Shelby Steele Quotes

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.

I am definitely a person of color.

Once you open up the Pandora's box of race and gender... you're never done.

I feel like any single woman of color who's been onstage has a Shakespeare monologue in her back pocket, and a monologue from 'For Colored Girls.' It's just part of what you should have, as a woman of color.

I have quite a different background from a lot of people in the Labour party - I'm of mixed heritage.

Ethnic minorities are not one homogeneous political group.

I've had lots of people say, 'Oh, Franchesca's content is just for white people.' But I try to talk about identity in a way that's accessible to lots of people and is not a pointed finger.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these 'studies' are about propaganda rather than serious education.

For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That's really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I felt like such a freaking anomaly - an oddity.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

Obviously, the issue for the Left isn't aging white males; it is conservatives, whether they are young or old, white or nonwhite, male or female. If female aborigines were conservative, the Left would have a problem with female aborigines.

I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.

I don't want the whole of my writing or my intellectual energy given over to race because I have diverse interests.

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.

America is grappling with cultural diversity, and I just want to put a show on that represents the world in which I live.

If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?

I don't judge people by their sexual orientation or the color of their skin, so I find it really hard to identify someone by saying that they're a gay person or a black person or a Jewish person.

Identity politics are wearisome; you don't want to go on speaking for any one group as a writer.

Being black, Latino, or Asian is not a genre. Romantic comedies, thrillers, action - those are genres. I think there's a lot of people who want to have the conversation. I don't think people are afraid of it, I just think it's the time to have that conversation. Race is not a genre.

Black women, whose experience is unique, are seldom recognized as a particular social-cultural entity and are seldom thought to be important enough for serious scholarly consideration.

I don't understand labels. I don't need anybody to tell me I'm Latina or black or anything else. I've played characters that were written for Caucasian females, I just want to be given the same consideration as everybody else, and so far that has been happening.

Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.

I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature.

I've tried to be inclusive in my '2B' series. Over the course of three books, I wrote African-American characters, a paraplegic character, gay and lesbian characters, a bisexual, Jewish heroine, a multiracial hero, Korean and Chinese-American characters, and a multiracial supporting character.