30+ Shelby Steele Quotes (Inspiring, Insightful And Provocative)

Shelby Steele is an American author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is best known for his work on race relations, multiculturalism and affirmative action. His books have won awards such as the National Book Critics Circle Award for his 2005 book, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.

Top 10 Shelby Steele Quotes

1. It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.
2. Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.
3. Every single progressive education fad of the past thirty years has hurt poor black children.
4. A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate.
5. The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.
6. Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves.
7. My experience in life tells me that the values that are now being labeled 'conservative' are the only way that blacks can get ahead.
8. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation's past.
9. My rule is, whatever is the most urgent is what I do next.
10. I wrote a piece in the New York Times back in the Nineties saying that racial discrimination ought to be a criminal offense, not just a civil one. I'm all for the criminalization of discrimination.

Shelby Steele Short Quotes

• My honest opinion is that blacks have to fight much harder for their individuality than whites do.
• Liberalism has become a moral vaccine that immunizes people against stigmatization.
• My individuality is my gift to my people.

Shelby Steele Famous Quotes And Sayings

No matter how accomplished we may be, just any little white person can come up and say, 'Well, you wouldn't be here, if it weren't for Affirmative Action.' You put power in white people's hands, and then they use it against you. It's a trick bag. — Shelby Steele

I'm not going to play a racial game. With me, you're going to meet a guy named Shelby Steele, and you will have to get to know me as an individual. The color of my skin won't tell you anything. I think there's more and more of that in America. — Shelby Steele

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good. — Shelby Steele

I grew during segregation in an all-black segregated neighborhood with segregated schools, etcetera. I was raised by a great father, my hero, who I much admired. So, I never really had anxiety in the way that someone like Obama would have. When he walks down the street alone, since no one knows who his mother is, they're just going to see him as a black guy. — Shelby Steele

I would love to see us, as blacks, get to the place where we say, 'I'm not going to play race games with you. Here I am. This is who I am. Take it or leave it.' — Shelby Steele

Barack Obama's strategy is to get away from anything having to do with race as quickly as he can. His fear is that that might open a Pandora's Box. — Shelby Steele

Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life. — Shelby Steele

If you're getting harassed, it's not helpful to know that racism has generally declined in America, when you're still experiencing it. That is a reality that we're still vulnerable to. — Shelby Steele

We have laws on the books. If somebody's discriminating against you, I strongly advocate suing them. That's the most effective thing you can do in terms of fighting racism. People understand that they're vulnerable to lawsuit. — Shelby Steele

I decided to live as an individual and as I grew older, and thought more, and read more and experienced more, my views became more conservative. But my group is liberal. Not only that, they say, 'If you're not liberal and not a Democrat, you're not black. If you're conservative, you're a sellout.' Here, then, I'm living with that kind of a pressure against my individuality. — Shelby Steele

All politicians are going to mask to some degree in order to present themselves in away they think will get them votes. What's different in Obama's case is that he's wearing a racial mask, this 'bargainer's' mask, and I think very effectively, whereby he gives whites the benefit of the doubt. He's essentially saying, 'I am going to presume you are not racist, if you won't hold my race against me.' So, his mask is a distinctly racial one. — Shelby Steele

Too often the result of affirmative action has been an artificial diversity that gives the appearance of parity between blacks and whites that has not yet been achieved in reality...Preferences tend to attack one form of discrimination with another...Affirmative action encourages a victim-focused identity, and sends the message that there is more power in our past suffering than in our present achievements. — Shelby Steele

I was raised in a completely black world. In those days, if a white woman married a black man, she lived as a black woman, and that was just the end of it. So, I don't have a feeling of being bi-racial. I don't have a connection to it. People often come up to me thinking I do have a connection to it, and I kind of let them down because I really don't. — Shelby Steele

I know that whatever power Shelby Steele has always comes out of the writing. I'm not the greatest television pundit or the best public speaker, so it's my writing that's most important. — Shelby Steele

If you are a minority, it is important that you have legal ways to defend yourself in the society in which you live. — Shelby Steele

Sometimes, Barack Obama is Martin Luther King, sometimes, he a black militant from the Sixties, then he's a Baptist minister. He can be so different. There's not yet an Obama voice. — Shelby Steele

What the Clintons have always done is embraced challenging. They can't have enough photo opportunities with Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. They communicate to blacks that they agree with their challenging identity. So, in a sense, Hillary is blacker than Barack Obama. Their alignment with this black identity makes them 'black' in a metaphorical sense, I guess. — Shelby Steele

Life Lessons by Shelby Steele

1. Shelby Steele's work emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility and self-reliance in order to overcome racial and social inequality.
2. He also encourages individuals to take ownership of their lives and to strive to make the world a better place through their actions.
3. Steele's work serves as a reminder that we all have the power to make a difference and to create positive change in our society.