Shelby Steele's analysis of the NFL protests as the end of an era for black protests

Shelby Steele (a.k.a., the "other" old black guy at the right wing Hoover Institution in Stanford) just wrote a brilliant analysis in the WSJ about the recent/current NFL flag protesting phenomenon, and how it fits into the bigger picture of black American self-image in general.

While thinking them silly (and while be entertained by some video clips of dramatic monologues by Ray Lewis and Shannon Sharpe), I don't care a whole lot about the NFL protests themselves. But Steele's article stands out for getting right to the bottom of why it's happening, and what it means within the larger historical sweep of American history: " Black Protest Has Lost Its Power."

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There was a forced and unconvincing solemnity on the faces of these players as they refused to stand for the national anthem. They seemed more dutiful than passionate, as if they were mimicking the courage of earlier black athletes who had protested.

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This rings true to me. I think that few of the involved players, if any, really harbored some Black Panther style grievances, or were seeking political standoffs and notoriety like a Muhammad Ali under the Nation of Islam. Yes, it was somewhat linked to BLM and talks about reforms of police culture, but I'm willing to bet the average kneeling player couldn't tell you what specific, concrete policies he was advocating for. Rather, they were just doing it because they felt duty-bound to rep the "movement" and remember the "community."

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It is not surprising, then, that these black football players would don the mantle of protest. The surprise was that it didn’t work. They had misread the historic moment. They were not speaking truth to power. Rather, they were figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course.

What they missed is a simple truth that is both obvious and unutterable: The oppression of black people is over with. This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless. We blacks are, today, a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by surprise.

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Yep. Freedom is not easy to deal with when obtained, and does not immediately lead to positive results. It is usually a painful process, as all true moral growth is painful. This is what the Book of Exodus is all about.

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What happened was that black America was confronted with a new problem: the shock of freedom. This is what replaced racism as our primary difficulty. Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.

Watch out that you get what you ask for, the saying goes. Freedom came to blacks with an overlay of cruelty because it meant we had to look at ourselves without the excuse of oppression. Four centuries of dehumanization had left us underdeveloped in many ways, and within the world’s most highly developed society. When freedom expanded, we became more accountable for that underdevelopment. So freedom put blacks at risk of being judged inferior, the very libel that had always been used against us.

To hear, for example, that more than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2016 embarrasses us because this level of largely black-on-black crime cannot be blamed simply on white racism.

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Chi-Raq

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We can say that past oppression left us unprepared for freedom. This is certainly true. But it is no consolation. Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win it. Freedom holds us accountable no matter the disadvantages we inherit from the past. The tragedy in Chicago—rightly or wrongly—reflects on black America.

That’s why, in the face of freedom’s unsparing judgmentalism, we reflexively claim that freedom is a lie. We conjure elaborate narratives that give white racism new life in the present: “systemic” and “structural” racism, racist “microaggressions,” “white privilege,” and so on. All these narratives insist that blacks are still victims of racism, and that freedom’s accountability is an injustice.

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When you don’t know how to go forward, you never just sit there; you go backward into what you know, into what is familiar and comfortable and, most of all, exonerating. You rebuild in your own mind the oppression that is fading from the world. And you feel this abstract, fabricated oppression as if it were your personal truth, the truth around which your character is formed. Watching the antics of Black Lives Matter is like watching people literally aspiring to black victimization, longing for it as for a consummation.

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We blacks have lived in a bubble since the 1960s because whites have been deferential for fear of being seen as racist. The NFL protests reveal the fundamental obsolescence—for both blacks and whites—of a victim-focused approach to racial inequality. It causes whites to retreat into deference and blacks to become nothing more than victims. It makes engaging as human beings and as citizens impermissible, a betrayal of the sacred group identity.

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He hits the nail on the head with the bubble metaphor. There seem to be a lot of problems in America with bubbles these days.