Rise of 'the new segregation': the 'politics of difference' threatens to produce a divided society.

• Author: Steele, Shelby

THE CIVIL RIGHT's movement of the 1950s and 1960s culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts--two monumental pieces of legislation that dramatically have altered the fabric of American life. During the struggle for their passage, a new source of power came into full force. Black Americans and their supporters tapped into the moral power inspired by a 300-year history of victimization and oppression and used it to help transform society, humanize it, and make it more tolerant and open. They realized, moreover, that the victimization and oppression blacks had endured came from a marriage of race and power. They had to stop those who maintained that, merely because they are white, they have the power to dominate, enslave, segregate, and discriminate.

Race should not be a source of power or advantage or disadvantage for anyone in a free society. This was one of the most important lessons of the original civil rights movement. The legislation it championed during the 1960s constituted a "new emancipation proclamation." For the first time, segregation and discrimination were made illegal. Blacks began to enjoy a degree of freedom they never had experienced before.

This did not mean that things changed overnight for blacks. Nor did it ensure that their memory of past injustice was obliterated. I hesitate to borrow analogies from the psychological community, but I think this one does apply: Abused children usually do not feel anger until many years after the abuse has ended--that is, after they have experienced a degree of freedom and normalcy. Only once civil rights legislation had been enacted did blacks at long last begin to feel the rage they had suppressed. I can remember that period vividly. I had a tremendous sense of delayed anger at having been forced to attend segregated schools. (My grade school was the first to be involved in a desegregation suit in the North.) My rage, like that of other blacks, threatened for a time to become all consuming.

Anger was both inevitable and necessary. When suppressed, it eats a person alive; it must come out, and certainly did during the 1960s. One form was the black power movement in all its many manifestations, some of which were violent. There is no question that we should condemn violence, but we also should understand why it occurs. You can not oppress people for more than three centuries and then say it is all over and expect them to put on suits and ties and become decent attache-carrying citizens and go to work on Wall Street.

Once my own anger was released, my reaction was that I no longer had to apologize for being black. That was a tremendous benefit and helped me come to terms with my own personal development. The problem is that many blacks never progressed beyond their anger.

The black power movement encouraged a permanent state of rage and victimhood. An even greater failing was that it rejoined race and power--the very "marriage" that civil rights...