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 alienated myself from the academic world almost entirely because it's a left-wing world.

— Shelby Steele

Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win…

— Shelby Steele

In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever…

— Shelby Steele

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

— Shelby Steele

No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation…

— Shelby Steele

And if you want to make many of our black leaders angry, just tell them that racism is not the number problem…

— Shelby Steele

Thomas Sowell, among many others, has articulated the power of individual responsibility as an antidote to black poverty for over 40 years.…

— Shelby Steele

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did…

— Shelby Steele

My father bought three ramshackle houses, rebuilt them, rented them out, kept clawing his way up the ladder. A man with a…

— 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

We have laws on the books. If somebody's discriminating against you, I strongly advocate suing them. That's the most effective thing you…

— Shelby Steele

The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. Interestingly, the…

— Shelby Steele

Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But…

— 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

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

— Shelby Steele

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

— Shelby Steele

In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentent and redemptive.

— 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

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

— Shelby Steele

In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take…

— Shelby Steele

I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national…

— Shelby Steele

You can do pretty much anything you want to do in America as a black, including become president. Still, the legacy of…

— Shelby Steele

My honest opinion is that blacks have to fight much harder for their individuality than whites do.

— Shelby Steele

I decided to live as an individual and as I grew older, and thought more, and read more and experienced more, my…

— Shelby Steele