A review by svsmith21
The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America by Shelby Steele

4.0

It is quite heartbreaking to read this book, originally published in the early 1990s, and realize how little progress we've made in the discussion of race in the United States. The questions, concerns, and observations made in this series of essays could, with slight adaptation, easily be raised today. That isn't to trivialize the problems we face, which are derived from over 400 years of terribly oppressive behavior by white people toward Black people in this country, but it is rather to make the sad observation of the persistence of the attitudes and disagreements that keep us from charting a path forward. Steele gives voice to many pathologies that plague our disagreements, and his perspective was very helpful to me. This book is a good starting point for trying to understand the discourse surrounding race in our country.