Black Scholar Shelby Steele Says Biden's George Floyd Funeral Speech Was a Political Stunt
These are the kinds of questions Joe Biden isn’t going to be getting from white liberals.
But a top black scholar’s take on Biden’s speech at George Floyd’s funeral Tuesday should have the presumptive Democratic nominee thinking long and hard about his pandering approach to race relations.
Six decades of what Democrats consider helping black Americans have left the population worse off than ever, author and commentator Shelby Steele told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.
And the Biden brand of white liberalism isn’t going to do any more good than it has in the past, Steele said.
For Democrats, it’s about political power.
“We live in, for a lack of a better term, a white guilt world,” Steele said at the beginning of the interview on “The Story with Martha MacCallum.”
“What is Mr. Biden doing? Does he really deeply care about black America and the problems that we have there? Or is he using our pain as a kind of advertisement of his own moral vanity?”
Check it out here. The interview is almost 10 minutes long, but it’s well worth the time:
Steele answered his own questions. In his telling, Biden’s appearance comes off as a political stunt, with an eye toward the November election.
“He’s looking for the moral vanity that he thinks will translate into votes and get him elected and so forth,” he said.
“Does he know anything at all, really, about the difficulties that black Americans face now? Many of which have nothing in the world to do with racism.”
Steele, the son of a black father and white mother born in 1946, has spent a career studying and writing about race relations in the United States. In 1990, a collection of his essays about race, “The Content of Our Character,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction.
Now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Steele described himself to MacCallum as the product of the days of segregation in Chicago.
That’s an experience most people would agree gives him a little more understanding about black American life – past and present — than Biden might have picked up in his 36 years living the pampered life of a United States senator before graduating to the even more pampered life of a vice president.
“I know what segregation is like,” Steele told MacCallum with powerful understatement.
“I know what racism is like. I know it intimately. It’s over with.”
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