Best quotes by Shelby Steele on America

Checkout quotes by Shelby Steele on America

• ‟ I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It's harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ White America's live under this accusation that they're racist, they need to prove that they're not racist. In order to prove that you're not racist, you need to take over the fate of black people and say, go with us, we'll engineer you into the future, we'll engineer you into equality.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ White-on-black shootings evoke America's history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ I think to be very blunt about it, in a lot of that support is a desire for convergence of a black skin with the United States Presidency, with power on that level - the idea is that to have a black in that office leading a largely white country would be redemptive for America.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ You can do pretty much anything you want to do in America as a black, including become president. Still, the legacy of our victimization, of our suffering and exclusion from the mainstream of American life, has left its mark.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ Where race is concerned, America has had a horrible, a wretched history and that came to account in the 1960s, with the Civil Rights victories and Civil Rights Bill and housing and so forth.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ Now, white America is using blacks, exploiting them, enabling their dependency so that they can say, we are innocent of racism, and therefore we are legitimate.

  - Shelby Steele
  

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

  - 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
  

• ‟ In America, many marginally competent or flatly incompetent whites are hired every day -some because their white skin suits the conscious or unconscious racial preference of their employers. The white children of alumni are often grandfathered into elite universities in what can only be seen as a residual benefit of historic white privilege.

  - Shelby Steele
  

• ‟ America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.

  - Shelby Steele