It's difficult to know what George Will actually thinks of Shelby Steele's White Guilt theory. One could give one's opinion directly, but I don't think Mr. Will wants any of the assertions in the column associated with him. Educated people know they are all nonsense. I have to guess that anything that's not enquoted or directly attributed is his personal contribution to the message.

Like this.

The dehumanizing denial that blacks have sovereignty over their lives became national policy in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson said: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others'."

Excuse me? Slavery? Jim Crow? The very point at which Black people were legally freed of the assumption of inferiority is the moment Mr. Will says the "dehumanizing denial" began? Not even Prof. Steele is THAT dense...never mind that Mr. Will's next sentence is

This, Steele writes, enunciated a new social morality: No black problem could be defined as largely a black responsibility. If you were black, you could not be expected to carry responsibilities equal to others'.

If you actually cared about the truth, you might read the speech in which President Johnson made the above quoted statement. You'd see how complete is the above-quoted lie.

Nor can we find a complete answer in the experience of other American minorities. They made a valiant and a largely successful effort to emerge from poverty and prejudice.

The Negro, like these others, will have to rely mostly upon his own efforts.

The problem, of course, is that the statement is embedded in a truth that literally makes Steele and Will wince.

First, Negroes are trapped--as many whites are trapped--in inherited, gateless poverty. They lack training and skills. They are shut in, in slums, without decent medical care. Private and public poverty combine to cripple their capacities.

We are trying to attack these evils through our poverty program, through our education program, through our medical care and our other health programs, and a dozen more of the Great Society programs that are aimed at the root causes of this poverty.

We will increase, and we will accelerate, and we will broaden this attack in years to come until this most enduring of foes finally yields to our unyielding will.

But there is a second cause--much more difficult to explain, more deeply grounded, more desperate in its force. It is the devastating heritage of long years of slavery; and a century of oppression, hatred, and injustice.

For Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences-deep, corrosive, obstinate differences--radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual.

These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced and they must be dealt with and they must be overcome, if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.

Nor can we find a complete answer in the experience of other American minorities. They made a valiant and a largely successful effort to emerge from poverty and prejudice.

The Negro, like these others, will have to rely mostly upon his own efforts. But he just can not do it alone. For they did not have the heritage of centuries to overcome, and they did not have a cultural tradition which had been twisted and battered by endless years of hatred and hopelessness, nor were they excluded--these others--because of race or color--a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in our society.

Nor can these differences be understood as isolated infirmities. They are a seamless web. They cause each other. They result from each other. They reinforce each other.

Much of the Negro community is buried under a blanket of history and circumstance. It is not a lasting solution to lift just one corner of that blanket. We must stand on all sides and we must raise the entire cover if we are to liberate our fellow citizens.

This is what President Johnson said, and it's what a plurality, if not a small majority of White Americans have resisted in ways gross and subtle from that day until...let's see, what day was Mr. Will's column published? June 5, 2006. They've been resisting from the day President Johnson spoke at Howard University until at least June 5, 2006.

But I digress.

One could go through the rest of the article in similar fashion, teasing apart Mr. Will's contributions from Prof. Steele's (finding them each and jointly objectionable).

Instead I suggest all Black folks read Mr. Will's column and remember: this is the message the Conservative Elites wants to spread about YOU.