphs make no assertion that is meaningful to anyone but him. As a cry of emotional pain, it is noted as a motivating factor. Motivating factors are taken into account when considering the usefulness of addressing the source of the rhetoric next time.

Therefore, it was only a matter of time before the images of deep black poverty that emerged in Katrina's aftermath were covered over in a narrative of racism: If Katrina's victims had not been black, the response to their suffering would have been faster. It did not matter that a general lack of preparedness, combined with a stunning level of governmental incompetence and confusion, made for an unforgivably slow response to Katrina's victims. What mattered was the invocation of the great white shame.

The best way to counter false statements is to appeal to actual events. Logical consistency means nothing when none of the events being described ever actually happened. Hurricane Katrina did not strike so long ago that we have already forgotten there was a week before there was any response, did it? And people didn't raise the issue of racism until they saw helicopters fly over Black neighborhoods on their way to rescue people...and we remember the evacuation of the Superdome was briefly halted so they could evacuate some nice, dry people from a first class hotel...and we remember the police waited for the National Guard to restore an order that was only lost in rumor...

The sad fact is, though it took nothing less than a hurricane to convince them, one in three white people don't think Bush cares about black people, and that was based on what they themselves saw, not anything anyone Black told them.

And here, in white racism, was a shame of truly epic proportions--the shame of white supremacy that for centuries so squeezed the world with violence and oppression that white privilege was made a natural law. Once white racism--long witnessed by blacks and acknowledged since the '60s by whites--was in play, the subject was changed from black weakness to white evil. Now accountability for the poverty that shamed blacks could be once again assigned to whites. If this was tiresome for many whites, it was a restoration of dignity for many blacks.

...and so the balance of the paragraph is rendered absurd.

Since he's discussing his own reactions, any further discussion will look remarkably like ad hominem. For this reason I bring this part to a close here so you can skip the next two parts if that prospect disturbs you.