Shelby Steele published an editorial entitled "The Inauthenticity Behind Black Lives Matter" in The Wall Street Journal this week. Below is an excerpt, as well as a personal observation.

"... there is an elephant in the room. It is simply that we blacks aren’t much victimized any more. Today we are free to build a life that won’t be stunted by racial persecution. Today we are far more likely to encounter racial preferences than racial discrimination. Moreover, we live in a society that generally shows us goodwill—a society that has isolated racism as its most unforgivable sin.

This lack of victimization amounts to an “absence of malice” that profoundly threatens the victim-focused black identity. Who are we without the malice of racism? Can we be black without being victims? The great diminishment (not eradication) of racism since the ’60s means that our victim-focused identity has become an anachronism. Well suited for the past, it strains for relevance in the present.

The article, like all of Steele's writings, is unflinchingly honest about the difficulties that black Americans face at becoming assimilated into a society that once literally enslaved them. There is going to be a lot of turmoil associated with accepting that the enslavement is in the past and that achieving real freedom in the future is now strictly a personal task that will require not just forgiveness, but forgetfulness. That personal turmoil is the true source of current upheaval.