Quotes by 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.

I am a middle-class black, a college professor, far from wealthy, but also well removed from the kind of deprivation that would qualify my children for the label 'disadvantaged.'

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.

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

Through protest - especially in the 1950s and '60s - we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.

There's a little racism out here, always was, and always will be.

I grew up in a time when there was real segregation. And blacks during the 50s and so forth took a lot of responsibility for their lives because the government didn't.

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

Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

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