Shelby Steele Quotes

To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world. Black people. And I mean that in every sense.

I always said I'm not disappointed with Obama because I voted for him because he was black, and as long as he kept being black, I was a happy man.

I'm not for having to support everything that's black, because I definitely don't. But I do feel like it is imperative for us to see that we are not a monolithic people.

I thought our community should have a deep dialogue to make black America better. I believe if we make black America better, we make all of America better.

Black people, we are not this monolithic group, you know?

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.

I never had that thing about being black. If the whole world was like that, maybe there would be more harmony and love.

The biggest accomplishment, in racial terms, for Barack Obama was being elected. He had to overcome his blackness to be elected. He climbed the Mt. Everest of American politics, becoming an historic first.

The promise of Obama's presidency, in many people's minds, is partly that America will move toward becoming a post-racial society. It's pretty clear, though, that we aren't there yet.

My black brothers and sisters - of all religious beliefs, or of no religious beliefs - we all have in common the greatest binding tie we could have. We are all black people!

Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites …

I just hope that when black people look at me, they don't see someone superhuman. They see themselves.

I'm not going to be one of those people who says, 'I'm a showrunner; I'm not a black showrunner.' I'm black when I go to sleep. I'm black when I wake up, period. It doesn't affect my perspective on everything, but at the same time, it's who I am, and I'm proud of it.

For me, what disturbs me about some of the conversations on the left is that you get the impression that times are so divisive, that there's so much discomfort with what Trump has exposed, that some people on the left don't actually have the goal of a kind of racially transcendent future. They don't want that.

There's not one black narrative. There's not one way to be black.

White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable.

For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn't the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn't centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don't yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn't falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn't distort the enduring realities of black poverty.

Me don't dip on nobody's side. Me don't dip on the black man's side, not the white man's side. Me dip on God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

My son don't have to say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud. He don't have to be called those crazy names.

I don't mind being black. I'm black out loud. It's more than the people that they are, it's the condition that they represent.

During the canvass in the State of Mississippi, I traveled into different parts of that state, and this is the doctrine that I everywhere uttered: that while I was in favor of building up the colored race, I was not in favor of tearing down the white race.

In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary.

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.