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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“(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

“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

“Whites cannot celebrate their race without aligning themselves with white supremacy and, thus, with the murder, enslavement, and exploitation of millions the world over.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“After all, diversity is a “progressive” idea conceived of by an elite. It did not spring naturally from the American soil, as it were. And to embrace it is, at the very least, to have pretensions toward that elite.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“But without white supremacy as a source of moral authority, the reverse began to happen. The loss of moral authority went too far the other way, not only denying legitimacy to the plunder of the nonwhite world but also denying it to that entire set of difficult “character” principles that bring coherence and even greatness to free societies: personal responsibility, hard work, individual initiative, delayed gratification, commitment to excellence, competition by merit, the honor in achievement, and so on. How could these principles be important when they had coexisted so easily with racism?”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“You will be far more likely to receive racial preferences than to suffer racial discrimination.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Moynihan’s unpardonable sin was to threaten liberal power by working from the assumption that blacks could be the agents of their own fates despite all the victimization they had endured.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Could a public official, for example, discuss the weakening of personal responsibility and the work ethic (two timeless values) in some segments of the black community as even a partial cause of the academic achievement gap between blacks and whites in American schools? Of course not. It is simply unthinkable.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Diversity is about dissociation and legitimacy for American institutions, not the development of former victims.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“However, by relegating The Good to the government, and making it a matter of public policy, we transformed it from an earnest and personal moral struggle into a glib cultural symbolism.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“White racism had made my race the limit of my individuality. But now the new black consciousness I was learning from people like Gregory wanted me to voluntarily, even proudly, do the same thing that racism had done: make my race more important than my individuality”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“In a democracy, the legitimacy of institutions and of government itself is earned and sustained through fidelity to a discipline of democratic principles. These principles strive to ensure the ennobling conditions that free societies aspire: to freedom for the individual, the same rights for all individuals, equality under the law, equality of opportunity, and an inherent right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Freedom, then, is not a state-imposed vision of the social good (say, a classless society); rather, it is the absence of any imposed vision that would infringe on the rights and freedom of individuals. In a true democracy, freedom is a higher priority than the social good.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era – A Race Relations Scholar's Meditation on Personal Responsibility

“Moynihan’s literal truth—that family breakdown would stymie black advancement even as racism and discrimination declined—is simply irrefutable today, nearly fifty years after his report.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“it was slavish to think that black advancement was somehow dependent on the good offices of a white man without half the gravitas of black leaders like King or James Farmer or Malcolm X.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“Poetic truths defend the sovereignty of one’s ideological identity by taking license with reality and fact. They work by moral intimidation rather than by reason, so that even to question them is heresy.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“Now I could shame and silence whites at will. With this moral authority there was the power to better defend myself against racism, but there was also a new, abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me—a power of racial privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin. This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new “black power.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“The Sambo doll, as an image of grotesque black inferiority sold to whites in homage to their superiority, is an ominous and recurring image in Invisible Man, a novel set in the era of segregation. Yet, even today, when people argue for diversity and, thus, for racial preferences, black students are effectively Sambo-ized. They are assigned an inferiority so intractable that nothing overcomes it, not even good schools and high family incomes.”
― Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era

“But hypocrisy is established when evil is clearly visible through the fog of rationalization—when rationalization is seen for what it is. So hypocrisy is not an act of evil; it is the pretense of innocence even as one is clearly in league with evil, and with all the duplicities and deceptions that serve evil.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country

“The victim of oppression is always, and understandably, startled and resentful of the anxieties and burdens that new freedom entails—its call to greater responsibility, discipline, and sacrifice. But there it is.”
― Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country