Shelby Steele

“I have called Mr. Obama a bound man because he cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites.”

“What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.”

“So we've never had a President of the United States ask anything of black citizens. And I think the reason for that is they've all felt that if they presume to do that, that they would be stigmatized as racist.”

“Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed background to challenge our authority to speak.”

“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.'”

“Normally, 'black responsibility' is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites.”

“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.”

“When blacks become humanly visible, when their true beliefs are known, their mask shatters and their symbiotic bond with whites is broken.”

“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.”

“Conservatism is the perfect antidote to underdevelopment. Its commitment to individual responsibility, education, hard work, personal initiative, traditional family values and free markets is a universal formula for success in a free society.”

“In certain quarters, conservatism is simply racism by another name. And minorities who openly identify themselves as conservatives are still novelties, fish out of water.”

“I've tried to be graceful and I've tried to make sure my arguments are grounded in reason and insight.”

“But on this 50th anniversary of the Little Rock crisis, it is important to remember that this evil did happen in America, and that no engineered redemption can make us innocent again. And we might also remember that it is better to be chastened than innocent.”

“The great drama at the core of American race relations is always the same: Can black Americans ever be truly equal - are they capable of achieving it and are others capable of accepting it?”

“For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle.”

“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.”

“The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle.”

“Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.”

“If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her.”

“Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.”