[A] one-sided focus on the behavioral causes of black disadvantage often gives rise to .... the temptation to substitute self-help programs for political action aimed at removing ideological and structural obstacles to equal opportunity. When political resistance to progressive change is formidable or stubborn, there is a dangerous tendency among elites to overemphasize self-help strategies or, worse, to opt for these strategies exclusively. Peer counseling, religious proselytizing, moral exhortation, and charitable giving, as worthy and worthwhile as they might be, do not constitute a politics. They are simply survival tactics.
Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard UP 2005), 146.
1 comment:
Don't know if it was intended as such, but this quote serves as a nice response to James Patterson's commemoration of the Moynihan report.
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