Shelby Steele

Author

1946-01-01

Books by Shelby Steele

White guilt
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The content of our character
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Dream Deferred
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Quotes by Shelby Steele

Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America.
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I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there - all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.
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Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.
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In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentent and redemptive.
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Conservatism is the perfect antidote to underdevelopment. Its commitment to individual responsibility, education, hard work, personal initiative, traditional family values and free markets is a universal formula for success in a free society.
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In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty.
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Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism's unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.
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The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation.
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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.
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Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies.
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Especially for blacks, but also for many Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans, group identity is now shaped more by a liberal politics in which past victimization is deferred to, and for which redress is sought with preferential treatment, than by a unified culture.
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Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.
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Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and over-the-top vulgarity. But it is important to remember that this music is a fairly accurate message from a part of society where human connections are fractured and impossible, so fraught with disappointments and pain that only an assault on human feeling itself can assuage.
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Our families have fallen to pieces. 75 percent of all black children are born out of wedlock, without a father.
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In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture.
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Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power - the right to kill - to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women.
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A bargainer is a black who enters the American, the white American mainstream by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
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When blacks become humanly visible, when their true beliefs are known, their mask shatters and their symbiotic bond with whites is broken.
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One drop of black blood and you're black. That was the rule. That's what kept the wall between whites and blacks was this one drop rule. So I was raised with absolutely no ambiguity about that.
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I think we have come to a place in black America, sadly from my point of view, where we have once again begun to rely on our history of victimization as our primary source of power to wield within society.
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