Shelby Steele: The Loneliness of the “Black Conservative”

"Whenever my talk was finished, though sometimes before, a virtual militia of angry black students would rush to the microphones and begin to scream. At first I thought of them as Mau Maus but decided this was unfair to the real Mau Maus, who, though ruthless terrorists, had helped bring independence to Kenya in the 1950s. My confronters were not freedom fighters; they were Carrie Nation–like enforcers, racial bluenoses who lived in terror of certain words. Repression was their game, not liberation, and they said as much. 'You can’t say that in front of the white man.' 'Your words will be used against us.' 'Why did you write this book?' 'You should only print that in a black magazine.' Their outrage brought to light an ironic and unnoticed transformation in the nature of black American anger from the sixties to the nineties: a shift in focus from protest to suppression, from blowing the lid off to tightening it down. And, short of terrorism, shame is the best instrument of repression."