A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America

Bestselling author Shelby Steele offers a timely and controversial essay collection on the untold story behind today's polarized racial politics. n nSteele has given eloquent voice to painful truths that are almost always left unspoken in the nation's circumscribed public discourse on race. --New York Timesn nFrom the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our Character and White Guilt comes an essay collection that tells the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today. n nIn A Dream Deferred Shelby Steele argues that a second betrayal of black freedom in the United States--the first one being segregation--emerged from the civil rights era when the country was overtaken by a powerful impulse to redeem itself from racial shame. According to Steele, 1960s liberalism had as its first and all-consuming goal the expiation of American guilt rather than the careful development of true equality between the races. n nIn four densely argued essays, Steele takes on the familiar questions of affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity, Afro-centrism, group preferences, victimization--and what he deems to be the atavistic powers of race, ethnicity, and gender, the original causes of oppression. A Dream Deferred is an honest, courageous look at the perplexing dilemma of race and democracy in the United States--and what we might do to resolve it.n