Steele, Early, and Baldwin on Black Identity and Integration

Liberal Individualism Versus Racial Nationalism

Shelby Steele and Gerald Early are firmly on the side of liberal individualism and equal rights in their essays, as opposed to nationalism or racial group identities, and both argued that this was exactly what Martin Luther King and the early civil rights movement were trying to achieve. Steele was a conservative Republican and supporter of Ronald Reagan — most unusual for any Black intellectual — and argued that Black Americans would be best served by adopting middle-class values and aspirations. Both Early and Steele had faith in the United States and its ability to accept Black Americans as equal citizens on these terms, although James Baldwin was far more uncertain about this possibility in his 1955 essay.

Black nationalists had criticized Baldwin for being too sympathetic to the idea of liberal integration in the 1950s and 1960s, although at best he seemed only cautiously optimistic about it compared to Steele and Early — even while recognizing that Black and white Americans had developed identities distinct from their ancestors in Europe and Africa, partly as a result of their struggles against each other. On the surface, the election of Barack Obama would seem to confirm the hopes of middle-class liberal integrationists: that non-threatening Black Americans could aspire even to the highest offices in the land. Yet the openly racist attacks against Obama raised serious questions about whether white nationalism and tribalism had truly faded into history.

Gerald Early on Afrocentrism and Black Nationalism

As Gerald Early pointed out in "Understanding Afrocentrism" (1995), nationalism among Black Americans takes many forms — from extreme claims that Jesus was Black and that Africa was the mother of all world civilizations, to the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey and the broader struggles against colonialism and apartheid. Early agrees with Shelby Steele that ideas of Black Power and racial separatism are detrimental to Black Americans, although he can understand why they emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Even so, he favors liberal multiculturalism and integration over identities based on nations, groups, or communities, and stated that "like the white Southerner, the Afrocentrist is in revolt against liberalism itself, against the idea of individual liberty" (Early 22).

Black Power and nationalist ideologies always seemed to hold greater appeal for the Black middle class — insecure about its status as it integrated into schools and workplaces long controlled by whites. Steele also noted this anxiety about the loss of identity among successful Black professionals. Even Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, with their puritanical emphasis on abstinence from drugs and alcohol and the development of Black-owned businesses, appeared to appeal most to aspiring members of the middle class (Early 19). As early as 1957, E. Franklin Frazier had criticized middle-class Black Americans for imitating whites in his book Black Bourgeoisie, and this dynamic often led to an exaggeration of Afrocentrist and nationalist values among those experiencing upward mobility in America.

Shelby Steele: Conservative Liberalism and Racial Bargaining

Shelby Steele is a Black conservative — which in the American political context means he is essentially a classical liberal in the nineteenth-century sense, believing in equal rights, individualism, and personal initiative rather than identities based on groups, races, or social classes. In his 1987 essay "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?" he admitted to being an admirer of Ronald Reagan, which was highly unusual for Black Americans then or later. He also recognized that Reagan's appeal to whites was greatly amplified by his claim — Steele considered it false — to be "color-blind" and to assert that white society had already overcome its traditional racism (Steele 31).

Steele regarded races in America as "competing power groups," each with an agenda to portray itself as essentially good, innocent, and entitled to power, as well as "a hidden investment in racism and racial disharmony, despite their good intentions to the contrary" (Steele 28). Although written some twenty years before Barack Obama's election, this essay accurately predicted that the most successful type of Black politician in America would not be someone whites found angry or threatening — like Jesse Jackson — but rather someone able to bargain with them and appeal to middle-class values.

Conclusion: Integration, Optimism, and the Limits of Progress

Shelby Steele is the most conservative of the three essayists and the most optimistic about the prospects for Black Americans integrating into American society, provided they do not appear threatening and adopt middle-class, capitalist values of individualism, two-parent households, thrift, and personal initiative. He maintains that these were the true goals of Martin Luther King and the early civil rights movement, though this reading overlooks King's later and pointed criticisms of American imperialism and the inequalities generated by the capitalist economic system. Gerald Early likewise concluded that the turn toward nationalism, Afrocentrism, and racial separatism in the late 1960s and 1970s was a mistake, and he remained hopeful about integration and multiculturalism as the correct path for Black progress. At best, he regarded Afrocentrism as a kind of security blanket for insecure Black Americans integrating into the middle class.