Shelby Steele “You Get Rewarded for Giving Up Your Humanity."

I’m an inferior podcaster.
 Second-rate.

 Not as good as the others.



And it is this implied inferiority that calls for special treatment.


Because apparently in their eyes, I’m not a podcaster; I’m a black podcaster.

Due to my blackness, I should be given certain opportunities. Not due to the quality of my content, but the color of my skin. Not because I’ve earned said opportunities. But because maybe they had a diversity budget that needed to be spent. A quota that needed to be met. An agenda to prove that they’re “not racist.”

So they took it upon themselves to try to make me their affirmative action-diversity-equity-and-inclusion token.


Well, until I told them that I don’t play that shit.



Don’t get me wrong. I love diversity. My family photos resemble the United Nations — black, Mexican, white, Asian. My social circle is much the same. Different races, ethnicities, and cultures. Story of my life.



However, my gripe is with diversity for the sake of appearances. Forced diversity, I call it. Like how a couple years ago my internet marketing pals started filling up their sales pages with stock images of black folks. As if to say, see, I’m not racist!

And it is this need to prove one’s non-racism, to essentially claim one’s innocence for past and present racial wrongs, that plants a seed of self-doubt in the minds of the minorities they say they want to help.



Imagine being given an opportunity, knowing that the only reason you got it was because of the color of your skin.



Imagine being accepted into a university that you weren’t truly prepared for academically, but because your racial profile helped the gatekeepers meet their quota.



Imagine how it feels to get a job that you know you weren’t qualified for, but the employer needed a little more color on the team.

In my opinion, and in my very recent experience which I share on today’s episode, there are few better ways to crush a person’s self-esteem and to instill a sense of self-doubt than to give them preferential treatment based solely on their race.

This needs to stop.


On this final day of Black History Month, Shelby Steele, probably my favorite author right now, reveals a side of affirmative action and other race-based policies that almost no one talks about.

Source: Shelby Steele | Is White Guilt Destroying the Promise of Civil Rights?