"Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and th..." — Shelby Steele

I grew up in a time when there was real segregation. And blacks during the 50s and so forth took a lot of responsibility for their lives because the government didn't.

You can do pretty much anything you want to do in America as a black, including become president. Still, the legacy of our victimization, of our suffering and exclusion from the mainstream of American life, has left its mark.

Thomas Sowell, among many others, has articulated the power of individual responsibility as an antidote to black poverty for over 40 years. Black thinkers as far back as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington have done the same.

Through protest - especially in the 1950s and '60s - we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.