From vastleft.com:

In George Will's recent Newsweek column, he does little more than echo Shelby Steele's controversial comments about race from his book, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.

Steele sees his upbringing, with a black father and a white mother, as affording him special clarity on matters of race.

Will, however, describes Steele's ethnicity simply as black, as in "America's most discerning black writer." Did Will somehow miss the author's backstory, or does he want to avoid undercutting Steele's "I'm not a racist" cred for his aggressive critique of African-American culture?

Shorter Steele-Will: efforts since the Civil Rights Act to repudiate our country's racist history have been unnecessary and counterproductive. For example:

The dehumanizing denial that blacks have sovereignty over their lives became national policy in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson said: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others'." This, Steele writes, enunciated a new social morality: No black problem could be defined as largely a black responsibility. If you were black, you could not be expected to carry responsibilities equal to others'.

I won't disagree that the race card has sometimes been overplayed (how's your golf game going, OJ?). But Steele and Will's knee-jerk irritation at political correctness obscures the stunning success of policies created to redress America's ugliest legacy.

Obviously, we haven't yet weathered the last of Jim Crow's aftershocks. Far too many African-Americans remain literally and figuratively ghettoized.

But can anyone who has lived through the past four decades in America deny that we've made tremendous strides in the fight against racism since the Civil Rights Act was passed?

Will refers to "the unbearable boredom occasioned by most of today's talk about race."

Perhaps he's nostalgic for the mid-sixties, when race riots lit up America's cities. If it's boring now, it's because the turnaround engineered by MLK, LBJ, and others in that fateful decade is working.

Paradigms for equality for people of color that were but a dream to Dr. King are today's reality, including the last two Secretaries of State.

At the time of this typing, the featured story on msnbc.com is a report (by way of Will's paper, the Washington Post) about the "dazzling" appeal of presidential contender Barack Obama, himself of mixed race.

Multi-ethnicity is the new black and the new white (video), a once-scandalous lineage that is increasingly commonplace — and a prized look for fashion models.

And what made our world change so much? Social and governmental pressure to actively reject our historical practice of marginalizing non-whites.

If feeling a little guilt for our forefathers' misdeeds has been the elixir that makes this a far less racist country than the one I was born into, then so be it. It's simply disingenuous to pretend this progress away, and to focus solely on perceived excesses of these adjustments.

With all this improvement, is it time to declare victory over American racism, time to end playfield-tilting policies like Affirmative Action? This, of course, is the prize that Will and Steele are eyeing.

When I see the Right continue to whitewash the struggles of black people in America, I'm not sure we're quite there yet.

Previous "Will Watch."