Shelby Steele

Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

— Shelby Steele

My individuality is my gift to my people.

— Shelby Steele

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

— Shelby Steele

Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves.

— Shelby Steele

There's a little racism out here, always was, and always will be.

— Shelby Steele

Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.

— Shelby Steele

My rule is, whatever is the most urgent is what I do next.

— Shelby Steele

I will take Al Sharpton seriously. And I know him, he's a nice, nice person.

— Shelby Steele

To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black…

— Shelby Steele

Liberalism has become a moral vaccine that immunizes people against stigmatization.

— Shelby Steele

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

— Shelby Steele

When America became stigmatized in the '60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else.

— 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

Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.

— Shelby Steele

The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.

— Shelby Steele

Racism and bigotry generally are the great driving engines of modern American liberalism. Even a remote hint of racism can trigger a…

— Shelby Steele

Rap makes the conservative argument about what happens when family life is eroded either by welfare and drugs, or by the stresses…

— 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…

— Shelby Steele

Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their…

— Shelby Steele

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence…

— Shelby Steele

I have called Mr. Obama a bound man because he cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support…

— Shelby Steele

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness - not an emptiness…

— 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…

— Shelby Steele

What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to…

— Shelby Steele

Part of our identity is the idea that racism is still there and that we are vulnerable to it. So, the question…

— 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,…

— 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…

— Shelby Steele

Too often the result of affirmative action has been an artificial diversity that gives the appearance of parity between blacks and whites…

— Shelby Steele

Most important, [research on affirmative action] has completely failed to show that affirmative action ever closes the academic gap between minorities and…

— Shelby Steele

My problem with Obama is that he's not a new paradigm; he's an old paradigm. A new paradigm would be somebody like…

— Shelby Steele

Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and over-the-top vulgarity. But it is important to remember that this music is…

— Shelby Steele

In America, many marginally competent or flatly incompetent whites are hired every day -some because their white skin suits the conscious or…

— Shelby Steele

Innocents don't learn from their sins; the chastened are informed by them.

— Shelby Steele

Our families have fallen to pieces. 75 percent of all black children are born out of wedlock, without a father.

— Shelby Steele

Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism's unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

— Shelby Steele

If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her.

— Shelby Steele

My experience in life tells me that the values that are now being labeled 'conservative' are the only way that blacks can…

— Shelby Steele

I've tried to be graceful and I've tried to make sure my arguments are grounded in reason and insight.

— 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…

— Shelby Steele

Racist societies enforce the idea of race as home by making race an inescapable fate.

— Shelby Steele