Shelby Steele

“Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.”

“Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.”

“The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.”

“Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”