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.”

“As many have noted, Donald Trump's presidency is an insurgency. Mr. Trump himself is the quintessential insurgent, doing battle with a disingenuous and entrenched establishment.”

“I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there - all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.”

“Liberal criticism of George W. Bush's minority cabinet and staff selections reveals just how much the left has come to rely on the manipulation of group identity in America as a means to political power.”

“John McCain is simply a man of considerable character, poor guy. He is utterly bereft of cultural cachet.”

“Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.”

“We are a nation with a powerful investment in the idea of our own fundamental innocence. Our can-do optimism and ingenuity are based on the faith that we are a decent, open, and generous people. This is our identity.”

“I alienated myself from the academic world almost entirely because it's a left-wing world.”

“I do not like the Confederate flag. It excludes me, profoundly. And if many good people fought honorably to defend it, I still experience the sight of it as a little racial aggression against me.”

“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.”

“Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies.”

“In talking with affirmative-action administrators and with blacks and whites in general, I found that supporters of affirmative action focus on its good intentions and detractors emphasize its negative effects. It was virtually impossible to find people outside either camp.”

“The 'safe spaces' for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment.”

“In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty.”

“Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood.”

“You know, one of the ways we adapted to not being free was to think that our group identity was again, the way we were being black, and being down with the cards. That was the way we were going to get it. Unity was everything.”

“Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism's unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.”

“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.”

“In the broader American culture - the mainstream media, the world of the arts and entertainment, the high-tech world, and the entire enterprise of public and private education - conservatism suffers a decided ill repute.”

“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.”