Shelby Steele > Quotes

“Poetic truth—this assertion of a broad characteristic “truth” that invalidates actual truth—is contemporary liberalism’s greatest source of power. It is also liberalism’s most fundamental corruption.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“To be a proud and militant black after the sixties, you screamed black power in order to induce the application of white power. And you lived by an ethic that still sees full responsibility as oppression, if not racism, when applied to blacks. Still today, the best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“It is also the formula that keeps black America underdeveloped even as we enjoy new freedom and a proliferation of opportunity. No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“The most striking irony of the age of white guilt is that racism suddenly became valuable to the people who had suffered it.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“For black leaders in the age of white guilt the problem was how to seize all they could get from white guilt without having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer. With it, the smallest racial incident proved the “global truth” of systemic racism.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“(One of the delights of Marxian-tinged ideas for the young is the unearned sense of superiority they grant.)”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion’s share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late sixties—and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next four decades—grew out of black America’s complete embrace of the latter option.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Like most people in the King-era civil rights movement, they were Gandhians because nonviolent passive resistance was the best way to highlight white racism as an immorality. Their rejection of violence, even as a weapon against racial oppression, gave them the extraordinary power of moral witness—the great power of the early civil rights movement. What could America think of itself when passive freedom riders were beaten or when a little black girl in crinoline and pigtails—an image of perfectly conventional human aspiration—had to be escorted into school past a screaming white mob?”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“anger is never automatic or even inevitable for the oppressed; it is chosen when weakness in the oppressor means it will be effective in winning freedom or justice or spoils of some kind. Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice. Wounds and injustices create only the potential for anger, but weakness in the oppressor calls out anger even when there is no wound or injustice. In both the best and the worst sense of the word, black rage is always a kind of opportunism.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations. In the age of racism, whites said blacks were inferior so as not to see their own desire to exploit them, their true motivation. In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Moral authority comes to institutions only when they relieve minorities of responsibility (lowered standards, racial preferences). In this age of white guilt responsibility is synonymous with oppression where blacks are concerned. So whites and American institutions live by a simple formula: lessening responsibility for minorities equals moral authority; increasing it equals racism. This is the formula that locks many whites into publicly supporting affirmative action even as they privately dislike it.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“the fact is that we blacks are free.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“The problem is that this “place” is in the past. And it does no good to adapt to a past that is only an echo now. There is no refuge there.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“It was the first truly profound strategic mistake we made in our long struggle for complete equality. It made us a “contingent people” whose fate depended on what others did for us.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“in the age of white guilt, white blindness has been driven not by racism but by the white need to dissociate from racism. Whites are blind to blacks as human beings today not out of bigotry but out of their obsession with achieving the dissociation they need to restore their moral authority. And when they find a way to dissociate from racism—“diversity,” politically correct language, political liberalism itself—there is little incentive to understand blacks as human beings. Dissociation makes whites human again.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Usually adolescent rebels are quickly humbled because they overestimate their own truth and underestimate the truth of their elders. As Mark Twain famously put it, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one’s self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. One opposes it to discover its logic and validity for one’s self. And by failing to defeat it, one comes to it, and to greater maturity, through experience rather than mere received wisdom. Of course, every new generation alters the adult authority it ultimately joins. But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past. The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. Baby boomers, already rather inflated from growing up in the unparalleled prosperity of postwar America, were inflated further by an adult authority that often backed down in the face of their rebellion. It doesn’t matter, for example, that there was honor in America’s acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgement of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority—and, thus, adult authority—despite the good it achieved.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“despite all he had endured as a black in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, he taught the boys that America was rich in opportunities for blacks if they were willing to work.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“this reform answers white stigma before all else, it has an indifference, if not resistance, to the true needs of blacks that mimics the indifference of oppression. Diversity, multiculturalism, affirmative action, and the propriety of political correctness are all icons of white racial virtuousness that never engage the independent will, character, or determination of blacks. With deference and license they try to buy white moral authority. And in these iconographic schemes, blacks themselves are often mere icons, carriers of white virtuousness, brought in to “diversify” an environment. They are as humanly invisible to the purveyors of diversity as they were to the segregationists of old.”
― Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America

“The leverage we gained by relying on America’s sense of fallenness came at the price of taking on, and then living with, an identity of grievance and entitlement.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Political correctness is the enforcement arm of poetic truth. It coerces people into suspending their own judgment on matters of racial equality, women’s rights, war, and the environment in deference to some prescribed “correct” view on these matters that will distance them from the stigma of America’s sinful past.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“the benevolent paternalism of white guilt, I said, had injured the self-esteem, if not the souls, of minorities in ways that the malevolent paternalism of white racism never had.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“When I called him a racist, I shocked him with what was then still a novel idea in race relations: that racism thrived by passing itself off as a kind of decency, a noblesse oblige.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Almost always, oppressed groups enter freedom by denying that they are in fact free, this as a way of avoiding the daunting level of responsibility that freedom imposes.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“It is often the victim’s fate to be victimized a second time by the moral neediness of his former victimizer. One can chalk up many of black America’s problems since the 1960s precisely to this phenomenon. The larger society around us—having acknowledged its abuse of us—wants to take charge of our fate in order to redeem itself, thus smothering us in social programs and policies that rob us of full autonomy all over again.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Thus, white guilt made racism into a valuable currency for black Americans—a currency that enmeshed whites (and especially American institutions) in obligation not to principles but to black people as a class. (Notice that affirmative action explicitly violates many of the same principles—equal protection under the law, meritorious advancement—that the King-era civil rights movement fought for.)”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“One of the more pernicious corruptions of post-1960s liberalism is that it undermined the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility in precisely the people it sought to uplift.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“also lost a degree of their authority to stand proudly for the values and ideas that had made the West a great civilization despite its many evils.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Buckley was not dismissive of this outrage; he simply proceeded as if it were interesting but not really relevant.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country