Shelby Steele Quotes

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.

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

Every single progressive education fad of the past thirty years has hurt poor black children.

A black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate.

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

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

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

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

My individuality is my gift to my people.

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.