Shelby Steele Quotes

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Shelby Steele

Profession : Author

Birth : January 1, 1946

We are a nation with a powerful investment in the idea of our own fundamental innocence. Our can-do optimism and ingenuity are based on the faith that we are a decent, open, and generous people. This is our identity.

Shelby Steele

The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle.

Shelby Steele

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness - not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

Shelby Steele

When blacks become humanly visible, when their true beliefs are known, their mask shatters and their symbiotic bond with whites is broken.

Shelby Steele

I have called Mr. Obama a bound man because he cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites.

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

The great drama at the core of American race relations is always the same: Can black Americans ever be truly equal - are they capable of achieving it and are others capable of accepting it?

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

Normally, 'black responsibility' is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites.

Shelby Steele

John McCain is simply a man of considerable character, poor guy. He is utterly bereft of cultural cachet.

Shelby Steele

Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America.

Shelby Steele

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs.

Shelby Steele

As an ideology - and certainly as a political identity - conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for.

Shelby Steele

In the broader American culture - the mainstream media, the world of the arts and entertainment, the high-tech world, and the entire enterprise of public and private education - conservatism suffers a decided ill repute.

Shelby Steele

Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life.

Shelby Steele

For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle.

Shelby Steele

The Achilles' heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces like 'systemic racism' and 'structural inequality.'

Shelby Steele

Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing.

Shelby Steele

Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that.

Shelby Steele

What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.

Shelby Steele