Black identity since the ’60s has been a totalitarian identity. It’s enforced. And if you don’t subscribe to the party line, then you are a betrayer and a dissident, and you are treated as dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union. Shelby Steele Read Quote
The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. Interestingly, the person who informed me of this spoke only matter-of-factly, with no hint of the gossip’s wicked delight. Shelby Steele Read Quote
Whites know never tell blacks what you really think and what you really feel because you risk being seen as a racist. And the result of that is that to a degree, we as blacks live in a bubble. Nobody tells us the truth. Nobody tells us what they would do if they were in our situation. Nobody really helps us. Shelby Steele Read Quote
I will take Al Sharpton seriously. And I know him, he’s a nice, nice person. Shelby Steele Read Quote
A bargainer is a black who enters the American, the white American mainstream by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Shelby Steele Read Quote
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 Read Quote
My father bought three ramshackle houses, rebuilt them, rented them out, kept clawing his way up the ladder. A man with a third grade education from the south. Shelby Steele Read Quote
I think we have come to a place in black America, sadly from my point of view, where we have once again begun to rely on our history of victimization as our primary source of power to wield within society. Shelby Steele Read Quote
Thomas Sowell, among many others, has articulated the power of individual responsibility as an antidote to black poverty for over 40 years. Black thinkers as far back as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington have done the same. Shelby Steele Read Quote
