I am experiencing an inexpressible gaping sense of loss here without my buddy Justin. I am carrying on, though.

Today (as per Cousin Bruce's suggestion), for example, I am reading Shelby Steele:

"Our (black) leadership never looks back at its own people and says, 'This is what we have to do to get from point A to point B.' They spend all their time looking at the larger society. The classic phrase is keeping a society "on the hook." Keeping whites on the hook. That's what the goal of our leadership is. And the thing that they can't stand about people like me is that, 'Well you're letting whites off the hook.' It is as though the fate of black America is entirely dependent on whites being on the hook. In other words, as though our advancement is in white hands, not in our hands. What was freedom supposed to be about?

"I call this in the book 'contingent thinking' -- the thinking that my faith is contingent on what somebody else does, on what white America does. For example, 'I spend my time not really developing myself, putting all my energy into that; I spend my time manipulating attitudes in white America. And keeping white America on edge; and negotiating to have a whole politics revolve around this and have a whole group identity revolved around keeping white America on the hook -- ignoring my own people but focusing on white America. If they don't do it, then it can't be done. If they don't do this in the school system, it can't be done. If they don't do something else, it can't be done.'

"Of course, if we look at those areas of black American life, where blacks don't have contingent thinking, where they say, 'We will compete with any and everybody' -- those areas are obviously sports and music and entertainment and literature. Blacks not only compete but very often dominate. The same terrible, wretched inner-city circumstances that produce these abysmal test scores, also produce every year the greatest athletes in the world. They come from the same deprivation, the same single parent homes. The same gang-infested neighborhoods, drug-infested neighborhoods. But in those areas, when you go out into the basketball court at the age of 8 or 9, they don't say to you, 'Well you come from a single parent home, so if you can't dribble then we'll bring a tutor in.' There's no mercy. Its standard of excellence is enforced that is ruthless, cruel, So we produce all these great athletes year in and year out, from the same circumstance where we produce no academics, where billions of dollars are spent 20 feet away in a classroom. Again, the contingent thinking is to me is infinitely more destructive to the future of black America than racism, which is not to say that racism is not the main problem."

(Excerpted from a talk about his book, "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America.")

Shelby, obviously, is one of these seemingly incongruous new creatures, the black conservative. As must also be obvious, Shelby extends this argument to rail against affirmative action. Very bold position. I am still chewing over my response to this essay.